Symphony No. 7

Sinfonia antartica is the seventh in the sequence of Vaughan Williams’ symphonies, although he did not formally designate it “No. 7”. The music began life when Vaughan Williams composed the score for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic, about the polar expedition led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Intending to be the first explorers to reach the South Pole, Scott’s five-strong team arrived there in January 1912, but they found that a rival expedition led by Norway’s Roald Amundsen had achieved this a few weeks earlier; on the return journey, all five men died. Vaughan Williams came to realise that the story’s theme, of heroic humankind pitted against implacable nature, could be the basis of a large-scale symphonic work derived from the film score. The result was the five-movement Sinfonia antartica, completed in 1952 and first performed a year later. The opening “Prelude” presents the struggle of humanity against the frozen Antarctic wilderness (represented by a wordless solo soprano and female chorus). “Scherzo” depicts whales and penguins; then the bleak chord sequences of “Landscape” build to a remarkable central climax, where a huge ice wall is depicted by the power of a full organ. In “Intermezzo” Scott writes to his wife; and in “Epilogue”, the team’s fate is portrayed by the gradual extinction of musical sound, obliterated by the howling of the percussion section’s wind machine.