Sinfonia antartica (Symphony No. 7)

Program notes

About the Work

Vaughan Williams’s Seventh Symphony, the Sinfonia antartica, grew out of one of the most evocative film scores ever written. In 1947–48 the composer, then in his mid-seventies, wrote the music for the Ealing Studios film Scott of the Antarctic, about Captain Scott’s doomed 1912 expedition to the South Pole. He was so gripped by the subject (the vast, indifferent grandeur of the ice, and the human courage and tragedy played out against it) that he reworked the material into a full symphony, completed in 1952 and premiered by Barbirolli and the Hallé in 1953.

The result is a remarkable, atmospheric work in five movements, each prefaced in the score by a literary epigraph (from Shelley, the Psalms, Coleridge, John Donne and Scott’s own final journal). It is a symphony of landscape and of human struggle: shimmering, glacial soundscapes; the relentless trudge of the explorers; moments of beauty, terror and desolation. To conjure the polar world, Vaughan Williams deploys a huge orchestra with a large percussion section, organ and, most famously, a wind machine, alongside a wordless soprano and women’s chorus whose eerie, textless voices float over the ice like the wind itself or the siren call of the unforgiving landscape. It is a unique and haunting addition to the symphonic repertoire, and a powerful close to a programme of cold, mythic and elemental music.

What to Listen For

Listen, from the very opening, for the great striding theme that represents heroic human endeavour, and then for the chilling sounds of the Antarctic itself: the wordless soprano and women’s chorus (here the women of the London Symphony Chorus) keening over the orchestra, the eerie whistle of the wind machine, the glitter of celesta, harp, piano and tuned percussion evoking ice and snow. This blend of the human and the elemental is the symphony’s whole world.

Follow the five movements as a journey: a grand, struggling Prelude; a Scherzo evoking the wildlife and the floes (listen for suggestions of penguins and whales); a vast, bleak central Landscape, its climax crowned by a terrifying organ entry depicting the immensity and menace of the ice; an Intermezzo of tenderness and human warmth; and a final Epilogue, in which the heroic theme returns and the explorers march bravely on. At the very end the music dissolves into the wind machine and the wordless voices alone, the indifferent landscape outlasting the men who dared it. It is one of the most atmospheric and moving of all twentieth-century symphonies.