Ralph Vaughan Williams [DVD]

Tony Palmer's film is highly informative, beautifully filmed and quite shocking at times. It is likely to remain a definitive resource for those wishing to know more about this great composer's life and music for years to come.

Many will perhaps have a rather cuddly image of Vaughan Williams who wrote lovely tunes and was the epitome of "Englishness". This film will make you think otherwise.

Of course VW wrote such favourites as The Lark Ascending (Classic FM's listeners' favourite piece of classical music), Greensleeves, The Tallis Fantasia. However the core of his achievement is the unique cycle of 9 symphonies and Palmer rightly focuses on them as we are taken on a journey through the man's life and work. VW though a large and loveable man in old age, an image that seems to predominate in the public mind was in fact a very tall and handsome figure in his youth, a time when he wrote some of his most lyrical music. The film is at its most powerful when focussing on VW's dark side and the effect this had on his music. A long life shattered by first hand experience of both World Wars. The frustration, rage and eventual happiness he had in his relationship with two women, his despair for the future of mankind, his agnostic spirituality are revealed both in the musical excerpts and Palmer's wonderful use of imagery.

Visually we are given the full range, hauntingly beautiful scenes of nature, the ferocious power of the sea and the harrowing devastation of war and famine. The music is most cleverly grafted into the biography and excellently played in specially filmed takes. I particularly liked the director's lighting of the orchestra which shows the players and their instruments in great clarity. Other highlights are old footage of the composer and his voice (taken from old broadcasts)talking about his life and music. All sorts of people pop up in the film to inform us why he was special to them. There is much else that this short review hasn't space for.

This film is a must see for anyone interested in the composer, classical music or the history of the 20th century, it is an affectionate but blunt, often disturbing portrait of a very great man from a director who is a master in the art-film genre.

N.B. Amazon have the running time of the DVD as 129 minutes which is incorrect. My copy of the DVD runs 2 hours and 28 minutes, this is a long film and justly so.

Apart from Ken Russell's documentary of 1986, a film I found deeply disappointing, there have been no films about Ralph Vaughan William's life and music that I can recall. Yet he is one of England's great composers, arguably the greatest, given the range of his music, its Englishness and the humanity of the man. `O Thou Transcendent' fills a large gap.

The length of this film allows the director breathing space to cover both the composer's life and music in some detail. The symphonies are at the heart of his output and these are given understandable prominence but plenty of other music is covered. The National Youth Orchestra bears most of the burden and they do it with great skill and flair. There is some interesting footage of Vaughan Williams (RVW) taken when he was very old and a few recordings of his voice. There are contributions from people close to the composer, some archive material, some made for this film. The structure of the film seems a little random, flitting back and forth over the decades of his life. A strictly chronological approach is a bit obvious but if you don't do this, you need something else to hold the structure together. Viewers who are new to this material might get lost.

There are one or two main themes running through the film. One is the popular image of the amateurish composer writing mainly pleasant, pastoral pieces. The idea that he had poor technique was fed by his self-deprecating remarks. I always thought that these remarks were part of his humour but the film did reveal evidence that he was subject to more self-doubt than is generally realised. As for his music consisting wholly of bucolic rhapsodising, Tony Palmer shows how false that is, revealing his art as encompassing the whole emotional range - the ecstatic lyricism of the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending to the ferocious outbursts of Job and the 4th and 6th symphonies.

The most important thread explores the relationship between the music and his personal life and international events. The usual - and lazy - links concern the 4th symphony - it predicted the Second World War- and the 6th symphony's epilogue supposedly describing a post-nuclear wasteland. None of these `meanings' came from the composer and they rather irritated him. A more convincing `explanation' came from Michael Kennedy, a close friend of the composer and leading authority on his music. He thinks the music of the 4th symphony is more a self-portrait of RVW. He was a man prone to rages but otherwise was the kindest and most thoughtful of men.

RVW was married to Adeline. She developed a chronic arthritic condition which gradually worsened over the decades. The film suggests that this took an enormous toll on him mentally, not least in the sexual side of marriage. That this anguish and frustration found itself into the music is likely. The Elgarian, Jerrold Northrop Moore, made the astonishing assertion that Adeline was suffering from a psychosomatic condition which provided her with an unconscious excuse to avoid sexual activity. A severe arthritic condition - with no treatment at that time - would be quite enough without bringing in frigidity as an explanation. I wonder what the members of her family, who also contributed, are going to make of this. Michael Kennedy, however, did confirm that Vaughan Williams was having an affair with Ursula Wood, later to become his second wife, for some years before Adeline died (RVW was in his 60s by this time).

Much of the film showed images of marching soldiers, war and the effects of terrorism. One image was shown twice - a poor, charred dead child on a stretcher. Many will find this very distressing. I feel this aspect of the film was overdone to quite a degree. There was even an attempt by one contributor to rope in the Tallis Fantasia as representing death and hopelessness. To take such a view of this noble masterpiece, written in 1910 and before RVW had seen the carnage of the battlefield, is absurd. The piece takes its general atmosphere from Tallis' original hymn, written a few hundred years before.

My criticisms are nothing compared to the magisterial sweep of this film and I would recommend it to all lovers of Vaughan Williams and especially those who don't. At the end one is impressed by the sheer magnificence of the man, a man with personal qualities we all wish we had but do not. At the end of the film, Ursula Vaughan Williams, shortly before her death, voices a crie de coeur, revealing how much she still loved and missed him so long after he died in 1958. This, more than anything else, lingers in my mind.

I've read the other reviews so far and find them largely a very thoughtful and interesting collection - maybe that in itself is a small tribute to the subject of this film, Ralph Vaughan Williams. V.W. is not a fashionable composer and never really was (Andre Previn makes the point in the film that orchestral programmers are reluctant to allow him to put VW Symphonies on his programmes). That, again, is perhaps to his credit. He was an entirely individual voice, and I think this film goes some way towards explaining where this individuality came from and examining its nature. It is a long film with a wealth of good material - excellent contributions from Michael Kennedy, Stephen Johnson, Ursula Vaughan Williams (very touchingly at the end as a very old, frail lady speaking simply about the man and how much she loved him), friends, people associated with the Leith Hill Festival , Lady Barbirolli, etc., etc.. There are also excellent musical contributions from the National Youth orchestra under Sian Edwards and the Hungarian State Orchestra under Tamas Vasary, and we see a number of fine singers, Nicola Benedetti and others too. I am not quite so fond of the very 'staged', backlit filming of the orchestras and conductors as some other reviewers have been - it is indeed very dramatic, but it is also very artificial. I am happier with the wonderfully natural short extract from an archive broadcast of Sir Adrian Boult conducting the Romanza of the Fifth Symphony. However, the musical illustrations are a strong element in this film. So is the archive footage of places with which Vaughan Williams was associated and Victorian and Edwardian London. What I am less certain about is the link made between horror and his music. He did indeed serve in the First War and live with memories from that for the rest of his life, and the 'Pastoral' Symphony is usually (perhaps paradoxically) associated with that, but very very stark, almost unwatchable images from other wars and conflicts form an important element in this film and I am not convinced that the thesis they seem to project is right. There is also a fair degree of weight placed on the nature of his first marriage (to the long-term invalid Adeline Fisher), and the explicitness with which this is investigated, and in particular some comments made on his relationship with Ursula, his second wife, as a young woman, while possibly quite accurate, are uncomfortable ; V.W. and all those of his time would I think have been unhappy with them, would have regarded these as private matters. In all of this the hand of the filmmaker of our time is a little too apparent. Having said that, it is clearly a film made with love. Its largely chronological structure works well. Despite what I said about the orchestral backlighting, there are certainly moments when the music blazes the more effectively because of the way it is presented - I think, for example, of the end of 'The Pilgrim's Progress', which comes at us with tremendous conviction. And in the end, there is so much in this film that is good that there is never any question of a poor review ; I think back, as another reviewer did, to Ken Russell's terrible, terrible self-indulgent film on the same subject and am the more thankful that this new film exists. It lasts 2 hours and 28 minutes - a long time - but, though I have some reservations, I was never less than interested and never less than certain that we were watching a good film about a great composer and that all that appeared on screen gave evidence of his greatness. In that sense, if not quite in every other, I think it did justice to its subject.