Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G Minor
Ralph Vaughan Williams, c. 1921
The longest, most magisterial work on Chorale’s March 23 concert program is Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G Minor.
Andrew Carwood conductor of the choir of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, writes, “Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G Minor... was the first substantial, unaccompanied setting [of the mass] to be written with a distinctly English voice since the time of William Byrd in the sixteenth century.” The power and scope of the work continue to be remarkable, more than 100 years after its premiere.
Vaughan Williams was the most important English composer during the years between Purcell and Britten. His distinctive style expresses his love of native English resources—both popular folk music and the highly developed church music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and a personal, visionary spirituality, outside of, but still related to the traditions of the English church.
The Mass was composed in 1920- 21, shortly after the end of World War I. Vaughan Williams was already an established composer, with an extensive body of work behind him, before enlisting in the war effort. He served as a wagon orderly with the Royal Medical Corps in France and on the Salonika front, later returning to France as an artillery officer. Many of his friends and contemporaries perished in the war, and from his vantage point in the medical corps he surely saw much that sobered and deepened his thinking. His second wife, Ursula Vaughan Williams, wrote that “he was an atheist during his later years at Charterhouse and at Cambridge, though he later drifted into a cheerful agnosticism: he was never a professing Christian,” and his wartime experiences did not alter this. Nonetheless, the series of works written 1919-34 suggest, in their subject matter and depth of feeling, a reaching out towards a spiritual view of reality, as well as a deep sense of the tragedy and futility of the war.
Vaughan Williams utilizes an early Baroque polychoral texture, in which the three choirs— two equal SATB choruses, and an SATB solo quartet—call and respond antiphonally, as well as accompany one another. At the same time, he favors pre-diatonic harmonies and quasi-gregorian melodic figures, which imbue the mass with a timeless, elegiac quality. The listener is always aware of Vaughan Williams’ love of the English pastoral tradition—his melodic lines, sometimes stepwise and undulating, sometimes surprisingly jagged, seem to spring directly from the indigenous English folk music he collected and studied throughout his career. At the same time, one cannot escape the dark, tragic quality of the music—though always soothing, it is never joyous or innocent. The landscape, the history, the people it evokes, are indelibly watered with the blood of the millions of victims of World War I.
I first became aware of the Mass when I was a student at Luther College, in Decorah, Iowa, singing in the school’s choir. The Roger Wagner Chorale, one of America’s premier professional choirs at the time, had recently issued an LP of the work, and was scheduled to perform it at our college during their concert tour. Our conductor, Weston Noble, had also programmed it for us, and we were deeply into learning it when the Wagner Chorale performed it on our campus. I sang in the solo quartet (octet, in our case), and felt deeply, emotionally involved with the work. We took it on tour, ourselves, and the experience of singing it night after night profoundly affected me. Singing this work was the most significant experience of my musical life up to that point. Returning to it now, many years and musical experiences later, I am not disappointed. It was not an adolescent crush; I really love this work, and am glad to have this chance to experience it again.