Symphony No. 8 in D minor

Program notes

About the Work

Vaughan Williams was in his eighties, the grand old man of English music, when he wrote his Eighth Symphony. He began sketching it in 1953 and took the rough score with him to the United States in 1954, where he spent months lecturing and conducting; by early 1955 it was largely complete. Sir John Barbirolli, who had asked him for a new piece for the Hallé Orchestra, got it, and the symphony is dedicated to him. Barbirolli and the Hallé played it through for the composer in February 1956 and gave the premiere in Manchester that May.

Most of his earlier symphonies seemed to carry some extra-musical idea, the sea, London, the war, the Antarctic. The Eighth is lighter and more playful, often called the lightest of his symphonies, though that is only partly true. It is compact, under half an hour, and each of its four movements uses a different part of the orchestra in a different way.

One late addition came from the opera house. While finishing the score, Vaughan Williams went to Puccini’s Turandot at Covent Garden and was so taken with its tuned gongs that he added them to his already large percussion section. By his own description, the finale uses ‘all the ‘phones and ‘spiels known to the composer’: vibraphone, xylophone, glockenspiel, tubular bells, celesta and more.

Light does not mean trivial, though. Commentators have pointed to melodic echoes of Holst and of Bach in the score: the flute tune in the first variation has been linked to Holst’s hymn tune for ‘O Valiant Hearts’, a Remembrance Day hymn, and the slow movement has its own Bach connection (see below). Some hear a quiet thread of remembrance running under the good humour, for friends and for the dead of the First World War.

It makes a bright companion to the Pastoral Symphony at the start of tonight’s programme, written more than thirty years earlier.

What to Listen For

The first movement is a set of variations without a clear theme, which Vaughan Williams called ‘seven variations in search of a theme’. Listen for three short ideas at the start: two rising intervals on the trumpet answered by the vibraphone, a jig-like flute phrase, and a falling figure in the strings. Everything that follows is built from them, and the movement ends with the trumpet motif again and a shimmer of vibraphone and strings.

The second movement is a brisk scherzo for wind instruments alone, woodwind and brass, with a comic bassoon theme and a short fugal passage. The third, a Cavatina, is for strings alone, a slow, meditative song for the cellos. Its opening theme resembles the Passion chorale ‘O Sacred Head’, which the composer said got mixed up in his mind: ‘I am quite unrepentant!’

The finale is a Toccata. It opens with a stroke of gong and bell, then the full orchestra and the tuned percussion trade the main theme back and forth. Unlike most of his symphonies, which fade away, this one ends loudly, in a blaze of bells.