THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

The White Gates,
Dorking.

[4 December 1940]

Dear Scholes
I was very glad to get your letter – It carries me back to very early days when we used to meet in London – I didn’t listen in the other night – I didn’t dare to – Alas I find I can seldom listen to music.  I find more & more that modern music means nothing to me – (I hope it means something to the younger generation – if so then it is all right – but does it?)
And the older music reminds me too much of old far off unhappy things¹ – I liked the Purcell² the other night & Haydn³ passim & Byrd in New College chapel⁴ – & the finale of the 9th Symphony tonight⁵ – which confirmed my opinion that the Finale is potentially the most magnificent of the 4 movements – That vulgar march with the drunken Welshman singing a Penillion to the tune is superb.⁶
Thank you very much for writing – it does one good to know that one’s life has not been quite useless – though it seems so nowadays.
Yrs
R. Vaughan Williams

1. An allusion to Wordsworth’s The Solitary Reaper: “Will no-one tell me what she sings?/ Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow/ for old, unhappy, far-off things,/ and battles long ago.”
2. A Purcell programme including songs, Fantasies, the Chacony and the Golden Sonata, performed by Margaret Field-Hyde and the Stratton Quartet on 26 November 1940.
3. Malcolm Sargent had conducted Haydn’s Symphony No. 86 on 30 November , and on 1 December the Griller Quartet played a pair of Haydn quartets.
4. The Short Service broadcast in the Evensong service on 3 December .
5. Beethoven’s Choral Symphony performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Adrian Boult was broadcast on the evening of 4 December.
6. In his essay ‘Some thoughts on Beethoven’s Choral Symphony’ written a year earlier in 1939 (but not published until 1953) VW writes of this passage in the symphony: ‘Then, against the march tune, a man’s voice is heard singing – probably a drunken soldier…He is without doubt a Welshman, for he is obviously singing a ‘Penillion’ to the principal melody, though he probably has not obeyed all the rules for Penillion singing. Gradually his companions join in and the song culminates in a lusty shout’.