Documentary by Tony Palmer
Performers & Interviewees Incl.: Ursula Vaughan Williams, Nat. Youth Orch./Sian Edwards, Nat. Orch. of Hungarian Radio/Tamas Vasary, Sir Adrian Boult, The Archbishop of Canterbury, BBC Chorus, Jordi Savall, Harrison Birtwistle, London Philharmonic, John Adams, Mark Anthony Turnage, Imogen Holst, Michael Tippett, Andre Previn, John Amis, Lady Barbirolli, Neil Tennant of The Pet Shop Boys & Richard Thompson of Fairport Convention.
Studio: Isolde Films/Voiceprint Records TPDVD106
Video: Enhanced for 16:99 widescreen, color & B&W
Audio: PCM Stereo
Length: 2 hours 28 minutes
Rating: *****
This year is the 50th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’ death. He was the grand old man of British music in the first half of the 20th century, and my personal favorite along with William Walton and Delius. This documentary uses a variety of excerpts from his music – many dramatically performed (and dramatically filmed) by the youth orchestra which he founded. The musical excerpts are alternated with interview material from important figures in British music, including his widow and those of other leading British composers and conductors. There are also stock footage clips showing various English scenes and some harrowing footage from the First and Second World Wars, in which the composer was involved. The opening is a lovely sequence of visionary panoramas of the English countryside.
Williams studied some with Maurice Ravel in France and probably emulated his mentor’s action in joining the ambulance corps in WW I. From a sheltered upper-class background where he never needed to earn his living, he was thrust into the horrors of the trenches and picking up bits of bodies. It definitely affecting his music. He was also challenged by a marriage of almost 54 years that had very negative consequences for him. Interesting comments from family friends concern VW’s thumbing his nose at Edwardian propriety and being more passionate, genuine and honest.
The documentary focuses on the man Vaughan Williams. He was related to Charles Darwin and Virginia Woolf among others, was very handsome in his youth and later a larger-than-life teddy bear of a man. He worked for two years on the English Hymnal, giving the Protestant faith some of their loveliest hymns which are still sung everywhere, he convinced Churchill to establish the Arts Council and the Third Programme of the BBC. The influence of English folk music on his work is illustrated with closeups of the Edison cylinder phonograph which he used to record authentic folk songs in the countryside just as Bartok and Kodaly were doing in Hungary around 1900.
Discussion of the overriding qualities of his music and of English music in general – nostalgia, pastoral qualities, perhaps regret – limn efforts to rid English music of a strong Germanic influence. His music ended up being banned by the Nazis. VW’’s so-called “war symphonies” effectively communicated the bleak outlook of the period, but his last symphonies also presented a rather bleak outlook on the future of humanity – never mind the impressionistic and nostalgic qualities. Some of the hard-to-view WW II footage Palmer uses affected me in a similar way to some of the footage Ken Burns used in his WW II documentary series, but that was its intent – to show how VW’s native optimism about mankind’s future was being tested.
– John Sunier
