Symphony From The Movies

As the temperature climbs back up into the summer heat, it's time for the other symphony in my "music to cool down by" series: the Sinfonia Antartica (# 7) by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

This work had a most unusual genesis, as the composer developed it out of a film score he had composed for the Ealing Pictures docudrama, Scott of the Antarctic.  This film presented a largely accurate portrayal of the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition.  For those not familiar, a quick crash course:  British explorer Robert Scott was challenging Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen to be the first to reach the South Pole.  Scott's expedition depended heavily on using ponies, motor vehicles, and manpower to haul sleds loaded with supplies.  Amundsen reached the Pole first.  Scott arrived a month later, to find a tent, a Norwegian flag, and a message left for him by his rival.  On the return journey, blizzards delayed the explorers, their fuel and food ran out, and they eventually perished in a snowbound tent just 11 miles away from a major supply depot.

Creating a symphony out of film music in this way is an intriguing procedure, since symphonic argument and structure largely depend on themes of considerable scale and substance, while film music is more apt to consist of atmospheric fragments of sound with perhaps one or two larger melodic ideas to anchor an entire film score.

I think that many commentators have dismissed this symphony on the basis of nothing more than this basic dichotomy of styles.  Or perhaps the Great Experts have passed it by because it doesn't contain a sonata-form first movement.  Maybe it's the five-movement structure with the longest movement in the centre that puts them off (but hey, if Mahler could do it in his # 5...).  Or was it the introduction of an organ and singers into the work?

For me, though, Vaughan Williams definitely succeeded in developing a true symphony out of his film music.  The completed work is by turns powerful, playful, wistful, dogged, colourful, determined, pictorial, and (in the end) deeply tragic.  Of course, part of this emotional perception comes from being familiar with the history of the Scott expedition.  

Let's be honest, too -- the music is, by its nature, episodic in places, and it will not cohere into a symphonic unity unless the conductor has a firm grasp of the big picture and a good clear view of the through line binding the entire work together.

Although there's no real resemblance in the sounds, or in the structure, this always strikes me as an almost Brucknerian symphony -- partly due to the predominant slow tempi, but also because of the crescendo and climax in the third movement, which resembles in form and impact the climax of the slow movement in Bruckner's Seventh.

In the score, the composer prefaced each of the five movements with a title and a superscription.  There's no indication that these were meant to be spoken aloud as part of a performance, although that has sometimes been done (and that includes one or two recordings).  Personally, I prefer simply to read them and ponder the music in light of those words.

1:  Prelude.  Andante maestoso.

"To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite,/ To forgive wrongs darker than death or night,/ To defy power which seems omnipotent,/ ... / Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent:/ This ... is to be/ Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free,/ This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.."

 -- Shelley, Prometheus Unbound.

The symphony begins as it means to go on, with a dogged, aspiring theme in moderate triple time.  This significant melody, rising stepwise in a series of sequences, keeps changing its harmonic dress in the most subtle yet significant way at each upward step, giving it great distinction.  After this theme has run its course, the scene shifts and we begin to hear the first of the composer's shimmering Antarctic sounds, arising from the combination of xylophone, vibraphone, celesta, and glockenspiel.  Two more significant sounds then follow.  First, to shivery string accompaniment, a wordless soprano solo sings a chilling cadenza, with a wordless female semi-chorus singing alternating chords like the keening of the women in RVW's operatic masterpiece, Riders to the Sea.  Then tolling deep bells alternate with heavy, off-beat, bass chords, followed by the women's voices together with a wind machine.  These various sounds, all representing implacable nature, stand in dramatic opposition to the human endeavour symbolized in the opening theme.  A fanfare sounds, and the human aspiration of the opening returns in a challenge to battle, ending in a triumphant assertion of will.

2.  Scherzo.  Moderato.

"There go the ships, and there is that leviathan whom thou has made to take his pastime therein ."  

-- Psalm 104

The most specifically programmatic of the five movements begins with horns and swirling figures giving a distinct sea sound, as the ships of the expedition set sail.  Deep brasses intone slowly, in music plainly meant to be suggestive of an encounter with great whales.  The central part of the movement is cheeky, perky music originally written to accompany footage of penguins.  The movement ends quietly, with a brief reminiscence of the sea music opening.

3:  Landscape.  Lento.

"Ye ice falls! Ye that from the mountain's brow/ Adown enormous ravines slope amain —/ Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,/ And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!/ Motionless torrents! Silent cataracts!"
-- Coleridge, Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni.

This long, slow movement opens with one of the chilliest sounds I've ever heard in an orchestra -- a chord of a major second which then shifts to a minor second, aptly described by Michael Kennedy as "two flutes freezing together."  This is repeated a number of times as a horn intones a slow, wandering melody laden with similar uncomfortable intervals.  A more sweeping theme intervenes, accompanied with slow arpeggios.  We then hear a quiet theme, played in bare octaves, full of steps of the minor second and augmented fourth.  This is succeeded by a quiet, almost hymn-like theme in block chords.  After some more glittering Antarctic sounds, the octave theme returns and is now worked up into a towering climax.  At the peak, the block chords are thundered out fff by the organ -- one of the most stupendous uses of that instrument in all of music.  (The organ entry originally accompanied the film footage of the immense icefall in the Beardmore Glacier -- see the superscription for this movement).  The music dwindles away on a final uneasy recollection of the freezing flutes and horn and leads without a break directly into the fourth movement.

4:  Intermezzo. Andante sostenuto.

"Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,/ Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time."

-- Donne, The Sun Rising

Warm chords for the harp and strings accompany an oboe melody which introduces a human note into the deadly chill left by the third movement.  An interruption in the middle brings back the deep bells and off-beat chords from the first movement, and when the oboe resumes it takes on a note of sorrow and regret as a result.

5: Epilogue.  Alla Marcia moderato (non troppo allegro).

"I do not regret this journey; we took risks, we knew we took them, things have come out against us, therefore we have no cause for complaint."

-- Captain Scott's Last Journal

A lengthy fanfare for the brass leads into a powerful and quick march theme, which is a loose and faster variation of the aspiring opening theme of the entire symphony.  This march develops a good head of steam for several minutes, but then breaks off suddenly, and the deep bells and off-beat bass chords return, followed by the women's voices and the wind machine.  And now that original opening melody appears once more, but with a significant change.  At the third phrase, where the orchestra formerly aspired upwards, the music now droops downwards into a lower octave, in token of defeat.  I vividly recall hearing this symphony played live, with Sir Andrew Davis conducting.  His inspired performance first made me realize that this recall of the opening, with its tempo slower than the march, now takes on the role of an elegy for the dead.  As that sombre threnody finishes its course, the keening voices and wind machine return to take the music slowly into silence.  Never has the direction niente ("nothing") on a score had so much meaning beyond the purely musical.

The Icebox Symphony

Given the recent heat wave we in eastern North America have been enduring, I can certainly see some value in considering a symphony that sits firmly in the dead cold of winter.

There are two works of music which inevitably make me feel the icy chill of perpetual winter whenever I hear them.  One, not surprisingly, is Vaughan Williams' Sinfonia Antartica (his seventh symphony).  The other is Shostakovich's monumental Symphony # 11 in G Minor, Op. 103 "The Year 1905."  

This huge work in four movements, lasting over an hour in performance, was scorned as a socialist potboiler by many Western critics when it first appeared in 1957.  That reaction undoubtedly owed much to the still-powerful memories of the Joseph McCarthy period.  Today, it's possible to look at it in a more detached light, relatively free from political interference.  

As so often with this composer's works, the Eleventh Symphony likely conceals multiple layers of meaning.  Outwardly, it commemorates the January 1905 massacre outside the Tsar's Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, an event which set in motion the forces that eventually led to the successful Communist revolutions of 1917, the overthrow of the royal family, and the formal creation of the world's first ostensibly Communist country.

But is that the music's only meaning?  It has been suggested, not without strong supporting evidence, that it may also have been intended as a requiem for the composer's own generation of the Russian people, who had suffered through not just two world wars, but also two violent revolutions and the Stalinist purges.  Or perhaps it represented Shostakovich's revulsion at the invasion and crushing of Hungary the year before the symphony's completion.

Whatever the truth of Shostakovich's intentions, the music has a remarkable directness and almost cinematic vividness that -- to more than one critic -- have suggested film music blown up to symphonic proportions.  That is certainly a part of the music's remarkable attraction, but only a part.

As so often with this composer, there's a great deal more to the story.  Just as important is the inclusion in the score of no less than nine genuine revolutionary and prison songs.  The texts of these songs (not sung here) frequently condemn dictatorial oppression, a clear signal of the possible hidden agenda behind the work.  As we would expect, these songs adhere to simple tonal frameworks, and lend the symphony as a whole a much more conventional tonal landscape than found in many of the composer's major works.  This fact alone serves to make the music one of his most approachable symphonies.  But do not confuse "approachable" with "unsophisticated." 

The symphony has four movements, directed to be played without pause or interruption.  The music's chilling character is very much to the fore in the long, quiet first movement, depicting "The Palace Square" -- the scene of the violence to come.  The strings play long, sustained notes with occasional shifts to different chords.  Ominous drum rhythms are heard as if in the distance.  Flutes play a melody of a song which may originally have been sprightly, but in this context sounds sad to the point of being funereal.  This ice-cold opening section will be repeated at several points during the symphony, the entire opening passage thus serving as a unifying motto for the work as a whole.

The second movement is the most "cinematic" of the entire score, a multi-section depiction of the actual events of January 1905.  It begins with rapid, restless figures in the lower strings over which an equally restless melody depicts the assembling crowd in the square.  As the music gains volume and intensity, the restlessness turns to anger and twice builds to a raucous climax.  Snare drums and a sudden shift in tempo to allegro herald the arrival of the soldiers.  The rapid tattoo of the snare drums and the panic-stricken wind and brass fanfares all too clearly depict the fusillade unleashed on the terrified crowd.  The abrupt breaking off of the drumbeats reveals the chilly winter music of the symphony's opening once again, and the movement ends in a landscape of frozen terror.

The third movement, titled In Memoriam, uses the melody of a song written shortly after the massacre in tribute to the victims.  It opens with what seem random plucked notes on the low strings, but these gradually assemble themselves into a bass pattern under the sombre melody -- the whole then taking on the character of a funeral march.  A new and even more funereal theme is heard on the low brasses, and from this emerges a slow crescendo in which the entire orchestra joins.  The music erupts into a thunderous climax with beating drums marking out all but the first beat of each bar.  Massive chords recall a fanfare-like figure heard during the massacre.  Slowly the music dies down again, and the memorial song is heard once more, bringing the movement to an end in the same character as it began, with a pensive, elegiac air.

The finale rudely interrupts that reflective ending with an explosive burst of energy which soon transforms into a kind of fast march driven by a moto perpetuo of stamping bass notes in unvarying time values.  Within that march are embedded phrases from several of the folk songs.  The opening explosions repeat several times, punctuating the march.  The climax is marked by the loudest repetitions of the movement's opening phrases, now played over long held notes on cymbal and side drums, until the music pulls up short and collapses one last time into the wintry opening bars of the symphony.

When the music rouses itself again, we reach -- in the final coda -- the real reason this movement is called The Tocsin ("alarm bell").  Deep strokes on bass drum and tamtam underlie the sound, an obsessive galloping rhythm sounds repeatedly on the snare drum, and brazen fanfare chords are accompanied by a repeated three-note figure on the tubular bells.

Here, more than anywhere else in the symphony, I feel that Shostakovich's underlying thought diverged sharply from his outward, ostensible programme for the symphony.  What alarm exactly was the composer sounding with his tocsin?  And how relevant is it today?

Ironically, after the early abuse heaped on this piece, the Eleventh has in the last decade become the most-performed Shostakovich symphony in Toronto.  This is mainly thanks to the National Ballet of Canada, which has now staged John Neumeier's ballet Nijinsky three times, each time for 5 or more performances.  Nijinsky ballet uses the symphony complete and uncut for its long second act.  In addition, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has programmed the work twice, as well as performing it on tour in Europe, and recording it for CD and online downloading.