By Néstor CASTIGLIONE

In 1948, English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was riding high upon the crest of international fame. His “Sixth Symphony” had been premiered by Sir Adrian Boult that April and the work immediately seized the public’s imagination on both sides of the Atlantic, garnering over a hundred performances in the following year – a remarkable achievement even then for a living composer.

“This is music that will take its place with the greatest creations of the masters,” Leopold Stokowski confidently declared before its New York City premiere.

Yet nearly 70 years later, the score and Vaughan Williams’ reputation has dwindled significantly in America.

Andrew Manze, currently recording a cycle of the composer’s symphonies for the Onyx label, will be performing the “Sixth Symphony” this weekend with the Los Angeles Philharmonic – the first time the orchestra has performed it since 1981.

Dr. Byron Adams, professor of musicology at UC Riverside and a distinguished composer in his own right, is one of the international authorities on British music and on Vaughan Williams in particular. His work in this regard has earned him the profound admiration and respect of many, including the composer’s widow, Ursula Vaughan Williams.

Dr. Adams talked about this symphony in a recent interview and why we may be seeing the beginnings of an American Vaughan Williams renaissance today.

Crescenta Valley Weekly: Can you give our readers an idea of just how popular Vaughan Williams was with the American public in the mid-20th century? Why, with the exception of one or two works, has he been largely ignored here since his death in 1958?

Byron Adams: It’s interesting to hear about [Eduard] van Beinum’s assistant [at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, John Barnett] performing this work shortly before Vaughan Williams’ death. He had many [American] champions at that time. Dimitri Mitropoulos, who recorded the “Fourth Symphony,” was one. When Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic inaugurated Avery Fisher Hall, Vaughan Williams’ “Serenade to Music” was included in the program. When he visited here in 1934 and 1954, his lectures gained national attention. He went to Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Eastman School of Music, University of Michigan, UCLA, and UC Santa Barbara. Stravinsky was very honored, for example, when Vaughan Williams came to sit next to him at the premiere of the former’s “Canticum Sacrum.” Of course he hated it – he turned off his hearing aid after the first movement.

What did eclipse his reputation were several things.

One was the rise of propaganda on behalf of Benjamin Britten. There was also the ascendency of Boulez and serialism. Vaughan Williams’ music seemed [to his critics] like the most conservative thing in the world.

The other thing is that Vaughan Williams meant so much to the British during [World War II]. But when the war was over, they didn’t want to think about the war anymore. They wanted to move past that. So their major young conductors didn’t take it up.

[The British] are also very insular and that’s the next thing that happened. They want him recognized as a great composer but, at the same time, they want to control everything about [his reception]. They have this feeling that only British people can understand his music. This is nonsensical.

The final obstacle is the immense amount of badly performed Mahler that has a stranglehold on the American repertoire.

CVW: You mention this “Mahlerization” of the contemporary symphonic repertoire. Do you believe the rise of Mahler has marginalized composers whose works function and express themselves very differently?

BA: Absolutely! Vaughan Williams was determined not to [follow Austro-German expectations of how music ought to sound and operate]. He had an ambivalent relationship to Beethoven, for example… But German influence was overwhelming in England and America. Take [former Los Angeles Times music critic] Martin Bernheimer. He hated British and French music. You couldn’t even perform Ravel here. Ravel! Some composers have escaped this. Stravinsky, for example. Even then he retained his prestige by experimenting with serialism, thereby earning Boulez’s good graces and all that. Vaughan Williams, on the other hand, could have cared less for fashion.

The other problem is American critical discourse around the terms “pastoral” or “pastoralism,” which have been often associated with Vaughan Williams, and which, for Americans, means something spineless, pretty, limp, lax… But the “Sixth” has nothing do with [any of that]. [His] music really belongs with the modern masters. Vaughan Williams was always forward-looking… You have [here] an important modernist composer.

CVW: When critic Frank Howe declared that the work was a war symphony, the composer crankily replied to the effect that the “Sixth” was pure music. What are your thoughts on the alleged subtext of this score?

BA: Howe got things right, but Vaughan Williams rejected that. Except, in fact, its scherzo was about the bombing of the Café de Paris [in London] during the Blitz. Ursula Vaughan Williams told me that personally. A jazz band led by Ken “Snakehips” Johnson was obliterated in that bombing. That bombing was a wound that has persisted in the British imagination, it was seared into [their] memory of the Blitz.

CVW: Do you believe that there will be a resurgence of American interest in Vaughan Williams’ music? And does his “Sixth” continue to be relevant today?

BA: I honestly believe that will happen over the next 20 years. I really do. Because the music is just too good.

Think of it – here was a composer who was an ambulance orderly in the First World War, who experienced the unbelievable horror and butchery of the trenches, was out at dusk to retrieve not just the dying, but as many body parts he could find to bury. Then he lives through another war. He bravely continues to teach even though at one point his train leaves Waterloo Station moments before it was bombed. He was someone born into relative comfort who subsequently experienced, totally and utterly, the range of warfare, the encroachment of fascism and totalitarianism, and responded to it as a great artist.

This is why I say that Vaughan Williams will become ever more relevant because he doesn’t just console us, he warns. And this is an important aspect of his [art]. There is never any sense of easy consolation. If we want a better world, his music seems to say, we’re going to have to work for it.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic under guest conductor Andrew Manze will perform Vaughan Williams’ “Sixth Symphony” in a program with works by Bacewicz and Mozart at Walt Disney Hall (111 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles) starting today, Thursday, March 29 at 8 p.m. through Sunday, April 1 at 2 p.m. To obtain tickets and more information, visit www.laphil.com or call the Disney Hall box office at (323) 850-2000.

  Nestor CASTIGLIONE