Author Description

In the latter stages of his career, Vaughan Williams experimented with unusual sonorities: the spoken word was explored in An Oxford Elegy composed between 1947 and 1949, and scored for speaker, small mixed chorus, and small orchestra. It was first performed privately, the public première taking place in June 1952, appropriately in Oxford, under the auspices of the Oxford Orchestral Society, conducted by Bernard Rose, with Steuart Wilson as speaker. The text is from ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’ by Matthew Arnold, Vaughan Williams’s admiration for the Victorian poet dating back many years. He had long contemplated an opera on the tale of the wandering scholar; indeed in 1901 had sketched some music for it, and one theme found its way into An Oxford Elegy. The story had its origins in the 17th century, telling of an impoverished student who forsakes the university and his friends to join the gipsies. Later recognized by some former friends, he tells them that when he has learnt all the gipsies’ remarkable arts and powers he will return to Oxford to write an account of the mysteries. He never, however, returned but the legend persisted that he had not died but lived on, occasionally, fleetingly, seen down the centuries. Vaughan Williams uses the voices as a wordless extension of the orchestra, occasionally blossoming into words as at ‘Soon will the Midsummer pomps come’, set to a ravishing melody and rocking rhythm. The scholar is evoked by a theme on the bassoon, later this developed into a wordless passage of serene vocal counterpoint. Throughout, the music is riven with nostalgia that befits the poetry but, as Michael Kennedy has pointed out, surely the composer in this work, written long after the Great War, was recalling his own lost friends such as Butterworth, and the work is his elegy for them. This is emphasized in the most magical music of all at the close to the words ‘Thou art gone, and me thou leavest here…the light we sought is shining still’.