A Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No. 3)

Program notes

About the Work

For decades A Pastoral Symphony was heard as a picture of the English countryside, gentle and a little sleepy. Vaughan Williams himself knew better. The piece began to take shape in his mind in 1916, while he was serving as a medical orderly with an ambulance unit just behind the front line in northern France. Years later he wrote to Ursula Wood, who became his second wife: ‘It’s really war-time music, a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night with the ambulance waggon … and we went up a steep hill and there was a wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset. It’s not really lambkins frisking at all, as most people take for granted.’

Vaughan Williams was in his forties when war broke out, and he volunteered anyway, serving in France and in Greece, and later as an officer in the artillery. Serious composing was impossible in those years, but ideas could still form. One of them came from an army bugler he heard practising in the evenings, a sound that he said became part of that landscape. It grew into the long trumpet solo in the second movement.

Back home after the war, he finished the new symphony in time for its premiere at the Queen’s Hall in London on 26 January 1922, with Adrian Boult conducting the orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society. His own note for that first performance warned the audience what to expect: the mood is ‘almost entirely quiet and contemplative’, with ‘few fortissimos and few allegros’. Most of the symphony is slow, and its harmony is full of soft dissonance handled so gently that it sounds like a new kind of consonance.

The symphony has no programme, and Vaughan Williams never wrote publicly about what the war did to him. But knowing where the music came from, many listeners now hear it as a quiet elegy for the dead of the First World War, a symphony and a requiem at once.

What to Listen For

There are four movements, and three of them are slow, so give yourself over to the pace. The first movement moves in gently overlapping layers, with chords sliding against each other. The second, marked Moderato maestoso, opens with a horn solo and builds to the symphony’s most famous moment: a long, free trumpet cadenza over a quiet pedal note in the strings. This is the bugler’s call, heard from a distance.

The third movement is what Vaughan Williams called a ‘slow dance’, heavy-footed and a little rustic, but it ends with the only really quick music in the whole symphony, a scurrying coda played pianissimo.

The finale begins with a voice alone: a soprano singing without words, unaccompanied except for a soft drum roll. The orchestra then takes up a broad, elegiac melody, and at the end the voice returns, now over muted violins, and fades into silence.