ABSTRACT

Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony, premiered in 1935, appears to constitute one of his most obvious claims for membership of the modernist party in twentieth-century British composition. It is one of the rare works of pre-Manchester-School British music that the general public is likely to classify with confidence as ‘modernist’. Reminding us of its composition during the Great Depression, while Fascism spread across Europe, today’s programme-note writers—who may be considered a good litmus test of the general musical public’s views of the symphony—suggests that we hear the suffering of the people and the steady approach of another total war. One of the possibilities open to early-modernist symphonic composers in the years around 1900 was by some means to subvert the Beethovenian model of tonal closure as redemption.