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15 January 2025

Ralph Vaughan Williams’ bitter symphony

The composer’s exhilarating Sinfonia antartica was met with a mixed response on premiere – and still sits oddly in his oeuvre.

By Phil Hebblethwaite

The most famous sentence in exploration literature was penned by Captain Robert Falcon Scott as his final journal entry on 29 March 1912, the presumed day of his death: “For God’s sake, look after our people.” Two months earlier, his Terra Nova expedition reached the South Pole, only to discover that a rival Norwegian expedition led by Roald Amundsen had beaten them to the landmark by 34 days. In appalling conditions, Scott’s team of five died on their return journey north, birthing a legend that remains deeply embedded in the British psyche – of fight-to-death heroism; of trying your damndest and being honourable in defeat.

Scott’s journal was recovered with his body in October 1912. Published as Scott’s Last Expedition a year later, it became a bestseller. Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s celebrated account of the mission, The Worst Journey in the World, followed in 1922, keeping the story of intrepidness in savage cold burning hot in the aftermath of the First World War. Inevitably, in the effulgence of the Allied victory in the Second World War, a film was made. Charles Frend’s Scott of the Antarctic starring John Mills came out in 1948, complete with a score by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Britain’s greatest living composer expanded on his thematic ideas to create his Seventh Symphony, nicknamed Sinfonia antartica, which he completed in 1952.

Vaughan Williams, then in his early eighties, surely expected a hit. Where his discordant Sixth Symphony of 1948 was considered to be an inward-looking response to the devastation of war – a reading that the composer denied – Sinfonia antartica made for an exhilarating listen, conjuring up the drama of polar exploration alongside the epic serenity of the crystallised Antarctic desert. It’s a work of rich textures and colouring that, regardless of its initial association with film, can be seen in the mind’s eye. Short snippets of romantic poetry and an excerpt from Scott’s journal precede the symphony’s five movements. These are narrated by an actor (John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson on early recordings), although the work is usually performed without its associated text.

While an accessible and wildly imaginative soundscape, Sinfonia antartica met a mixed response on premiere in 1953. To this day, it sits oddly in both Vaughan Williams’ catalogue and the wider world of orchestral music. It competes with Holst’s The Planets in its scope but has never been as popular, nor is it recognised among the great symphonies inspired by nature, whether Beethoven’s evergreen Pastoral Symphony (1808), Strauss’s vast An Alpine Symphony of 1915, or Sibelius’s serene Fifth (also 1915).

Classical music can be a stickler for traditional form, forever suspicious of works considered to be neither fish nor fowl. That the symphony was drawn from film music may have counted against it in the concert hall, and perhaps you could argue that it only truly resonates at this time of year – in the bitterest months. Vaughan Williams may also have been too late to capture the fever for Captain Scott, his symphony suffocated by a need in British culture to move on from portraying heroes with comic-book-like aloofness. The war years were long gone by 1953; rock ’n’ roll and the counter culture were ahead. Come the 1970s, Captain Scott wasn’t exactly forgotten; more his capabilities and integrity were questioned, reducing a once-untouchable hero to a more recognisable figure – a man of weaknesses and perfectly ordinary complexity.

The key book was Roland Huntford’s Scott and Amundsen, published in 1979 and later televised and retitled as The Last Place on Earth. Huntford wrote that Scott’s expedition was recklessly organised to the point of being a suicide mission. “Scott had brought disaster on himself by his own incompetence, and thrown away the lives of his companions,” Huntford wrote, adding that his journals had been favourably edited by his wife, Kathleen, and Clements Markham of the Royal Geographical Society. Most damagingly, Huntford dared to suggest Scott could have made it back to base, but sought immolation instead, thereby snatching “a kind of victory out of defeat”. Instantly, what was once considered a story of British pluck and ambition became a tale of the worst in British arrogance and folly.

The book was hugely controversial and had a knock-on effect for the fortunes of Sinfonia antartica. Was it also a folly? Sycophancy? Or an ambiguous work with a suspicion of Scott weaved into its score? Writing in 2001 for Current Musicology, the American scholar Michael Beckerman took the latter view, remarking that much of Huntford’s evidence for Scott’s failings would have been available to Vaughan Williams when he was composing the work. He indicated to a passage in Ursula Vaughan Williams’ biography of her husband in which the composer becomes “more and more upset as he read about the inefficiencies of the organisation; he despised heroism that risked lives unnecessarily”. After his score was complete, he was reported to be “still fulminated against the amateurish organisation of the last stages of the expedition”.

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For Beckerman, these revelations from Ursula offer important insights into Sinfonia antartica. He notes that the symphony doesn’t finish with “hymn-like fanfares of vindication”, but with “the dark, enveloping death mask of nature”, adding that the work “is not simply to be heard as a paean to the heroism of man and the massive power of nature, but is also meant to be associated with the bitterness of human failure, the pessimism of dreams dashed, and the futility of fools fighting the wind and ice”. But then, in a footnote, Beckerman adds that just as his article was going to print “things in the Antarctic… heated up”. A new book on the Scott expedition had just been published – Susan Solomon’s The Coldest March – offering a rebuttal to Huntford. Solomon saw Scott as a victim of the bad luck he so frequently referred to in his journal, allowing for an entirely different reading of Sinfonia antartica.

Vaughan Williams, who loathed such literal interpretations of his music, would go on to write two more symphonies before dying in 1958. It’s common now to think of Sinfonia antartica as a transitional work – the starting point for what became an intriguing last few years of creativity. The undying popularity of his short romance from 1914, The Lark Ascending, seems to forever taint impressions of the kind of music he wrote. These final symphonies mark not just a creative flourishing in late life, but his most visionary orchestral works. They demand attention, offering admittance to their sonic world only with repeated listens. They are not “nice-Nelly music”, as the critic Harold C Schonberg wrote, adding: “No British composer has so managed to steer clear of Ye Olde Tea Shoppe school of music.”

The secrets of Sinfonia antartica may yet still be revealed, as indeed might the meaning of the symphony that followed, his Eighth. It also perplexed his audience, including a nine-year-old boy called Tom Whitestone, who wrote to the conductor John Barbirolli after a 1956 performance to say how much he enjoyed the Haydn symphony, but not the Vaughan Williams. Barbirolli passed on Tom’s letter, and Vaughan Williams replied: “I am glad you like the Haydn. He was a great man and wrote beautiful tunes. I must try one day to write a tune which you will like.”

[See also: Ethel Cain’s American Gothic]

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This article appears in the 15 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Disruptors