Symphony No. 5 in D Major

Vaughan Williams conducted the first performance of his Symphony No. 5 in 1943 at a Promenade Concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The music’s serenity and beauty seemed at an opposite pole from the destruction of the Second World War then raging across Europe, and in that respect the symphony brought solace to many of its first listeners. But its character had a different source. For three decades Vaughan Williams had been working on an opera based on John Bunyan’s 17th-century allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come. He had begun to convince himself that he would not live to finish this; and not wanting the music to remain unheard, in 1938 he started work on what was to become Symphony No. 5, drawing on material from the opera. The “Preludio” first movement opens with a quiet figure for two horns in D major, sounded above a held note on the cellos and double basses in an implied C major, so that the music feels suspended in an indefinable, otherworldly combination tonality of its own. The speedy “Scherzo” second movement is followed by the loveliness of the “Romanza”, which is headed in the score by a quotation from Bunyan’s text: “He hath given me rest by his sorrow and life by his death.” Then the “Passacaglia” finale journeys through a sequence of more turbulent episodes toward the symphony’s radiant conclusion.