The Church with Psalms Must Shout
If his only bequest to the Church had been the hymn tunes Down Ampney and Sine Nomine, we would have cause to be grateful for the gifts of Ralph Vaughan Williams. The melodies that he composed for Christians to sing the fourteenth-century hymn, “Come down, O Love divine,” and the mid-nineteenth-century, “For all the saints, who from their labors rest,” continue to convey the quiet spiritual urgency of the first and the triumphant confidence of the second. Both tunes were devised for inclusion in The English Hymnal, which Vaughan Williams edited, a liturgically seminal volume published in 1906 (the story of which I summarized in “Taught by Melodious Sonnets,” in the November/December 2017 issue of Touchstone).
Apart from hymns, Vaughan Williams wrote very little music for use in liturgical settings. But the catalogue of his works includes some remarkable compositions for performance in concert that employ Christian texts and explore Christian themes. The celebration this October 12th of the 150th anniversary of his birth offers an occasion for Christians to become more familiar with these works.
A Fantasia for All Time
Some of the earliest music of the English church provided resources for many of Vaughan Williams’s compositions, including the work that first established his reputation as a notable composer. Written for string orchestra and first performed at Gloucester Cathedral as part of the 1910 Three Choirs Festival, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis remains Vaughan Williams’s best-known work.
The theme therein employed is present in many hymnals under the tune name Third Mode Melody. Tallis—one of the towering giants of Tudor-era church music—originally composed the melody as one of nine tunes included in the Psalter of 1567, the work of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury. Vaughan Williams included this tune in the 1906 English Hymnal with the words of the poem by Joseph Addison which opens, “When rising from the bed of death overwhelmed with guilt and fear.” Today, many hymnals present Third Mode Melody as the tune to which is sung the hymn by Horatius Bonar, “I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Come unto Me and rest.’”
If Vaughan Williams had not included that Tudor tune in his 1906 Hymnal, it might not still be sung today. But just as relevant to its survival is the use of the tune in that 1910 orchestral work and its subsequent popularity in concert performance. After the work’s premiere, music critic J. A. Fuller Maitland wrote:
Throughout its course one is never quite sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new. . . . But that is just what makes this Fantasia so delightful to listen to; it cannot be assigned to a time or a school, but it is full of the visions which have haunted the seers of all times.
Art Bearing Witness
Ralph Vaughan Williams was not a devout Christian; his wife Ursula famously described him as a “cheerful agnostic.” But he clearly believed that the Christian tradition, in its poetry and music, bore witness to transcendent realities. In a 1920 article entitled “The Letter and the Spirit,” Vaughan Williams asserted:
[Do we not] take it that the object of all art is to obtain a partial revelation of that which is beyond human senses and human faculties—of that in fact which is spiritual? And that the means we employ to induce this revelation are those very senses and faculties themselves? The human, visible, audible and intelligible media which artists (of all kinds) use, are symbols not of other visible and audible things but of what lies beyond sense and knowledge.
If Vaughan Williams was a skeptic, it was not because of the entrenched materialism common among his contemporaries. Rather, it was the concrete specificity of Christian dogmas—the claim that Myth has become Fact—that he apparently found unattractive. When in April 1951 the audience at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, heard the first performance of Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, they may have been perplexed by the fact that Bunyan’s hero was no longer named “Christian” but bore the more generic and anonymous designation, “Pilgrim.” Vaughan Williams later explained in a letter: “I on purpose did not call the Pilgrim ‘Christian’ because I want the idea to be universal and apply to anybody who aims at the spiritual life whether he is Xtian, Jew, Buddhist, Shintoist or 5th Day Adventist.”
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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