program - SVIZ

PROGRAM / PROGRAM
94
As a composer Ralph Vaughan Williams stands between Elgar and Britten.
During his lifetime, change and revolution not only marked European music,
but in two catastrophic world wars the very social foundations of the entire
world were forcefully shaken. Amidst a feeling of ‘the world gone crazy’ Williams
sought firm roots for his art in so-called ‘national music’. He asserted
that artistic roots must be “firmly anchored in one’s homeland, and if that
land can give you something individual you can gain the entire world without
losing your soul”. The two foundations of English national music – folk music
and the music of the Elizabethan era – where amongst the main sources of
Williams’s inspiration. Even today, music histories describe Williams as typically
‘English’: he is the “apotheosis of Englishness”, his music is “the most
individual in the history of British music since Purcell”.
In the opinion of music historians, the English essence is also that which gave
rise to Williams’s idyllic, dreamy pastoral romance The Lark Ascending from
1914 (revised in 1920). The orchestral version of this work was performed for
the first time by Marie Hall, to whom it is dedicated. The music is based on
verses from the poem of the same name by romantic poet George Meredith,
who describes the joyous flight of a lark above a valley and the bird’s song in
“silver chains of sound”. The poet compares the lark with wine that fills his
goblet – the valley – and with which beneath the heavens people also raise
themselves up. The eternally changing song of the lark and the ecstasy of
its singing is portrayed in the onomatopoeic romance in the slow Andante
sostenuto. This flows into the Allegretto tranquillo, a faster section inspired
by folk music. But here the pastoral idyll is just illusion and nostalgia: it is only
with difficulty that the work actually believes in the idyll, as it was commenced
on the outset of the First World War and was completed after it.
Czech composer Pavel Haas commenced his music education at the Philharmonic
School in Brno, and in 1919 enrolled to study composition at the
Brno Conservatory, where he was most influenced by his studies with Leoš
Janáček. The latter made his students familiar with the harmony and melody
of Moravian folk music. The melodic and rhythmic elements of speech and
its setting to music also became one of the main foundations of Haas’s approach
to composition. Although Janáček’s influence on the young composer
was enormous, Haas subsequently developed an entirely personal style.
In addition to Moravian folk song, his sense of melody was marked by the
singing in Jewish synagogues and by Gregorian chant, while rhythmically
he was influenced by an interest in contemporary western European musical
streams and jazz. Encouraged by his wife Soňa, Haas dedicated himself
entirely to music in 1935. However, due to his Jewish origins, he was deported
to the Terezín concentration camp in 1941, where he composed at least eight
works, of which only three are extant, including the Study for String Orchestra
and the Four Songs on Chinese Poetry. Haas died in a gas chamber in the
Birkenau concentration camp in 1944. He did not leave an extensive opus,
but he is nonetheless one of the key representatives of Czech music, linking
the national tradition with the new achievements of international music.