Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, also known as the Tallis Fantasia, is a one-movement work for string orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The theme is by the 16th-century English composer Thomas Tallis. The Fantasia was first performed at Gloucester Cathedral as part of the 1910 Three Choirs Festival, and has entered the orchestral repertoire, with frequent concert performances and recordings by conductors and orchestras of various countries.
Contents
Background and first performance
Vaughan Williams did not achieve wide recognition early in his career as a composer, but by 1910, in his late thirties, he was gaining a reputation. In that year the Three Choirs Festival commissioned a work from him, to be premiered in Gloucester Cathedral; this represented a considerable boost to his standing. He composed what his biographer James Day calls "unquestionably the first work by Vaughan Williams that is recognizably and unmistakably his and no one else's". It is based on a tune by the 16th-century English composer Thomas Tallis, which Vaughan Williams had come across while editing the English Hymnal, published in 1906.
Vaughan Williams conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the first performance of the Fantasia, as the first part of a concert in Gloucester Cathedral on 6 September 1910, followed by Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, conducted by its composer.
Music
Theme
Like several of Vaughan Williams's other works, the Fantasia draws on the music of the English Renaissance. Tallis's tune is in the Phrygian mode, characterised by intervals of a flat second, third, sixth and seventh; the pattern is reproduced by playing the white notes of the piano starting on E.
Tallis's theme was one of nine tunes he wrote for the Psalter of 1567 of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. It was a setting of Parker's metrical version of Psalm 2, which in the King James Bible version begins, "Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?", and is rendered by Parker as "Why fumeth in sight: The Gentils spite, In fury raging stout? Why taketh in hond: the people fond, Vayne things to bring about?". The tune is in Double Common Metre (D.C.M. or C.M.D.).
According to his biographer Michael Kennedy, Vaughan Williams came to associate Tallis's theme with John Bunyan's Christian allegory, The Pilgrim's Progress, a subject with which the composer had a lifelong fascination; he used the tune in 1906 in incidental music he composed for a stage version of the book. For the Hymnal, he adapted the tune as a setting of Joseph Addison's hymn "When rising from the bed of death".
Fantasia
The term "fantasia", according to Frank Howes in his study of Vaughan Williams's works, referred to the 16th-century forerunner of the fugue "in that a thread of theme was enunciated and taken up by other parts, then dropped in favour of another akin to it which was similarly treated". Vaughan Williams's fantasia draws on but does not strictly follow this precept, containing sections in which the material is interrelated, although with little wholly imitative writing, and antiphony in preference to contrapuntal echoing of themes.
The Fantasia is scored for double string orchestra with string quartet, employing antiphony between the three contributory ensembles. Orchestra I is the main body of strings; Orchestra II is smaller. The published score does not stipulate the number of players in Orchestra I; Orchestra II consists of two first violins, two seconds, two violas, two cellos and one double bass The composer's metronome marking indicates a playing time of 11½ minutes, but in recorded performances the duration has varied between 12m 40s (Dimitri Mitropoulos, 1958) and 18m 12s (Leonard Bernstein, 1976), with a more typical time of between 15 and 16½ minutes.
The piece is structured with an introduction, opening statement of the themes (Tallis's original hymn melody broken up into its four constituent phrases and interspersed with a "swaying chord" motif), four episodes (exploring different variations of those themes and different voicings across the three ensembles), and then a restatement of the themes and a coda.
The Introduction begins in B-flat major with all three groups playing together, ppp molto sostenuto for two bars of 44 time before moving to 34 and the low strings plucking hints of the first two phrases of the Tallis theme interspersed with the bowed sway motif. Kennedy describes the introduction as "a hauntingly poetic introduction before we hear its first full statement in Tallis's four-part harmonisation". Howes comments that "a phrase of swaying chords" after the initial statement of the theme "acts as a kind of recurrent refrain" throughout the main body of the piece.
In the Opening Statement of the full theme, beginning in the 15th bar, the two orchestras and solo quartet come together. The first two Tallis phrases and sway motif are played on all second violins, violas and celli continuing into a 68 section in Phrygian mode for the third and fourth phrases of Tallis's theme. The first violins join for a restatement of the fourth phrase. In the 30th bar the time signature changes back to 34 and the music rises to a climax. In an analysis published in 1995, Stephen Schwartz comments, "There's much octave double-stopping (each string player sounds two notes at once), a higher dynamic, and an appassionato marking after all!" The statement ends dying away in 68 section dying with a texture reminiscent of the opening two bars.
Reception
The premiere of the Fantasia received a generally warm welcome, with a few exceptions: Herbert Brewer, the Gloucester cathedral organist, described it as "a queer, mad work by an odd fellow from Chelsea". The Musical Times reviewer said, "It is a grave work, exhibiting power and much charm of the contemplative kind, but it appears over long for the subject-matter". Other reviews were more enthusiastic. The reviewer in The Daily Telegraph praised Vaughan Williams's mastery of string effect and added that although the work might not appeal to some because of its "seeming austerity", it was "extremely beautiful to such as have ears for the best music of all ages". In The Manchester Guardian, Samuel Langford wrote, "The melody is modal and antique in flavour, while the harmonies are as exotic as those of Debussy ... The work marks out the composer as one who has got quite out of the ruts of the commonplace". In The Times, J. A. Fuller Maitland also commented on ancient and Debussian echoes, and observed:
In 1954 Howes wrote:
Listeners to the British classical music radio station Classic FM have regularly voted the piece into the top five of the station's "Hall of Fame", an annual poll of the most popular works of classical music .
Recordings
Although the BBC first broadcast the Fantasia in 1926, and again over the following decade, conducted by the composer and Arturo Toscanini, it was not until 1936 that the work was recorded for the gramophone. The fledgling Decca company recorded it with Boyd Neel conducting his orchestra under the supervision of the composer in January 1936, a set described by The Gramophone as one of the outstanding records of the year. Since then there have been more than fifty recordings by orchestras and conductors from various countries.
Notes, references and sources
Sources
Day, James (1972). Vaughan Williams. London: Dent. OCLC 462037518.
Dearmer, Percy; Ralph Vaughan Williams (1906). "Hymn 92 – When Rising from the Bed of Death". The English Hymnal. Oxford: Oxford University Press. OCLC 10855613.
Frogley, Alain; Aidan J. Thomson (2013). The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-04324-3.
Culshaw, John (1981). Putting the Record Straight. London: Secker and Warburg. ISBN 978-0-436-11802-9.
Douglas, Roy (1988). Working with Vaughan Williams. London: The British Library. ISBN 978-0-7123-0148-0.
Howes, Frank (1954). The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press. OCLC 459433504.
Hurd, Michael (1978). The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-211752-6.
Mellers, Wilfrid (1989). The Double Man: Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion. London: Barrie & Jenkins. ISBN 978-0-7126-2117-5.
Ross, Ryan (2016). Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Research and Information Guide. New York and London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-79271-5.
Vaughan Williams, Ralph (1921). Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis. London and New York: Boosey & Hawkes. OCLC 663881436.
Vaughan Williams, Ursula (1964). RVW: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-315411-7. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
Atlas, Allan (2010). "On the Structure and Proportions of Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis". Journal of the Royal Musical Association. 135 (1): 115–144. doi:10.1080/02690401003597797. JSTOR 43741608. S2CID 191641106. (subscription required)