Title: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Duration: Approximately 15 ½ minutes
Composer: Ralph Vaughan Williams (Born in Down Ampney, England on October 12, 1872; died in London on August 28, 1958)
Work composed: This work was commissioned, and composed, in 1910 for the Three Choirs Festival which is an annual English festival that brings together choirs from three English cathedrals for its event. In 1910, the festival was to be held at the Gloucester Cathedral in England’s Cotswolds District, and Vaughan Williams created his Fantasia with the acoustics of the Gloucester Cathedral in mind. The work was revised in 1913, and lastly in 1919.
World premiere: The work had its premiere at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester Cathedral on September 6, 1910, with Vaughan Williams conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.
Instrumentation: String Orchestra comprised of a double string orchestra and a string quartet: the first orchestra (“Orchestra 1”) is the largest string group, for an unspecified number of the typical symphonic strings; the second orchestra (“Orchestra II”) is for 2 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos, and double bass; and a typical string quartet
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
In the first decade of the 20th Century, Ralph Vaughan Williams was already in his mid-thirties and struggling with his music writing. He needed a break and he looked outside Britain for fresh ideas, specifically to Paris and the young musical genius, Maurice Ravel. Starting in 1908, Ravel and Vaughan Williams worked together for three months, swapping ideas, dabbling with older forms of music, and, of course, exploring Impressionistic ideas. Their mutual exchange led Vaughan Williams to say that he acquired “a little French polish” and that he learned to create harmonies “in colours rather than linearly.” The compositions that flowed from Vaughan Williams in the next few years were made of this delightful recipe – a kind of English heritage meets impressionist-like colors, at once mystical and sophisticated. His Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is probably his best-known work from this period.
Aside from his French inspiration, Vaughan Williams had his own English inspiration with Thomas Tallis. Tallis (1505-1585) was considered one of England’s greatest composers of the High Renaissance. Primarily a composer for voice, Tallis’s musical balance and breathtaking melodies earned him the sobriquet in England as the “Father of the Church Hymn.” As an English music historian, Vaughan Williams ran across some of Tallis’s hymns while he was editing The English Hymnal, a “best of” book of hymns spanning centuries to be used as the official hymn book for the Church of England. Of particular merit in this collection are Tallis’s nine hymns from 1567 that he composed for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker’s Metrical Psalter. Metrical psalters were collections of psalms translated into the local language and set in verse (poetic rhyming) form. One of Tallis’s hymns for the Archbishop, “Why fum’th in fight?,” especially enchanted Vaughan Williams.
In 1910, Vaughan Williams was commissioned to write a piece for the prestigious Three Choirs Festival, one of the world’s oldest classical choral music festivals, and he remembered Tallis’s “Why fum’th in fight??” With his new ideas from his time with Ravel about harmonies and using old musical forms, Vaughan Williams took Tallis’s hymn and turned it into a Fantasia – an old instrumental form which develops several related themes in separate sections. Somewhat ironically, given this piece’s origin in Tallis’s hymn and its commission for a choral festival, Vaughan Williams wrote his Fantasia for string orchestra, not for choir. He revised it twice after its 1910 Festival premiere; once in 1913, and again in 1919, which is the version now performed.
The Fantasia opens with five of what Vaughan Williams called “magic chords,” lush and atmospheric. The progression from one chord to the next doesn’t follow any particular harmonic rules, but instead seem to float downward in timelessness, “in colours rather than linearly,” as if they were reverberations in a colossal cathedral. These “magic chords” thus introduce the piece not as a hymn, per se, but as a mystical rumination. The Tallis tune is heard in its entirety a few bars later, played by the cellos and violas, with the high strings playing gleaming tremolos above as harmony – evoking luminous stained glass in the cathedral heights. The ancient key (called the Phrygian mode) of Tallis’s original tune sounds strange to our modern ears – the flatted second, third, sixth and seventh notes in its scale give it a uniquely antiquated sound – yet allows Vaughan Williams to harmonize the old hymn in some stunningly new and lovely ways.
After hearing the hymn tune proper, the Fantasia divides Tallis’s hymn into four small parts, or short verses, roughly following Tallis’s original meter. The verses are separated by a brief refrain – generally referred to as a “swaying-chords motive” – that, in part, has a slow-motion kind of skipping rhythm. Upon that basic structure, Vaughan Williams creates four larger episodes in which he explores variations in voicings between his inventive sets of strings – he divides the string orchestra into three groups: two string orchestras, the first of which is rather large (“Orchestra I”), a second with only nine strings (“Orchestra II”), and a “String Quartet.” One of the most enchanting ways that Vaughan Williams handles these separate orchestras is after one of the three groups plays one of the verses, a second group often follows antiphonally in a call-and-response, creating a kind of “halo effect.” A particularly beautiful example of this happens at about four minutes into the piece. For about two luxurious minutes, Orchestra I and Orchestra II trade portions of a verse back and forth; but while Orchestra I plays unrestrained, Orchestra II is instructed to play pianissimo (very quietly) and con sordino (with mutes). Not exactly an echo, and answering in the softest of whispers, Orchestra II sounds as if it’s a reverberation from 350 years ago in Tallis’s time that is now somehow being heard again – it’s a musical imagining both disarming and breathtaking.
Even with Fantasia’s exquisite sonic effects, the most sumptuous and alluring part of this masterpiece, though, is its drifting, dark, ambling progression of chords. They transport us through time and seem to dwell in some other unique dimension – haunted, beautiful, and beckoning. As musicologist Peter Ackroyd characterized it, Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia is “deep and mystical as well as … nostalgic yet timeless.” Certainly, it’s one of Vaughan Williams’s most treasured and distinctive masterpieces.