England has never had a strong tradition of home-grown ballet music. Several composers in the great English musical renaissance of the 20th century composed ballet scores, but these have remained largely unperformed as dance. Where some of them have survived and triumphed is in the concert hall.
I've written before about a ballet score by Ralph Vaughan Williams (Christmas Delights 1) but never have I discussed his finest music for ballet, indeed one of the finest works he ever composed.
RVW was far from being the first composer to take a series of pictures as the inspiration for a work of music. When he had the idea of writing a ballet that would revive old dance forms of the Tudor and Stuart eras, he turned to poet and artist William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job as his starting point, and created a ballet scenario that compressed Blake's twenty-some pictures into nine tableaux. The result was Job: A Masque for Dancing. As a ballet it was something of a flop. As a concert work, on the other hand, it works beautifully.
Job runs about 45 minutes in playing time, and is scored for triple woodwinds and brass, 4 horns, percussion, 2 harps, organ and strings. That's more orchestra than most theatre pits can easily accommodate, and for the premiere in 1931 a reduced version for smaller orchestra had to be arranged. The original score, then, can quite appropriately be regarded as more of a symphonic poem than a ballet score.
The score's dedicatee, Sir Adrian Boult, said of Vaughan Williams and Job: "His very broad mind is all there." It's a comment worth noting. Few of this composer's works span so many different styles of writing, or weave them so closely together.
The three main contrasting elements are strongly presented in the first scene: the nobility and grandeur of the music for God and the angels of heaven, the simple yet positive music of Job, and the whirling, spiky, malicious material associated with Satan. The first of the "set dances" is the Sarabande of the Sons of God, a stately chordal hymn-like theme.
In Scene II, Satan dances wildly before the throne of God (now vacant) and then runs to sit on the throne while the hosts of hell bow to him and the brass play a fanfare that sounds like a mockery of the angelic Gloria in excelsis.
The third scene depicts the sons of Job and their wives dancing and clashing their wine cups together in a gentle minuet. Satan enters, summons a whirlwind, and the house collapses to a grinding discord, killing all those in it.
Scene IV depicts Job sleeping while Satan stands over him and summons visions of plague, famine, war and destruction. This scene contains some of RVW's most violent and discordant "modern" idiom, very much akin to the contemporary Fourth Symphony.
In the fifth scene, the messengers arrive to tell Job of the death of his sons and their wives, yet Job still blesses God. The Dance of the Messengers is a sombre, slow-moving theme.
The sixth scene is memorable for the slithery, unctuous tones of alto saxophone and bass clarinet as the voices of Job's hypocritical comforters. At last Job loses patience and curses the day in which he was born -- this to an agonized minor-key version of the music for him in the first scene. Heaven opens to reveal a vision of Satan and the hosts of hell enthroned in God's place and Job cowers down in terror. This moment features one of the most remarkable and breathtaking inventions of the score: the vision is accompanied by a grinding, terrifying distortion of the Sarabande of the Sons of God played powerfully by the organ (conventionally considered a very religious musical instrument)!
In the shadow of that awe-inspiring climax the music dies away until a solo violin opens the seventh scene in a slow, rhapsodic, musing quasi-recitative accompanied by pizzicato strings and harp. This favourite musical trademark of the composer leads into Elihu's Dance of Youth and Beauty, and it's a blessed relief (in the most literal sense) after the vehement emotional contrasts of the preceding scene. This Dance in turn flows into the lyrical beauty of the Pavane of the Sons of the Morning, one of the most heartfelt and lovely musical ideas that Vaughan Williams ever composed.
In Scene VIII Satan enters to claim his victory and reward, but God rejects him and banishes him. The Sons of the Morning dance a robust Galliard in joy and praise. On earth, Job builds an altar and with his wife and daughters worships God in the Altar Dance. As the Sons of the Morning resume their Pavane, the Altar Dance and Pavane intertwine beautifully together until the scene ends with three surging chords that then die away. Scene IX resumes Job's pastoral music from the first scene, a perfect illustration of the text, "So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning."
Sir Adrian Boult recorded this magnificent score for the first time in 1946, and made no less than three further commercial recordings, the last one in 1970. I had that 1970 version on LP and it vividly characterized all the diverse aspects of then music. Plainly the conductor knew the score like the back of his own hand, and loved every note of it.
The only other recording I've ever heard is one made by Vernon Handley for EMI. Handley had worked extensively with Boult, and the reading comes across sounding very like Sir Adrian's, but with the advantage of more modern sound. Where Handley's version triumphs is in Scene VI, where the organ entry at the vision of Satan is absolutely overwhelming (as it would have to be in a live performance) and yet firmly contained and clearly recorded with no distortion -- an impressive and hair-raising moment indeed.
I was set off on writing this particular post by having a dream of winning a gigantic lottery prize and using part of the money to pay the costs for a complete performance of Job at Roy Thomson Hall, in which I got to play the organ part! Isn't it fun to dream?
No comments:
Post a Comment