A Sea Symphony is a work of just over an hour's length for soprano, baritone, chorus and large orchestra written by Ralph Vaughan Williams between 1903 and 1909. The first and longest of his nine symphonies, it was first performed at the Leeds Festival in 1910 with the composer conducting. It is one of the first symphonies in which a chorus is used throughout as an integral part of the texture and it helped set the stage for a new era of symphonic and choral music in Britain during the first half of the 20th century.
When Vaughan Williams was a young man the sea was a popular subject for composers. The biographer Michael Kennedy cites as examples Elgar's Sea Pictures (1899), Debussy's La mer (1905), Stanford's Songs of the Sea (1904), and Frank Bridge's The Sea (1911). Another inspiration for some British composers in the first half of the 20th century was the poetry of Walt Whitman, set by, among others, Stanford and Charles Wood and later Delius, Holst, and Hamilton Harty. Vaughan Williams was introduced to Whitman's work by Bertrand Russell while they were undergraduates at Cambridge. Although some of Vaughan Williams's early literary enthusiasms cooled in his later years he remained a lifelong admirer of Whitman. The musicologist Elliott Schwartz has commented that Vaughan Williams was particularly attracted to Whitman by tendencies that are paralleled in his music: "the concern for the development of a national art independent of foreign influences and the recurring theme of mysticism and exploration". The music critic of The Times wrote, "poet and composer are marvellously akin".
In 1903 Vaughan Williams began to sketch a Whitman choral work tentatively called "Songs of the Sea". The musicologist Alain Frogley comments that the finished work reflects several influences in Vaughan Williams's early development: "a disparate range of styles and influences, the latter including Brahms ( in particular), Parry, Stanford, Elgar, Wagner, Tchaikovsky and (to a lesser extent) Debussy and Ravel, along with folk-song and hints of Tudor music". The work evolved into A Sea Symphony, but before that was completed Vaughan Williams composed Toward the Unknown Region, setting an 1868 poem from Whitman's Whispers of Heavenly Death. This setting, for chorus and orchestra, was well received at its premiere during the 1907 Leeds Festival.
During the six-year gestation of the symphony it took various forms. For a while Vaughan Williams labelled it "The Ocean Symphony". The scherzo and slow movement were sketched first, followed by parts of the first movement and finale. In 1906 the composer wrote a movement for baritone and women's chorus called "The Steersman", but discarded it. The final four-movement version used lines from three of Whitman's poems in his collection Leaves of Grass: "Sea Drift", "Song of the Exposition" and "Passage to India".
The composer conducted the first performance, which was given at the Leeds Festival in 1910, with the festival's orchestra and chorus and the soloists Cicely Gleeson-White and Campbell McInnes. It was a considerable success. The Times commented, "It will not be surprising if the Festival of 1910 is remembered in the future as 'the Festival of the Sea Symphony' just as that of 1904 is remembered as 'the Everyman Festival' or that of 1886 as 'the Golden Legend year'.âÂÂ
At just over an hour A Sea Symphony is the longest of Vaughan Williams's nine symphonies. Although it represents a departure from the traditional Germanic symphonic tradition of the time, it follows a fairly standard symphonic outline: fast introductory movement, slow movement, scherzo, and finale. Frogley writes that the work's status as a true symphony has been disputed, "and it is certainly a hybrid work in terms of genre, combining elements of symphony, oratorio and cantata". He adds that the work is more fully choral than, for example, Mahler's symphonies with voices: "the choir or soloists are heard virtually throughout; this necessarily dilutes its ability to pursue some more traditionally symphonic processes". The analyst David Cox writes that the work is symphonic: "The shape of the first movement ⦠is governed by the words, but is recognizably in sonata form, with first and second subjects, development and recapitulation. Similarly, the slow movement is in ternary form".
The four movements are:
The first movement lasts roughly twenty minutes; the inner movements approximately eleven and eight minutes, and the finale lasts roughly thirty minutes.
Vaughan Williams set sections from the following poems in A Sea Symphony:
* Movement 1: âÂÂSong of the Expositionâ and âÂÂSong for all Seas, all Ships"
* Movement 2: "On the Beach at Night Alone"
* Movement 3: "After the Sea-ship", (taken in its entirety):
* Movement 4: "Passage to India"
The symphony is scored for soprano, baritone, chorus and a large orchestra consisting of:
The chorus sings in all four movements. Both soloists are featured in the first and last movements; only the baritone sings in the second movement. The scherzo is for the chorus and orchestra alone.
Musically, A Sea Symphony contains two strong unifying motives. The first is the harmonic motive of two chords (usually one major and one minor) whose roots are a third apart. This is the first thing that occurs in the symphony; the brass fanfare is a B flat minor chord, followed by the choir singing the same chord, singing Behold, the sea. The full orchestra then comes in on the word sea, which has resolved into D major.
The second motive is a melodic figure juxtaposing duplets and triplets, set at the opening of the symphony (and throughout the first movement) to the words And, on its limitless heaving breast... In the common method of counting musical rhythms, the pattern could be spoken as 'one two-and three-two-three four', showing that the second beat is divided into quavers (for on its) and the third beat is divided into triplets (for limitless).
Hugh Ottaway's 1972 book Vaughan Williams Symphonies presents the following observation in its introduction:
In the Grove article on Vaughan Williams, Ottaway and Alain Frogley call the work:
The first recording of the symphony was made by Decca Records in December 1953 and January 1954 at the Kingsway Hall, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. It was produced by John Culshaw under the supervision of the composer and was released in March 1954 as LP LXT2907-08. Boult also conducted the first stereophonic recording of the work, made by HMV at the Kingsway Hall in September 1968 and released in December of that year.