1(a). A London Symphony

Ralph Vaughan Williams's impact on music in New York City properly begins at Carnegie Hall on 30 December 1920, when Albert Coates led the New York Symphony in the American premiere of A London Symphony (App. I, no. 1). To some extent, the symphony had to share the spotlight with Coates himself, who was making his own much-heralded American debut and who, earlier that day, was the guest of honour at a reception at the Park Avenue residence of Harry Harkness Flagler, himself an important figure in the city's musical life.Footnote ¹⁰

About the symphony itself, the NYTimes and the New-York Tribune (N-YTrib) were split. An unsigned review in the N-YTrib praised the work: ‘The most imposing, most interesting work that has come out of England for a long time […] written in the modern idiom but firmly molded, free from dissonantic meanderings, it is in the fullest sense music of to-day, music of blood and tears.’Footnote ¹¹ Richard Aldrich, chief music critic at the NYTimes, was less impressed, though ultimately ambivalent.

Three points call for comment: (1) Aldrich's reference to the composer as ‘Mr. Williams’ shows that Vaughan Williams was anything but a household name; in fact, the unhyphenated, compound surname confused American critics (as well as some library cataloguers and the public at large) for years and even decades to comeFootnote ¹³ ; (2) Aldrich is wrong about the version of the symphony that he heard; it was already the second – not the first – revisionFootnote ¹⁴ ; and (3) Aldrich took the programmatic aspects of the work far too literally. Indeed, the programme, which was written especially for the New York premiere and haunted Vaughan Williams for years, calls for comment.

Though Vaughan Williams disliked programmatic interpretations of his symphonies and generally adopted a closed-mouth stance when asked about their ‘meaning’, he did offer his views about London on two occasions: first for a 1920 performance in London and then for one in Liverpool in 1925. Both times he was adamant that the symphony was not descriptive and that, as he put it in 1925, ‘it is intended to be listened to as “absolute” music’.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet the audience in Carnegie Hall would never have guessed that. Rather they would have come away thinking that the symphony was a guidebook – and a rather exhaustive one at that – to London and those who live there, for that is the impression to be gleaned from the evening's programme notes, which, though signed ‘A. C.’ (Albert Coates—see Figure 1), were (as she acknowledged) written by his wife Madelon.

Source: Reproduced with permission of the New York Philharmonic Archives.

Figure 1. New York Symphony programme booklet for the New York (and United States) premiere of A London Symphony, 30 December 1920. Symphony Society Bulletin, 14/6 (27 December 1920), [1-2].

Her description of the fourth movement begins and ends as follows:

Upon learning about the travelogue-like programme, Vaughan Williams was aghast, and he explained the situation in some detail 20 years later in a letter of December 1940 to Olin Downes, who by then had been chief music critic of the NYTimes for 16 years (see below, §2b): ‘When Coates first wanted to do the symphony in America, he saw that the American public must [emphasis in the original] have a detailed programme or they would not listen to the work—& then his wife had written one. When I saw it I was horrified […].’Footnote ¹⁷ For her part, Madelon Coates had already defended her work as far back as a letter of 28 August 1924 to Percy Scholes:

Thus the low regard in which Albert and Madelon Coates held their New York audience.

Two other reviews of the premiere warrant attention. After praising Coates, who had opened the programme with his own arrangement of excerpts from Purcell and followed it with a truncated version of Elgar's Enigma Variations (‘some of which Mr. Coates was canny enough to delete’), the unidentified critic of The Sun complained that the symphony was ‘as long as London is large’ and that it had a theme for ‘everything from Big Ben to Bloomsbury’.Footnote ¹⁹ Finally, Musical America was even more negative: ‘Vaughan Williams […] basked in the glory of Mr. Coates. […] The music […] is, unfortunately, prolix and deficient in the powerful emotional appeal inherent in its pictorial basis.’Footnote ²⁰

The symphony received two further hearings during our opening three-season period. The New York Symphony repeated the work on 30 January 1921 (App. I, no. 2), now under its own musical director, Walter Damrosch, while Coates returned to lead another performance with the orchestra on 28 January 1923 (App. I, no 7). On both occasions, the reviews got stuck on the programmatic aspects of the work, especially as they concern the first movement: the N-YTrib's influential Henry Krehbiel thought such descriptive writing ‘vulgar’,Footnote ²¹ while an anonymous reviewer for the same newspaper took issue with the ‘materialistic din illustrative of the street life of the world's metropolis’.Footnote ²²

Yet there was one review of the January 1921 performance that held out a glimmer of hope. Contrary to Krehbiel's verdict of ‘vulgar’, Aldrich wrote: ‘To those who heard it a second time it may have seemed even a more profoundly felt and original expression than it did before’ (and this after his very guarded reaction one month earlier). In fact, Aldrich had moved closer to Vaughan Williams's own conception of the work, for while Madelon Coates's detailed ‘analysis’ appeared in the programme booklet once again, the symphony now seemed ‘not dependent on this visualization for its value as music’.Footnote ²³ In all, for a work that would soon play a major role in establishing Vaughan Williams's reputation in New York, London got off to something of a rocky start.

1(b). A Sea Symphony – A Pastoral Symphony

Two other symphonies made their New York debuts during the course of these three seasons.

A Sea Symphony arrived first, on 5 April 1922, when the New York Philharmonic and the visiting Toronto Mendelssohn Choir joined forces under Herbert Austin Fricker in what constituted both the New York and the United States premiere (App. I, no. 5).Footnote ²⁴ The reviews were not favourable. Krehbiel was even concerned about calling the work a ‘symphony’: ‘We were not convinced […] that the experiment of using a chorus was altogether a success. […] Sometimes we wondered why the voices were used at all […].’Footnote ²⁵ Two reviewers found fault with the very idea of setting Whitman's poetry. Oscar Thompson: ‘The ear cannot fail to sense the fundamentally unmusical character of Whitman's verse, the square corners of which –whatever the bigness of the poetic ideas – do not lend themselves to musical setting'Footnote ²⁶ , while for the critic at The Sun, identified only as ‘The Listener’: ‘Mr. Williams has written a big, burly piece, often inspiring, though rarely inspired – a comment […] often applied to Whitman, as well as to those who set him to music.’Footnote ²⁷

Only the anonymous reviewer of the NYTimes had something favourable to say: ‘It was a daring venture to attempt conventional symphonic form for [Whitman's] visions […].’ He then singled out three passages in particular: (1) the ‘brilliant […] trumpet calls alternating with shouts from the [chorus]’ that open the first movement (surely one of the most arresting openings in the symphonic repertory); (2) ‘the emergence of a solo soprano voice suddenly from the full chorus, like a star beacon at sea’ (if the reference is still to the first movement, likely seven measures after rehearsal letter S, on the words ‘Flaunt out O sea your separate flags of nations’); and (3) the ‘sustained mood of beauty and solemnity’ of the second movement, ‘On the Beach at Night Alone’.Footnote ²⁸ In any event, the Philharmonic has never again programmed A Sea Symphony, and it was not until 1960 that New York audiences had a chance to hear the work again. (Can it be that it's simply ‘too big’ for its own good?).Footnote ²⁹

Completed in 1921, A Pastoral Symphony received its first performance in New York with the Philharmonic under the Czech-born Josef Stransky (Stránský) on 24 November 1922 (App. I, no. 6), just a few months after Vaughan Williams himself had led the American premiere at the annual Norfolk festival in Connecticut on 7 June 1922 (see below, §1c). The reviews of the New York premiere were not kind, none meaner than Richard Aldrich's in the NYTimes: ‘The music suffers […] from too great a prolongation of a single mood […] the audience listened with an apathy almost complete.’Footnote ³⁰ Both Thompson in Musical America and Gilbert Gabriel of The Sun concurred: Thompson – ‘There is too little contrast between movements’; Gilbert – ‘an almost monotonous contemplation […]’.Footnote ³¹ Clearly, there was more of the ‘pastoral’ than the critics could take.

These negative judgments notwithstanding, both Aldrich and the unnamed N-YTrib critic were astute enough to recognize that something interesting was going on. As the latter put it: ‘Musically the past and future meet in it. The antique modes of its themes […] are suggestive of the oldest English music, while its harmonic structure is free from classical restrictions […].’Footnote ³² Yet without impugning the anonymous critic's ear, we may ask if he was really that sensitive a listener or whether he was simply parroting Lawrence Gilman's programme notes.Footnote ³³ In the end, though, both Sea and Pastoral joined London in meeting with receptions that ranged from downright negative to tepid at best.

Yet in dealing with Pastoral, there was something that the critics, through no fault of their own, missed entirely. Neither they nor anyone else could know that beneath that ‘monotonous contemplation’ lay dark memories of the First World War; for only in 1964 did Ursula Vaughan Williams inform us that what Virgil Thomson would one day (20 years later) call a ‘slight haze’ over the ‘English landscape’ (see §3c) was a deeply felt recollection of the ‘twilight woods at Ecoivres’ (France), where Vaughan Williams had served during the First World War.Footnote ³⁴

1(c). Vaughan Williams's first visit to New York

Vaughan Williams visited New York three times: May–June 1922; September–December 1932; and September–December 1954. The 1922 trip was made at the behest of Carl Stoeckel, who had invited Vaughan Williams to conduct the American premiere of A Pastoral Symphony at the music festival that he (Stoeckel) mounted each summer at his lavish estate in Litchfield, Connecticut.Footnote ³⁵ Described by The Hartford Courant in its announcement of the visit as ‘the coming man in English music'Footnote ³⁶ , Vaughan Williams conducted Pastoral on 7 June 1922. The symphony was the featured work on the programme, and Vaughan Williams was ‘called back several times amid great applause’.Footnote ³⁷

Two letters from New York shed light on the impression that the city made on Ralph and his wife Adeline. The first, written about 5 June 1922 from the posh Plaza Hotel, where the couple was staying, is from Vaughan Williams to Gustav Holst: he was overwhelmed by the Woolworth Building, then the tallest in New York, and found it more ‘terrify[ing] than Niagara Falls'Footnote ³⁸ ; he then drew a row of five skyscrapers in order to give Holst an idea of the skyline, and told him that Stoeckel had put him and Adeline up in ‘the swaggerest Hotel in N.Y.’, where they had ‘a suite of rooms with 2 bath rooms with this wonderful view all over N.Y.’; further, ‘N.Y. is a good place but wants hustling badly – the busses are slow & stop wherever you like – Broadway is I believe easier to cross than High Street Thaxted’; and finally, he was scheduled to have four rehearsals with the orchestra, and found ‘many of the players v[ery] good but the back desks of the fiddles are not v[ery] good – & the Trombones have not much beef about them’.Footnote ³⁹

The second letter dates from 14 June 1922, a week after the festival performance. Back in the Plaza Hotel, Adeline shared some impressions with her youngest sister, Cordelia Curle: Carl Stoeckel ‘sticks to us & pays for everything’; both she and Ralph like a kind of melon called ‘canterlope [sic]’, which is particularly good with ‘pink ice cream’; lunch is a two- or three-hour affair; and Ralph is ‘feeling restive & says he now knows how Mozart & his contemporaries felt living under a patron’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Finally, there is a letter postmarked 25 August 1922 from Vaughan Williams (now back in England) to Daniel Gregory Mason (1873–1953) – composer, critic and, at the time, Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University – that shows that he and Adeline had met Mason and his wife, perhaps in New York, perhaps at the festival, perhaps in both places.Footnote ⁴¹

2(a). A London Symphony reconsidered

Despite its poor initial reception, London was not to be denied. As noted above, Aldrich had already begun to form a more positive view of the work upon hearing it for the second time (just a month after the premiere). But it was Olin Downes's review of a Damrosch-led performance on 25 January 1925 (App. I, no. 10) that altered perceptions: ‘No symphony could better illustrate the basic distinction between exterior “program” music and music inspired by an emotional poetic conception than this one’; and then, after describing the ‘pictures’ in the programme: ‘But these things pass by on the surface […].’Footnote ⁴² And three months later, in the course of reviewing another Damrosch performance of the symphony (App. I., no. 11): ‘a composer with genius came along […] he felt deep in his heart the eternal tides of life […] and he wrote a noble symphony’.Footnote ⁴³ Here, then, was a critic who ‘got it’, one who could hear beneath Madelon Coates's programmatic ditherings and fathom what Vaughan Williams was trying to express. And here, in fact, was the critic who would be Vaughan Williams's greatest champion in the New York press for the next 30 years. Finally, there was another critic in the audience that evening who ‘got it’: Lawrence Gilman of the then one-year-old NYHTrib, who was even more to the point: ‘If there is a finer symphony than this in the post-Brahmsian list, we cannot think what it is.’Footnote ⁴⁴

2(b). Olin Downes

Reference to Olin Downes requires a digression, since he was (as noted) the major advocate of Vaughan Williams's music in New York for three decades.Footnote ⁴⁵ Born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1886, Downes studied at the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York (of which Dvorˇák had been the head from 1892 to 1895) and then privately with a number of teachers in Boston. Drawn to music criticism, he wrote for the Boston Post from 1906 to 1924, in which year he succeeded Richard Aldrich as chief music critic for the NYTimes, a position that he retained until his death on 22 August 1955. And among composers who were roughly contemporary with Vaughan Williams, Downes held only one, Jean Sibelius (1865–1957), in greater esteem.Footnote ⁴⁶ Perhaps Downes best sums up his feelings about Vaughan Williams's music in a letter to the composer dated 23 August 1943: ‘What I really want you to know is how deeply I and so many others in America value your art and how much it has meant to us and how exceptional, to my mind, is the truly creative place that you have in the literature of contemporaneous music.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Finally, the many years of friendship through correspondence were no doubt topped off – at least for Downes – when critic, composer and their wives dined together in New York in early December 1954, at the end of Vaughan Williams's third and final visit to the United States (see §4f).

2(c). London and Pastoral: some notable performances

The 12 seasons that constitute our §2 saw three more notable performances of London: (1) on 18–19 and 21 October 1928 (App. I, no. 14), Damrosch included the first and second movements on a Philharmonic programme titled ‘Five Cities Program: Music Inspired by Great Cities’, in which, in addition to London, there was Respighi's Fontane di Roma, Johann Strauss Jr's Geschichte aus dem Wienerwald, John Alden Carpenter's New York-inspired Skyscrapers and an aria from Charpentier's Louise to represent Paris; (2) the third movement only appeared as part of a Young People's Concert on 19 January 1931 (App. I, no. 17), the first time that Vaughan Williams was represented in this series, which the New Jersey-born conductor Ernest Schelling (1876–1939) had inaugurated in 1924; and (3) a programme conducted by the German-born Hans Lange (1883–1960), one of Toscanini's assistants, on 27 February and 1 March 1935 (App. I, no. 22) that, as Gilman noted, marked the first complete performance of the symphony by the post-merger New York Philharmonic. It led Gilman to describe Vaughan Williams as ‘an intellectual patrician’.Footnote ⁴⁸

After the negative reviews that attended the New York premiere of A Pastoral Symphony in November 1922, the symphony disappeared from the Philharmonic's repertory for more than decade, not to be heard again until Hans Lange revived it on 21–23 and 31 December 1933 (App. I, no. 20). Downes loved it: ‘[…] this is the sheerest and purest music. Perhaps only Sibelius, among contemporaries of Vaughan Williams, has felt nature so deeply and purely and reflected its mystery with such originality […]’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Writing to Vaughan Williams some 20 years later about a performance of A London Symphony that he had recently heard, Downes had the following to say about Pastoral:

Downes's unhappiness about the infrequent performances of Pastoral notwithstanding, he could not tell the Philharmonic what to play (though he seems to have tried to do just that in connection with the Fifth Symphony – see below, §3b), and A Pastoral Symphony has figured on only two subsequent Philharmonic programmes: 16–17 February 1939 (App. I, no. 31) and 25–26 February 1943 (App. I, no. 40), both conducted by Vaughan Williams's close friend, John Barbirolli (1899–1970), during and just after his tenure as music director of the orchestra (1936–42).Footnote ⁵¹

2(d). Vaughan Williams's second visit to New York

Vaughan Williams spent a good part of the autumn 1932 academic semester in the United States, mainly in order to deliver the Mary Flaxner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College (just outside Philadelphia), out of which grew his 1934 publication, National Music.

Writing from Bryn Mawr (the eponymous town in which the college is located) around 21 October 1932, he told Holst that he will soon hear the New York Philharmonic (though none of his own music was on tap at the time)Footnote ⁵² ; a letter to Imogen Holst (Gustav's daughter) mentions that he will be in New York for two nights on 12–13 November, and that ‘the chief thing I noticed as I passed through [earlier] was that the Woolworth B^dg is now quite insignificant’.Footnote ⁵³ Rather more informative is a letter to the folk-song collector Maud Karpeles (1885–1976) written from the Biltmore Hotel, likely on the thirteenth:

The ‘evidence’ seems unequivocal: Vaughan Williams enjoyed New York City, though it would be more than 20 years before he returned (in 1954).

There is a New York-related footnote to Vaughan Williams's 1932 visit and his lectures at Bryn Mawr in the form of a review of National Music by W.J. Henderson: ‘This book of Vaughan Williams is one to provoke thought. It is the utterance of a musician of great talent […] Every page is filled with the feeling which is found in the author's scores. He writes out of a fullness of deep conviction and with a confession of love in almost every sentence.’Footnote ⁵⁵

Taken together, the 15 seasons from 1920/1 through 1934/5 (our §1–§2) saw Vaughan Williams represented on 23 New York Philharmonic/New York Symphony programmes, 12 of which featured one or another of the early symphonies: London = nine, Pastoral = two and Sea = one. The other 11 programmes break down as follows: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis = eight, while Job; a Masque for Dancing, the Overture to The Wasps and the Fantasia on Christmas Carols = one each. And though Tallis, which made its New York (and United States) debut on 9 March 1922 (App. I, no. 3), was also greeted with scepticism, it quickly (by the end of the decade) came to be recognized as a masterpiece. Reviewing a Philharmonic performance of 26 December 1929 under Willem Mengelberg, Downes called the piece ‘noble, most beautiful, most mysterious music’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In fact, Tallis and London would be Vaughan Williams's two most often-performed works in the Philharmonic repertory, with 28 and 19 programmes respectively (the Fourth Symphony is third with 17 programmes, after which the numbers plummet dramatically, with only two other pieces – the Overture to The Wasps and the Fantasy on ‘Greensleeves’ – appearing as many as four times).

Finally, we might put the 23 programmes in context by comparing Vaughan Williams's representation during this period with that of six roughly contemporary composers: Nielsen, Ravel, Respighi, Schoenberg, Sibelius and Stravinsky (Table 1). Once again, the numbers reflect programmes by both the New York Philharmonic and the pre-merger New York Symphony.

Two final notes: (1) that there was no lurking anti-British bias is evident from the 22 appearances of music by Elgar, and (2) since a reality check helps keep things in perspective: Beethoven's Coriolan Overture itself appeared on 21 programmes.

How might we spin these numbers? I would argue that Vaughan Williams holds his own nicely, especially since he did not make his New York debut until the very end of 1920, by which time the New York Philharmonic and/or the New York Symphony had already programmed Ravel's Ma Mere l'oye a half dozen times (either in its entirety or individual movements), Sibelius's Swan of Tuonela about a dozen times and Elgar's Enigma Variations 11 times, beginning with a performance on 23 March 1906 and ending (rather symbolically for our present purposes) on the very same programme on which Vaughan Williams's London was premiered. In all, Vaughan Williams had some catching up to do, and he acquitted himself nicely in the chase.

3(a). Symphony No. 4 in F minor

The Fourth Symphony made its New York debut on 6 February 1936, Hans Lange conducting the Philharmonic (App. I, no. 27).Footnote ⁵⁷ As had their English counterparts following the world premiere some ten months earlierFootnote ⁵⁸ , the New York critics recognized that Vaughan Williams had turned a new stylistic page, at least with respect to his symphonies (I emphasize ‘with respect to the symphonies’ on the grounds that New York audiences and critics would already have heard stylistic ‘forecasts’ of the Fourth Symphony in such works as Job, which the Philharmonic performed in August 1931 [App. I, no. 18], and the Piano Concerto in C, which made its New York and United States debut with Harriet Cohen and the New York Orchestra [under Nikolai Sokoloff] at Carnegie Hall on 16 January 1931).Footnote ⁵⁹ Irving Kolodin was succinct: ‘The principal impression […] is the degree to which it deviates from […] his two better known symphonies. […] There is no programmatic basis […] the talent of Vaughan Williams has taken a new direction […].’Footnote ⁶⁰ The Musical America critic, identified only as ‘C’, said the same: ‘[it] came as a startling surprise to those expecting another “Pastoral” or “London” symphony […] a new Vaughan Williams quite unpredictably emerges’. ‘C’ then felt compelled to vouch for Vaughan Williams's ‘sincerity and integrity of purpose’; in other words, he was not ‘undertaking to show his younger colleagues that he can meet them on their own ground and hold his own with them’.Footnote ⁶¹ Gilman, after noting the ‘consternation’ of the English critics who had been expecting another London or Pastoral wrote: ‘But the heartless Mr. Williams gave them none of these things […] This music is savagely challenging, dissonant, drastic. It disdains to woo the ear […] But it is music of power and intensity, forcible, dynamic, ruthless.’Footnote ⁶² Finally, there is Downes, who was expansive and whom I quote at some length:

Quite aside from two outright errors: (1) the symphony is not the third (did Downes not know A Sea Symphony, which had last been performed in New York in 1922, while he was still with the Boston Post, or did he, like Krehbiel, have doubts about its being a ‘symphony’, or is it merely a slip of the pen?); and (2) in 1934 Vaughan Williams would have been 62 years old, Downes tells us far more about himself than he does about the music (is there ‘criticism’ – whether of the journalistic or academic variety – in which this is not the case?): he could not escape his strongly held notions that composers are born to a national style (‘native birthright’) and that – anti-modernist that he was – excessive dissonance was both ‘artificial’ and ‘delusion[al]’. In the end, though, he was more perplexed than judgmental.

After the 1936 premiere, the Fourth Symphony disappeared from the Philharmonic's repertory until 6 January 1943, when Dimitri Mitropoulos revived it (App. I, no. 39). And a brief digression in the form of Table 2 shows the extent to which Mitropoulos (1896–1960) – the orchestra's music director from 1949/50 (sharing the post that first season with Stokowski) to 1957/58 (succeeded by Bernstein) – promoted the work and, as it were, made it his own.

Thus Mitropoulos conducted 11 (in succession) of the 17 Philharmonic programmes that included the symphony. No other conductor associated with the orchestra came even close to so identifying himself with a particular composition by Vaughan Williams. Moreover, Mitropoulos twice took the work to the annual Edinburgh Festival (August 1951 and September 1955) and conducted one of the two Philharmonic recordings of the work.Footnote ⁶⁴

By the time Mitropoulos revived the work in 1943, there was a new and influential music critic on the scene: Virgil Thomson (1896–1989), who joined the NYHTrib in October 1940, remained there until the end of the 1953/54 season, and preferred to hire assistants who were themselves composers (or at least active musicians).Footnote ⁶⁵ And in comparison to Downes's strictly-for-the-general-reader comments about the symphony's ‘merciless severity of line’ and ‘savage brilliancy'Footnote ⁶⁶ , Thomson's review is more probing, rather negative and even somewhat mean-spirited (I give it almost in its entirety):

This was not the last time that Thomson would rail against Vaughan Williams (see §3c-d).

3(b). Symphony No. 5 in D

Among the reviews that followed the 24 June 1943 premiere of the Fifth Symphony at a Promenade Concert at London's Royal Albert Hall (Vaughan Williams conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra), one is particularly relevant to our story: Ferruccio Bonavia's piece in the Daily Telegraph (reprinted in the NYTimes on 15 August 1943), one phrase of which no doubt caught Olin Downes's eye: ‘In this symphony Vaughan Williams reverts to his earlier style, the style that gave us the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis […].’Footnote ⁶⁸ Now, whether Downes had seen a copy of the review prior to its appearance in the NYTimes (and, if so, could he have been responsible for getting it reprinted there?) or only after its publication, he set off the following sequence of events:

1. (1) Downes wrote to Vaughan Williams on 23 August, telling him that he had seen Bonavia's review, and that Rodzińsky would present the American premiere if he could get the score and parts on time for the upcoming season (1943/44); in fact, Downes would urge Rodzińsky to place the work on the opening-night program (7 October); finally, he ends by expressing his pleasure that the Fifth Symphony looks back to the composer's earlier style;Footnote ⁶⁹

2. (2) A week later, Downes jumped the gun and, in describing the 1943/4 season, announced, quite prematurely, that Rodzińsky had ‘secured’ the work and would perform it;Footnote ⁷⁰

3. (3) On 25 September Vaughan Williams replied to Downes's letter of 23 August: it would not be possible to get score and parts to New York on time for a 7 October performance; further, he (Vaughan Williams) does not know if the work is a ‘“reversion to my earlier style”, but it is very simple’.Footnote ⁷¹

Thus despite Downes's efforts, the Philharmonic would not perform the Fifth during the 1943/4 season. Rather, New York audiences had to wait another year to hear the work, the performance of which was announced in the NYTimes on 26 November 1944Footnote ⁷² and took place a few days later, on 30 November, with Rodzińsky conducting (App. I, no. 43).

Having finally heard the work, Downes was in ‘seventh (or was it “fifth”?) heaven’:

Just what Thomson might have thought about the Fifth we do not know, since he assigned the review to one of his assistants, Paul Bowles. What Bowles thought is not pretty: ‘The work [is] reactionary in intent. It is anti-intellectual music, and as such is not of this century.’Footnote ⁷⁴ The arrogance is breathtaking.

3(c). London and Pastoral

Though it was the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies that garnered the most attention in terms of Vaughan Williams's representation during this period, both London and Pastoral held their own. London appeared on four programmes: (1) 2–3 January 1936 under Beecham, its first appearance at the Philharmonic in ten years (App. I, no. 24); (2) 19 December 1937, as part of an all-British programme at a Young People's Concert (App. I, no. 28); (3) 8–9 February 1940, Barbirolli conducting (App. I, no. 34); and (4) 9 July 1941, with Eugene Goossens at Lewisohn Stadium (App. I, no. 36).Footnote ⁷⁵

Reviewing the 1936 Beecham performance, Downes, as he often did, viewed Vaughan Williams through a narrow, nationalistic/‘racial’ lens: ‘[…] the “London” symphony has irresistible pages, racial not only in idiom but in a melancholy known to the English mind […]’.Footnote ⁷⁶ And writing about Beecham in a longer-than-usual essay that dealt with problems faced by conductors, he reinforced that view of the work: the symphony has ‘the most profound eloquence. Probably […] in part due to a racial and temperamental sympathy on the part of the conductor […].’Footnote ⁷⁷ Both reviews underscore a question that runs throughout the reception of Vaughan Williams in New York: nationalist or something more than that? We will return to the matter presently.

The Pastoral made two appearances during this stretch, both times, as noted above (§2c) under Barbirolli: 16–17 February 1939 (App. I, no. 31) and 25–26 February 1943 (App. I, no. 40). While both Noel Straus and Lawrence Gilman had nothing but praise for the work in 1939Footnote ⁷⁸ , the most interesting review is Virgil Thomson's of the 1943 performance. Thomson begins by calling it the ‘least heavy-footed’ of Vaughan Williams's works, melodically ‘impeccable’ and even ‘graceful’, but he could not let the compliments stand unqualified: the scoring is unimaginative, and the work as a whole ‘lacks definition’. As for Barbirolli (never one of his favourite conductors), Thomson admits that ‘with a new score or a British one, he gets everything right.’Footnote ⁷⁹

Reading through Downes and Bowles on the Fifth, Downes on London/Beecham and Thomson on Pastoral/Barbirolli, one is struck by the references to musical nationalism that jump off the page: ‘English folk melody’, ‘ancient England’, ‘racial’, ‘English mind’, ‘Thomas Hardy’, ‘folklore’, ‘English landscape’, ‘new score or a British one’ (not all the terms are included in the excerpts cited above). At question, of course, is the view of Vaughan Williams as a rather limited and nationalistic purveyor of things English, a view that developed during the 1920s and 1930s, just when, as Alain Frogley observes, Vaughan Williams was writing – at least in terms of his major compositions – in a thoroughly international style.Footnote ⁸⁰ Yet this is the view that prevailed – much to Vaughan Williams's detriment, especially after his death – among New York critics for decades to come. Table 3 provides a number of such post-1945 views

and shows that even those who perform Vaughan Williams are stereotyped and drawn into the web.

3(d). NYTimes v. NYHTrib

One of the most interesting aspects of Vaughan Williams' reception in New York is the disparity with which he and his music were treated in the NYTimes, on the one hand, and in the NYHTrib, on the other.Footnote ⁸¹

The rift began quietly enough when Downes and Jerome D. Bohm disagreed about the opera The Poisoned Kiss, which they saw at its American premiere – a student production at the Juilliard School – on 21 April 1937: Downes enjoyed the work; Bohm called it ‘styleless’ and ‘disappointing’.Footnote ⁸² It gained momentum and volume with Thomson's reviews of the Fourth Symphony and Pastoral in 1943, and boiled over with those of the Fifth Symphony by Downes and Bowles. Next came the contrary opinions with respect to the New York (and United States) debut of Sir John in Love, which the Columbia University Opera Workshop mounted on 20 January 1949; Taubman liked it, while Thomson found fault.Footnote ⁸³ Then, after a brief respite in connection with the Sixth Symphony in 1949 – Thomson and Downes both praised it (see §4a) – the two newspapers were back at it just a few years later, now in connection with the large-scale choral work Five Tudor Portraits, which Thomson deemed ‘the least subtle work’ that he had ever heard by Vaughan Williams, composed for a ‘provincial English singing society’ and a ‘none too sophisticated one’ to boot, whereas Harold Schonberg called Portraits ‘one of the major choral achievements of our time’.Footnote ⁸⁴

As it happens, the differences between the NYTimes and the NYHTrib followed Vaughan Williams to the grave and beyond, this notwithstanding the appearance of two new and influential critical voices at the papers. Upon Vaughan Williams's passing on Tuesday, 26 August 1958, Harold C. Schonberg (1915–2003), who had joined the NYTimes in 1950, rose to prominence after the death of Olin Downes in 1955 and assumed the post of the paper's chief music critic in 1960 (he was also the first music critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism when that award was extended to music critics in 1971), wrote a moving obituary notice in which he suggested that Vaughan Williams could claim a place alongside the likes of Bartók, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg and Ives as one of the major composers of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁸⁵

At the NYHTrib, Paul Henry Lang (1901–91) – on the faculty at Columbia University (1933–69) and editor of The Musical Quarterly (1945–73) – succeeded Virgil Thomson on time for the 1954/5 season. And though Lang did not go in for Thomson's stinging disdain, he sometimes substituted a kind of ‘not-so-benign neglect’: in connection with Vaughan Williams's death he wrote no obituary at all.Footnote ⁸⁶ A few years later he added insult to injury. As one would expect, both Schonberg and Lang were part of the celebrity-studded audience at the inaugural concert of Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall on 23 September 1962. The musical fare consisted of Leonard Bernstein, the New York Philharmonic, three choirs and an all-star cast of soloists performing the ‘Gloria’ of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Aaron Copland's Connotations (commissioned for the occasion), Vaughan Williams's Serenade to Music and Part I, ‘Veni sancte spiritus’, of Mahler's Eighth Symphony (App. I, no. 76). To be sure, Schonberg had little to say about the Serenade – ‘quiet and lovely’ – but that was three words more than Lang said: he said nothing at all. It was as if the piece had not been performed.Footnote ⁸⁷

Obviously, one might argue that the disparity between the newspapers is simply a function of the personalities of the critics as opposed to being a reflection of the two newspapers’ deeper musical/cultural outlook. And yet this would be only partially true. Rather, at least some of the critics at the NYHTrib subscribed to a music department-wide sense of superiority to and outright contempt for their counterparts at the NYTimes. As Bowles put it: ‘The Times had not a single good critic […] One of them had been a weatherman.’Footnote ⁸⁸ Certainly, the NYTimes was less interested in contemporary music; as one of its own critics, Ross Parmenter, said in explaining why covering such music usually fell to him: ‘Nobody else liked modern music […] none of them wanted to bother with it […].’Footnote ⁸⁹

Clearly, there is a point at which critic and newspaper become one, especially if the relationship is a long one. And if Thomson and the composer-critics whom he hired gave the NYHTrib a rather Francophile, progressive character, Downes (who idolized Sibelius) and Schonberg (always wary of serialism) kept the NYTimes on a more conservative course, one tilted toward the Austro/German, Classical/Romantic tradition. Ironically, the two newspapers' positions on music thus reversed their political leanings, for it was the NYHTrib, conservative and pro-big business, that was more at home at Republican golf and country clubs.

4(a). Symphony No. 6 in E minor

If in the reception of Vaughan Williams's symphonies in New York there is one evening that stands out as his greatest success, it must surely be that of 27 January 1949, when Leopold Stokowski and the New York Philharmonic treated the Symphony No. 6 in E minor to its New York premiere (App. I, no. 51 – thus five-and-a-half months after the first American performance, on 7 August 1948, with Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra at a Tanglewood concert, and nine months after the world premiere at London's Royal Albert Hall on 21 April 1948, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Adrian Boult). Just as the English critics greeted the symphony with praise – Richard Capell described the final movement as being ‘like nothing else in music’Footnote ⁹⁰ – so too did Virgil Thomson and Olin Downes, who for once came down on the same side of the critical fence. For Thomson the piece had ‘power and depth […] a very personal and English beauty. […] A lovely piece and one I should like to have heard right over again.’Footnote ⁹¹ Downes thought it more than just ‘lovely’: ‘one of the most […] profoundly felt orchestra scores […] in decades. […] A noble and mystical symphony’.Footnote ⁹² And if Downes thought it ‘dangerous if not superfluous’ to offer an ‘interpretation’ of the symphony, Miles Kastendieck of the Christian Science Monitor did not. Following the lead of the English critics, who associated the symphony with war (atomic), peace and desolation, he wrote: ‘a miracle symphony […]. He has heard the thunder of war, lived through the depths of despair, and perceived the notion of peace.’Footnote ⁹³

Even Stokowski, who was also the first to record the symphony, chimed in:

Two other major orchestras soon brought further performances of the Sixth to the city. On 16 October 1949, Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra reprised their Tanglewood performance (see earlier), which led Downes to exclaim that the symphony plumbs ‘the inmost recesses of the consciousness’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Then, two months later (12 December), came Ormandy and the Philadelphia. By now Downes had run out of his own superlatives, so he quoted the novelist-music critic Edward Sackville-West (5^th Baron Sackville): ‘like the final echo of a vanishing world’, while the NYHTrib’s Francis Perkins, after referring to Vaughan Williams as the ‘dean of English composers’, focused on the finale: ‘[a] prolonged and philosophically melodic meditation’.Footnote ⁹⁶

One final accolade remains (even if it is not specifically New York-centric). In May 1949, Musical America announced the results of its Sixth Annual National Radio Poll, a poll decided by several hundred of the nation's newspaper music critics and editors. And though a performance of Aida by Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra was judged the outstanding musical event of the past year, Vaughan Williams's Sixth was voted the ‘Outstanding New Work’.Footnote ⁹⁷

4(b). Symphony No. 8 in D minor

On 25 October 1955, the NYTimes carried a London announcement that Vaughan Williams had completed his Eighth Symphony and that the first performance would take place on 2 May 1956 at Manchester, with Barbirolli conducting the Hallé Orchestra.Footnote ⁹⁸ By the time the Philharmonic got around to the Eighth Symphony on 1 January 1959 (App. I, no. 74), it marked the work's third appearance in New York. Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra had presented the New York premiere on 9 October 1956, followed by Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 16 November 1957. Reviewing the Philadelphians' performance, Howard Taubman noted that the Eighth was ‘not one of [Vaughan Williams's] outstanding works’; it lacked the ‘richness of thought or invention’ of the earlier symphonies; and though the final movement makes ‘a generous noise’, it says ‘nothing at all’. In the end, however: ‘a man in his eighties is entitled to some fun with a big band, and Mr. Vaughan Williams may be indulged in this example of outright triviality’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Lang, still a few years away from slighting Vaughan Williams by neither writing an obituary nor mentioning the presence of the Serenade to Music at Lincoln Center's opening night (see §3d), was more favourably inclined: ‘It is vigorous, well made, and displays the accumulated wisdom and skill of a great musician. [… .] Though somewhat debatable, this is an interesting score which deserves to be known.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The sheen had not worn off 13 months later in the wake of Munch's performance. Perkins sensed a ‘remarkable vitality’, while the NYTimes’s ‘E.D.’ thought it ‘jovial’, though he did point out that it was not as ‘ambitious emotionally as some of [the] earlier symphonies’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Schonberg, too, weighed in. Reviewing Barbirolli's recording of the symphony, he noted that ‘Vaughan Williams could well be today's major symphonist. […] he has a complete grasp of his material and can handle it as suits his fancy.’Footnote ¹⁰²

Finally, as he had with the Sixth Symphony a few years earlier, Vaughan Williams garnered a prestigious award with the Eighth, this time an award that was as New York-centric as could be. In the Spring of 1957, the Music Critics' Circle of New York announced its choice for best new symphonic work performed in New York during the previous year. The winner: Vaughan Williams's Eighth Symphony.Footnote ¹⁰³

4(c). Symphony No. 9 in E minor

On 25 September 1958, just one month after Vaughan Williams passed away, Stokowski figured in another Vaughan Williams premiere, now leading the Contemporary Music Society Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in the United States debut of the Ninth Symphony.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It was also a special evening for Stokowski, who was celebrating his fiftieth anniversary as a conductor, and who, during a break in the concert, received congratulatory messages from both President Eisenhower and Robert F. Wagner, Jr., who was then nearing the end of his first term (of three) as Mayor of New York City and was there in person.

Lang was unmoved: although the symphony is of a ‘very high caliber […it] never soars, though it never takes a crooked path either’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Schonberg, on the other hand, leant the other way on two occasions: first in a review of the premiere: ‘the Ninth Symphony is a masterpiece’, and then in writing about Adrian Boult's recording (recorded just hours after Vaughan Williams passed away): ‘It speaks directly from the heart […] it will come to hold a very personal place in the hierarchy of the Vaughan Williams symphonies.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ And once again, as he had been for the Eighth Symphony, Vaughan Williams was honoured (posthumously) for the Ninth, as the Music Critics' Circle of New York voted to bestow ‘a special citation in the orchestral category’ upon it.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

There is some irony in the awards and honours accorded the Sixth, Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, for despite the accolades, the New York Philharmonic has programmed the Sixth on only two subsequent occasions: January 1978 and September 1987 (App. I, nos 86 and 90, respectively); it has not repeated the Eighth, and it has never performed the Ninth (or, for that matter, the Sinfonia antartica, No. 7, about which see §5c.ii).

As a brief codetta to this section, we might note that three of the earlier symphonies kept up appearances at the Philharmonic: the Fifth (once = App. I, no. 47), London (twice = App. I, nos. 48, 65) and, thanks to Mitropoulos, the Fourth (ten times! = App. I, nos. 44, 54, 56, 61, 66–71). The critics, though, had nothing new to say.

4(d). Other tributes

New York bestowed a number of ‘lifetime achievement’ awards on Vaughan Williams during the last decade of his life.

• On 18 February 1949, the New York-based National Institute of Arts and LettersFootnote ¹⁰⁸ named Vaughan Williams an ‘honorary associate’, one of five ‘foreign artists distinguished in the arts’ to be so honoured that year. (The other four were Pablo Picasso, Dame Edith Sitwell, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Gian Francesco Malipiero, all of whom thus joined the likes of George Bernard Shaw, T.S. Eliot, Diego Rivera, Max Beerbohm and Heitor Villa-Lobos).Footnote ¹⁰⁹

• The Schola Cantorum of New York (with ‘members of’ the Philharmonic) observed Vaughan Williams's eightieth birthday on 19 March 1952 (some seven months in advance) by offering the New York premiere of Five Tudor Portraits (App. I, no. 59 – and see §3d). The announcement in the NYTimes included a photo of the composer.Footnote ¹¹⁰

• In Spring 1952, the International Contemporary Music Festival, which Roy Harris was organizing in Pittsburgh, conducted a poll in order to determine which contemporary composers would be represented there. A questionnaire was sent to 87 ‘distinguished composers, conductors, critics, theorists, and musicologists’, of whom 61 (some from New York) responded. The winner was Paul Hindemith, named on 41 ballots; Vaughan Williams came in fifteenth, with 24 nominations. Yet already the numbers said something about the future assessment of Vaughan Williams's standing among twentieth-century British composers: Benjamin Britten tied for seventh with 32 votes.Footnote ¹¹¹

• On 28 September 1952, Howard Taubman wrote an appreciative tribute in celebration of Vaughan Williams's eightieth birthday. The concluding sentence reads: ‘At his best he has sung with a universal voice.’Footnote ¹¹²

• The NYTimes celebrated the composer's birthday on 12 October 1952 by reprinting an article by Ernest Newman in its Sunday Magazine section; concerned mainly with Vaughan Williams's ‘Englishry’, it was accompanied by a photograph of the composer above a caption that – despite the indoor setting and the subject's full sweater-and-suit attire – read: ‘He looks more like a farmer struggling with compost than a composer.’Footnote ¹¹³

• In a ‘Special to the New York Times’ dated London, 8 February [1953], the newspaper announced the marriage of Dr Vaughan Williams to Mrs Ursula Wood, at St Pancras Church. It was the second marriage for both Vaughan Williams, whose first wife, Adeline, died in 1951, and Mrs Wood, whose first husband had been killed in World War II.Footnote ¹¹⁴

• Finally, on 13 October 1957, Mitropoulos and the Philharmonic celebrated Vaughan Williams's eighty-fifth birthday (the previous day) with a performance of the Fourth Symphony (App. I, no. 71).

Together with the honours accorded the Sixth, Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, these celebrations surely speak for the fondness and respect that New York felt for Vaughan Williams during the twilight of his career.

4(e). Vaughan Williams's third visit to New York

Though the press announced what would be Vaughan Williams's third visit to the United States in 1954 with some fanfareFootnote ¹¹⁵ , it concerns us a bit less than the first two visits, since he spent little time in New York City itself. The main reason for the trip was a residency at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York), around which there was a cross-country tour of the United States.

Yet two aspects of the visit merit a word. Having docked in New York on Sunday morning, 26 September, Ralph and Ursula (now Mrs Vaughan Williams) checked into their hotel, travelled to Brooklyn to see friends, and then, in the evening (together with two members of the Cornell music faculty, the English baritone Keith Falkner, a long-time friend of the composer, and Donald Grout), went up to the Empire State Building's 86^th-floor observation deck. Looking out over the city, Vaughan Williams said, according to Ursula: ‘I think this is the most beautiful city in the world.’ The next morning Falkner and Grout drove the visitors to Ithaca.Footnote ¹¹⁶

About the second event we can only speculate, and always with the knowledge that it was no doubt of greater import for Olin Downes than it was for Vaughan Williams. Having heard that Downes had passed away on 22 August 1955, Ursula Vaughan Williams sent a note to his widow, Irene. Dated 29 August 1955, it reads: ‘We were both so very sorry to hear the sad news, and this is just a line to say that we are thinking of you so much. We were so glad to have had the chance of meeting you both when we were in New York, and that will always be a happy memory for us.’Footnote ¹¹⁷ Ursula is surely referring to the 1954 tour, and the most likely time for such a meeting would have been during the week or so that the Vaughan Williamses spent in New York City before sailing for England on 4 December. For Downes, the meeting must have been one of the highlights of his career, the chance to meet at long last one of his musical Gods, the composer whom he called, in one of his last pieces about him: ‘a precipitating force in contemporary music’.Footnote ¹¹⁸

5(a). Two measures of decline

As noted (it bears repeating): after his death, Vaughan Williams's representation on New York Philharmonic programmes fell precipitously, with the symphonies being particularly hard hit. Table 4, which includes the New York Symphony programmes prior to the 1928 merger, tabulates his representation on a decade-by-decade basis.

The numbers speak for themselves. To some extent, though – and, some might say, a fairly generous one at that – a combination of visiting orchestras and other local ensembles have helped to fill the void (Table 5).

One cannot help but notice the pro-Vaughan Williams efforts of André Previn, ‘that indefatigable Anglophile’, as John Rockwell dubbed himFootnote ¹¹⁹ , and about whom Rockwell wrote again a year later: ‘Mr. Previn has made a specialty of lushly scored, late Romantic English music […].’Footnote ¹²⁰

In fact, if one considers the conductors who have been most active in keeping Vaughan Williams's symphonies and a few other orchestral works (mainly Tallis) alive before the New York public in recent decades, the list is heavy with those who are either from the United Kingdom or have had close ties with it (Table 6).

A second way to measure Vaughan Williams's decline at the Philharmonic is to compare the number of seasons within each decade in which Vaughan Williams was not represented at all (Table 7).

The difference between the decades before and after Vaughan Williams's death is striking.

5(b). Two ‘friends’ lost

Quite aside from the overall changes in musical tastes, fashions and ideologies that contributed to the general decline in Vaughan Williams's status after his death – he had come to be judged as little more than a hopelessly out-of-date fashioner of the English countryside (as, of course, was also his fate in England) – I would single out two specific ‘losses’ that hastened that decline in New York in particular; one has to do with the New York Philharmonic, the other with a changing of the guard among New York music critics. In both instances, Vaughan Williams lost a friend.

5(c). Two symphonic bright spots

Despite the almost unrelenting gloom (yes – I am rooting for Vaughan Williams), there have been some notable bright spots, both in terms of performances and, with the new millennium, even critical assessment. In fact, perhaps there has even been the beginning of a turn-around in connection with Vaughan Williams in New York, though to catch a glimpse of it we will eventually have to look beyond the symphonies. First, though, two symphonies (and other genres) warrant our attention.

5(d). Beyond the symphonies

At the risk of going beyond what our title advertises, I would like to look at a number of non-symphonic works and genres that helped fill at least some of the void left by the diminished role of the symphonies: the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, the Sonata in A minor for violin and piano, the large-scale choral work Dona nobis pacem, the revival of the operas and, finally, the New York premieres of a number of early works that Vaughan Williams withdrew and that have only recently been published and performed.

5(e). Critical reassessment?

We have seen that already in 1972 – with the memory of the awards and tributes that New York had bestowed upon Vaughan Williams in the late 1950s still relatively fresh in mind (but with the composer already unrepresented in five of the Philharmonic's previous six seasons) – Harold Schonberg felt the need to call for a reassessment of what he had begun to view as Vaughan Williams's fading reputation (see §5c.i, and note 127). What, then, would he have thought at the beginning of the new millennium, by which time his successors at the NYTimes had virtually ridiculed Vaughan Williams for the better part of two decades, while the New York Philharmonic had neglected him during 12 of the 20 seasons therein?

In fact, the reassessment for which Schonberg had called was beginning to take place, even if on a modest – very modest – scale and even if we must once again sometimes look beyond the symphonies. A series of four song recitals provides a good starting point. Reviewing the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe's performance on 16 January 2005 of Songs of Travel, the 1904 setting of poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Tommasini referred to the songs as ‘wistful and elegant’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Also drawing praise were two performances of On Wenlock Edge: Holland, who, as we have seen, was not a great Vaughan Williams fan, nevertheless thought that the composer's settings gave A.E. Housman's verse ‘a theatrical bigness’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ On 13 February 2007, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center offered the second concert in its two-part series titled ‘English Musical Renaissance’. Sharing the second half of the programme with Arnold Bax's Elegiac Trio, Wenlock drew the following response from Allan Kozinn: ‘currents of introspection and intensity’; it was the only work on the programme, he wrote, that he would want to hear again.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ But perhaps the most telling round of praise was the ‘understated’ (in fact, silent) one that followed Bryn Terfel's performance of Songs of Travel on 5 March 2002. Though the British-born Paul Griffiths could hardly find sufficient praise for Terfel's performance, there was not a word about the song cycle itself. Though I could well be wrong, I would like to think that Griffiths thought that there was no more reason to praise Songs than there is to validate a Beethoven or Brahms symphony that has been beautifully performed by a world-class orchestra.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

To conclude, we might look briefly at the work of three members of the latest generation of NYTimes critics: Steve Smith (as of 2004), Vivien Schweitzer (2007) and Zachary Woolfe (2010). Writing about the performance of the rarely heard Silence and Music (1953) by the New Amsterdam Singers on 7 June 2007, Schweitzer commended the piece for its ‘vivid word painting and rich, striking unpredictable harmonies’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Quite different in both nature and intent is Steve Smith's contribution to a commemorative ‘appreciation’ triggered by the fiftieth anniversary of Vaughan Williams's death. He begins by recalling two ‘memorable’ concerts in which Colin Davis conducted the Sixth Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra (September 2005, see Table 5) and the Fourth with the New York Philharmonic (April 2008, see App. 1, no. 105), both of which are ‘terse enigmatic works […] worlds apart from the wistful nostalgia that continues to define his reputation. […he is] more than a writer of pastorals. […] his mature compositional style [is] a distinctive musical language […]’. Smith goes on to single out for special praise four symphonies that appear on the soundtrack of Tony Parker's DVD documentary O Thou Transcendent: The Life of Ralph Vaughan Williams: the ‘bustling’ London, the ‘apocalyptic fury’ of the Sixth, the ‘desolate majesty’ of Antartica and the ‘melancholy aspect’ of the Ninth, before concluding with a comment that those who love Vaughan Williams's music will applaud: ‘[…] “The Pilgrim's Progress” had an ecstatic aspect to rival Wagner's “Parsifal” and Messiaen's “St. François d'Assises”’.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Finally, there is something of a ‘validation’ of A Pastoral Symphony – so beloved by Olin Downes and one of the works that contributed to Vaughan Williams's early reputation in New York – in Zachary Woolfe's review of Richard Hickox's 2002 Chandos recording; he sums up as follows: ‘[…] his Third – subtle, gentle, troubled, reflective, imperfect – is movingly modest, considering the violence that begot it. The work's calm, if calm it is, is hard won.’Footnote ¹⁶²

Does all of this constitute a reassessment? Readers will have to judge that for themselves. I would, however, like to think that the pendulum has begun to swing, and that for now it seems to be heading in the right direction. Perhaps New York critics are finally getting it right, thanks to a combination of growing distance, lack of axe grinding (from any direction) and placing one's ears before one's ideologies. Perhaps they are finally coming to recognize the ‘real’ Vaughan Williams: clearly, he was not the heroic antidote to the Second Viennese School that both Downes and Schonberg wished him to be, but neither was he part of a ‘lost cause’, as Henahan claimed. Rather we might say that New York once again respects and still retains a place for the music of Vaughan Williams. And perhaps, then, after almost a century (I count from the premiere of London in December 1920), Vaughan Williams's reputation in New York has found its proper place.