TONY PALMER'S FILM ABOUT THE LIFE OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS IS NOW COMPLETE
12th November 2007

Tony Palmer's film, 'O thou transcendent' is now complete. Undoubtedly controversial it will also be very important in raising awareness of RVW. Two and a half hours long, it looks at Vaughan Williams’ life as a disturbed and frustrated one. Powerful with some harrowing imagery, the film firmly dispels the myth that VW was simply a cuddly folk song collector and recycler who was affectionately known as "Uncle Ralph". As well as exploring his musical legacy, Palmer also focuses on the human side of VW. His frustration at living in a cosy market town, looking after an invalid wife (which he did devotedly) and the fury as well as the kindness and humanity which were all features of his remarkable character and which in their turn affected his music. The music passages are superbly played and filmed. The film is available on DVD. An absolute must see.

See also: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article2780045.ece

Also: Simon Heffer's review in The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/12/05/bmwilliams105.xml

The first ever full-length film biography of the great man, produced by the multi-award winning director, TONY PALMER, is to be shown on Channel FIVE on New Year's day. The DVD will be available from December 5th.
With many of those who knew and worked with him, including the GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL CHOIR, conducted by ANDREW NETHSINGHA,
• archive performances by BOULT and BARBIROLLI,
• newly discovered interviews with VAUGHAN WILLIAMS himself,
• specially recorded extracts from The Symphonies, Job, The Lark Ascending and of course The Tallis Fantasia
• And with unexpected contributions from HARRISON BIRTWISTLE, JOHN ADAMS
MARK ANTHONY TURNAGE, MICHAEL TIPPETT & NEIL TENNANT of The Pet Shop Boys.
A glorious 3 hour celebration, but with a helluva sting in the tail.

Reprinted below with Tony Palmer’s permision, is the article as published in the OUP magazine.

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
for O.U.P. magazine

'O thou transcendent…..'

Vaughan Williams holds an extraordinary fascination for a surprising number of fellow musicians. Known for his openness with advice to younger colleagues, he was often besieged by requests along the lines of "I'm thinking of becoming a composer. Can you give me a few hints?" Thus the 80 year-old grand old man of British music received the 16 year-old whippersnapper, Harrison Birtwistle. The great American composer John Adams was taken by his parents as a 9 year-old to his first orchestral concert in Boston, U.S.A. The first piece on the menu was Vaughan Williams. Adams, previously (he believed) destined to be an engineer, told his parents he now wanted to be a composer - "like that!" Neil Tennant, famous as part of The Pet Shop Boys, had a similar Damascus moment as a schoolboy in Newcastle. Mark Anthony Turnage, knocked sideways by his encounter with "the darkness, even hopelessness", of Vaughan Williams’ vision of mankind….the list of such musicians included in this 3-hour film is considerable.

Next year will be the 50th anniversary of his death. Having made films about Britten and Walton, I knew I had to face up to the man whose shadow falls across the whole of 20th century English music, and also as to why he was not immediately thought of in the same breath as, say, Elgar. It seems to me now, as I put the finishing touches to my film, that his importance exceeds the other three. Two stories illustrate this.

In 1936, Vaughan Williams went to Norwich for the première of his Five Tudor Portraits. When he arrived at the rehearsal, the leader of the orchestra asked him to ‘deal with’ the composer of the other work on the programme who was being an hysterical pest, and in any case they hated the piece. VW asked who it was, and then apparently told the leader: "Sir, you are in the presence of greatness. If you do not perform his work, then you cannot perform mine". The other work was Our Hunting Fathers; the composer the 22 year-old Benjamin Britten. Michael Tippett tells the film, in an interview recorded some years ago, that although as a student he had despised everything VW stood for with "all that folk waffle", after VW died Tippett realised he had made the most appalling misjudgement because it was VW "rather than any of his contemporaries" who had "made us free".

"Folk waffle"? I agree with Tippett - a profound misjudgement. It doesn’t even begin to describe some the bleakest, most desperate and yearning English music written in the last 100 years. This is the musician who leapt back across the centuries to Tallis, Byrd, Dowland and Purcell long before it became fashionable to do so. This is the scholar who read Walt Whitman, long before anyone had ever heard of him on this side of the Atlantic. This is the visionary who single-handedly rescued the English Hymnal, who prodded the Churchill government during the Second World War to establish what became eventually the Arts Council and The Third Programme on the BBC.

But that’s not the main thrust of my film, which is about the man himself. First, his family – related, either directly or by marriage to Darwin, to Wedgewood, to Keynes, to Virginia Woolf, centre stage among the intellectual aristocracy at the beginning of the 20th century. Then married, and devotedly so, for over 50 years to a woman who was for much of that time a cripple – can you imagine what that did to his psyche, his sexuality? And he was a devastatingly good looking young man, not the crumpled, cuddly figure that has become (until now, I hope) his lasting image. A man who volunteered, aged 41, to serve in the infantry in the First World War, but eventually served in the Ambulance Corps (and don’t forget his very sheltered background – Charterhouse, Cambridge, and a man who never needed to earn his living), picking up bits of bodies blown to smithereens in the Battle of Vimy Ridge. And this had no effect on him and his music? Of course it did.

In the end, of course, it’s the music which speaks to us. Gergiev’s Mariinsky Orchestra provides much of it in specially recorded extracts – all the Symphonies, Job, Tallis, The Lark, The National Youth Orchestra, which also celebrates 60 years in 2008, underlining VW’s commitment to the young – he did, after all, helped to put the National Youth Orchestra on its feet; The English Chamber Orchestra, the BBC Chorus, Simon Keenleyside, Joan Rodgers, the amazing Catalan Viola da Gamba player Jordi Savall, the great folk singer Martin Carthy and his daughter Liza who will perform the folk songs that VW heard (and as he probably heard them) on his walking tours with Gustav Holst in 1903/4, and not least Gloucester Cathedral Choir with the hymns and The Mass. Dorking & The Leith Hill Music Festival, which VW conducted for over 50 years, is well represented. And all this quite apart from archive performances with Sir Colin Davis, Sir Adrian Boult and Barbirolli. Finally, there are the witnesses who knew and worked with him – Roy Douglas (now over 100), Michael Kennedy, David Willcocks, Lady Barbirolli, Lord Armstrong, Kiffer Finzi, Bill Llewellyn, Alun Hoddinott, Jill Balcon who remembers with tears her father’s commissioning of the music for the film Scott of the Antarctic, Jerrold Northrop Moore, Hervey Fisher recalling his great Aunt Adeline, VW’s first (and much overlooked first wife), Hugh Cobbe, the archivist of his letters……and of course Ursula Vaughan Williams herself in an extended interview she gave in 1990 recently discovered. Best of all, VW himself talking in hitherto forgotten interviews.

But my intention is not hagiography. It is simply this: to explode for ever I hope the image of a cuddly old Uncle, endlessly recycling English folk songs, and to awaken the audience to a central figure in our musical heritage who did more for us all than Greensleeves and Lark Ascending, even if it is No.1 in the Classic FM 'Hall of Fame'; who not only deserves his place among the greatest of British composers, but who deserves our respect and admiration as a man of phenomenal nobility and courage. Courage musically; we forget that in its time his music was considered progressive and ‘modern’ (he had after all studied with Ravel), and performed at the Salzburg Festival (the first English composer to be so honoured) and the Prague Contemporary Music Festival. His music was even banned by the Nazis. The 15 year-old Margot Fonteyn even danced in the stage première of Job. And courage as a man. Never forget the man from a privileged background picking up bits of dead bodies, a shattered head, an arm, a finger, an eye, while married for most of his adult life to a cripple in a wheelchair. In my view, anyone who tells you that his music is just notes on a page or 'visions of Corot' has missed the point – by a million miles.

At the end of my interview with Roy Douglas, he jabbed his finger at me and said: "young man. Tell me, what is his music about?" I waffled, inevitably – "oh, I said, belief in humanity, visionary, optimism……" "Oh yes?" said Roy. "End of the 6th Symphony? 4th Symphony? 9th Symphony? even the Norfolk Rhapsody? A very bleak vision. Just think of the times he lived through. Think again, young man” he said. I have, and this film is the result. It does not make comfortable viewing.

©Tony Palmer

The film will be shown over several weeks on Channel FIVE in November 2007.
The première will be at the Barbican Cinema in the same month. The DVD of the full 3 hour film will be available in time for Christmas.

Tony Palmer's web site http://www.tonypalmer.org/