Symphony No. 4 in F Minor

When Adrian Boult conducted the premiere of Vaughan Williams’ Fourth Symphony in London’s Queen’s Hall in 1935, its first listeners were startled by the music’s sheer ferocity and level of dissonance. This was a different Vaughan Williams from the one who, after the human slaughter of World War I, had responded with the serene, Requiem-like A Pastoral Symphony. The composer insisted, however, that the Fourth Symphony was to be heard as pure music (it was his first not to have a descriptive title). And he denied that the new work’s turbulent style related to the widespread fear at the time of another world war to come. The first of the four movements begins with a strident dissonant chord played by the full orchestra; Vaughan Williams said that this was “cribbed from the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth [Symphony]”, which begins in a similar but not identical way. The eruptive power of this opening sets the tone of the music that follows, before the movement ends quietly, in a kind of shell-shocked calm. After the slower second movement (“Andante moderato”), with its expressive and masterfully developed main theme, the “Scherzo” brings back the earlier mood of wild disturbance, and hurtles without a break into the finale; this ends with a reprise of the work’s grindingly dissonant opening. Several years after his Fourth Symphony’s premiere, Vaughan Williams remarked: “I don’t know whether I like it. But it’s what I meant.”