Anglicanism as a way of beauty: Ralph Vaughan Williams
A friend asked me the other day: why does sadness have a special relationship to beauty? Why do I see, and feel, the beauty of the world - simple things, like that book - more clearly when I am sad?
The contrast he was describing - between what is absent and what is present - is a very moving one. I wondered if it also represents a sort of fundamental aesthetic structure for orthodox Christianity: the sense of the fullness and the presence of “Christ” - the pleroma of God - experienced cosmically and mystically, as well as in more conventional terms, with the sense of the painful absence of God, of goodness and love and full presence and justice.
Theologians would call this the tension between the now (the kingdom of heaven is here) and the not yet (creation is still “groaning”, waiting for greater justice, love, and peace).
Perhaps for this reason, as well as my somewhat melancholic temperament - I love songs and music in a minor key.
Coverdale’s Carol (Now blessed be thou…”): Words by Martin Luther (1483-1546), translated by Miles Coverdale (1487-1568), sung to a 19th century English folk air, “On Christmas Day”, arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).
Those new to Ralph (‘Rafe’) Vaughan Williams might like to read this lively summary here.
He was significantly engaged with Anglican Christianity for most of his life, revising the official English Hymnal, although he was an atheist as a young man, and, in later years, an agnostic. Michael Kennedy writes:
It is important to realize, and it cannot be over-emphasized, that the religion of Vaughan Williams’s life was music. He was that extremely English product: the natural nonconformist with a conservative regard for the best tradition. In the music of the Church he recognized the only continuous musical tradition in English life. When he was at Cambridge he would go to Ely Cathedral in time for morning service and sit at the back of that beautiful church listening to the chants echoing among the lofty recesses of the roof. The marvellous prose of the Authorized Version, the fundamental simplicities of The Pilgrim’s Progress – these were necessary food for his artistic spirit, and he himself responded to their proclamation of the ultimate mysteries as artists have done throughout the ages. There is no lack of sincerity in his religious music almost all of which is strongly affirmative. The atheism of the undergraduate was replaced by a more mature Christian agnosticism, as Sir Stewart Wilson has brilliantly described it. He had a deep-rooted humanitarian faith: beyond that, he would not go. (1)
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As with Constable, some of the Vaughan Williams’ pieces that most deeply stir me are not formal “religious” ones. Why is that?
A shorter example of one of these, more appropriate for this format, is the pared back Lake in the Mountains. In this piece, I feel no sadness, but the fullness and stillness of the lake, going on being.
Unlike Constable’s landscapes, full of human associations, Williams’ lake feels more solitary and undisturbed.
I do not mean to imply that Williams was an essentially sad or serene composer. He composed in many moods, landscapes and tones. He is perhaps more emotionally varied than Constable.
The Lake in the Mountains is a solo piece from the film score for 49th Parallel:
The plot follows the attempt of six Nazis, who have been stranded in Canada after escaping from their damaged submarine, to reach the USA, at that time a neutral country…For one scene, ‘The Lake in the Mountains’, Vaughan Williams decided to score the music for solo piano. It introduces and underpins dialogue between Howard, who portrays an idealist studying native Indian customs, and Portman, the leader of the Germans. Pastoral in character to evoke the Canadian landscape, the music also reflects the dramatic situation when the harmony suddenly veers menacingly at the moment when the Nazis arrive. (2)
Ah, how my ear and imagination create a more undisturbed, less populous lake! We create what we need to hear and see!
Although ‘quintessentially English’, like Constable, in The Lake we see Williams venturing out. While Constable’s art sold well in France, he chose not to visit the continent, famously saying that he would “rather be a poor man in England than a rich man abroad”. As a consequence of both temperament and historical context, Williams was more modern and international.
This difference, or progression, is also a nod to the Anglican Church in modern times: from being the established ‘Church of England’, to the ‘Church of England’ in the ‘Province’ of New Zealand (or Canada or Australia etc.), to eventually becoming the (independent, self-governing, disestablished) ‘Anglican Church in New Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia’, the ‘Anglican Church of Canada’, or even ‘the Episcopal Church’ (in the United States).
These changes, of course, raised many political and cultural questions; so too for the church as a way of beauty - for its liturgy, architecture, and aesthetic imagination.
How English do we need, or want, to be? What is ‘Anglicanism’ when it isn’t established, or male, or even English and white? Or, as we shall see in the next post, when it isn’t so ‘straight’ and ‘Authorized Version’?
References:
(1) Kennedy, Michael Kennedy, (1980), The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, p.42.
(2) Retrieved from https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dw.asp?dc=W3623_GBAJY0231301.
Image at top of page: Portrait of Ralph Vaughan Williams, O.M., ca. 1961, by Sir Gerald Kelly.
