Product Description

2008 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Vaughan Williams and this timely DVD is the first ever full-length film biography of the great man, produced by the multi-award winning director, TONY PALMER. Features specially recorded extracts from all The Symphonies, Job, The Lark Ascending, and of course The Tallis Fantasia, archive performances by Sir ADRIAN BOULT, newly discovered interviews with VAUGHAN WILLIAMS himself and the last ever interview with URSULA VAUGHAN WILLIAMS.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11062 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-12-31
• Rating: Exempt
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Colour, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 148 minutes

Synopsis
The award-winning Tony Palmer directs this feature-length biography of influential English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Features specially recorded extracts from Vaughan Williams work, archive performances by Sir Adrian Boult, interviews and rare footage of the man himself.

Customer Reviews

A great composer revealed at last.
Tony Palmer's film is highly informative, beautifully filmed and quite shocking at times. It is likely to remain a definitive resource for those wishing to know more about this great composer's life and music for years to come.

Many will perhaps have a rather cuddly image of Vaughan Williams who wrote lovely tunes and was the epitome of "Englishness". This film will make you think otherwise.

Of course VW wrote such favourites as The Lark Ascending (Classic FM's listeners' favourite piece of classical music), Greensleeves, The Tallis Fantasia. However the core of his achievement is the unique cycle of 9 symphonies and Palmer rightly focuses on them as we are taken on a journey through the man's life and work. VW though a large and loveable man in old age, an image that seems to predominate in the public mind was in fact a very tall and handsome figure in his youth, a time when he wrote some of his most lyrical music. The film is at its most powerful when focussing on VW's dark side and the effect this had on his music. A long life shattered by first hand experience of both World Wars. The frustration, rage and eventual happiness he had in his relationship with two women, his despair for the future of mankind, his agnostic spirituality are revealed both in the musical excerpts and Palmer's wonderful use of imagery.

Visually we are given the full range, hauntingly beautiful scenes of nature, the ferocious power of the sea and the harrowing devastation of war and famine. The music is most cleverly grafted into the biography and excellently played in specially filmed takes. I particularly liked the director's lighting of the orchestra which shows the players and their instruments in great clarity. Other highlights are old footage of the composer and his voice (taken from old broadcasts)talking about his life and music. All sorts of people pop up in the film to inform us why he was special to them. There is much else that this short review hasn't space for.

This film is a must see for anyone interested in the composer, classical music or the history of the 20th century, it is an affectionate but blunt, often disturbing portrait of a very great man from a director who is a master in the art-film genre.



N.B. Amazon have the running time of the DVD as 129 minutes which is incorrect. My copy of the DVD runs 2 hours and 28 minutes, this is a long film and justly so.

A magnificent Englishman
Apart from Ken Russell's documentary of 1986, a film I found deeply disappointing, there have been no films about Ralph Vaughan William's life and music that I can recall. Yet he is one of England's great composers, arguably the greatest, given the range of his music, its Englishness and the humanity of the man. `O Thou Transcendent' fills a large gap.

The length of this film allows the director breathing space to cover both the composer's life and music in some detail. The symphonies are at the heart of his output and these are given understandable prominence but plenty of other music is covered. The National Youth Orchestra bears most of the burden and they do it with great skill and flair. There is some interesting footage of Vaughan Williams (RVW) taken when he was very old and a few recordings of his voice. There are contributions from people close to the composer, some archive material, some made for this film. The structure of the film seems a little random, flitting back and forth over the decades of his life. A strictly chronological approach is a bit obvious but if you don't do this, you need something else to hold the structure together. Viewers who are new to this material might get lost.

There are one or two main themes running through the film. One is the popular image of the amateurish composer writing mainly pleasant, pastoral pieces. The idea that he had poor technique was fed by his self-deprecating remarks. I always thought that these remarks were part of his humour but the film did reveal evidence that he was subject to more self-doubt than is generally realised. As for his music consisting wholly of bucolic rhapsodising, Tony Palmer shows how false that is, revealing his art as encompassing the whole emotional range - the ecstatic lyricism of the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending to the ferocious outbursts of Job and the 4th and 6th symphonies.

The most important thread explores the relationship between the music and his personal life and international events. The usual - and lazy - links concern the 4th symphony - it predicted the Second World War- and the 6th symphony's epilogue supposedly describing a post-nuclear wasteland. None of these `meanings' came from the composer and they rather irritated him. A more convincing `explanation' came from Michael Kennedy, a close friend of the composer and leading authority on his music. He thinks the music of the 4th symphony is more a self-portrait of RVW. He was a man prone to rages but otherwise was the kindest and most thoughtful of men.

RVW was married to Adeline. She developed a chronic arthritic condition which gradually worsened over the decades. The film suggests that this took an enormous toll on him mentally, not least in the sexual side of marriage. That this anguish and frustration found itself into the music is likely. The Elgarian, Jerrold Northrop Moore, made the astonishing assertion that Adeline was suffering from a psychosomatic condition which provided her with an unconscious excuse to avoid sexual activity. A severe arthritic condition - with no treatment at that time - would be quite enough without bringing in frigidity as an explanation. I wonder what the members of her family, who also contributed, are going to make of this. Michael Kennedy, however, did confirm that Vaughan Williams was having an affair with Ursula Wood, later to become his second wife, for some years before Adeline died (RVW was in his 60s by this time).

Much of the film showed images of marching soldiers, war and the effects of terrorism. One image was shown twice - a poor, charred dead child on a stretcher. Many will find this very distressing. I feel this aspect of the film was overdone to quite a degree. There was even an attempt by one contributor to rope in the Tallis Fantasia as representing death and hopelessness. To take such a view of this noble masterpiece, written in 1910 and before RVW had seen the carnage of the battlefield, is absurd. The piece takes its general atmosphere from Tallis' original hymn, written a few hundred years before.

My criticisms are nothing compared to the magisterial sweep of this film and I would recommend it to all lovers of Vaughan Williams and especially those who don't. At the end one is impressed by the sheer magnificence of the man, a man with personal qualities we all wish we had but do not. At the end of the film, Ursula Vaughan Williams, shortly before her death, voices a crie de coeur, revealing how much she still loved and missed him so long after he died in 1958. This, more than anything else, lingers in my mind.

A well spun tale
This is a very welcome film about a great composer who is woefully under-represented on DVD. It is certainly time that we should review RVW's career and our own perception of it, and Tony Palmer's beautifully made film offers and eyoyable and interesting starting point. The contributions of those who knew the man are valuable and well chosen, though I (for one) could have listened to Michael Kennedy throughout. His comments were often more succinct and perceptive than any point the film-maker was trying to get across.

And that brings me to my main gripe, that it seems to me that Tony Palmer has started with a thesis (RVW the despondent pessimist, rather than Uncle Ralph, 'cowpat' composer)and has 'spun' his film to achieve that conclusion. I suppose it is a sign of the times that the viewers cannot be left to make up their own minds from the facts, but the seeds of pessimism (nihilism, almost) are apparent in A Sea Symhony and the Tallis Fantasia! Or so we are assured. Never mind that not one of those who knew the composer seems to endorse this view with the barest conviction, it must be true because the narrator says so.

And facts are manipulated to give one preferential view. We are told that RVW was deeply affected by his experience in a field ambulance in WW1; we don't really know in what way or by how much since we are also told that he never spoke about it, but the film speculates that the need to pick up eyes, fingers and 'half a head' was responsible (we are told this twice). We are told that RVW enlisted as a private soldier when he could have 'bought' a commission (no he couldn't, by the way - that practice had been abolished in the previous century). But many other musicians enlisted as privates. George Butterworth and friends (mostly too from privileged backgrounds) did so, but accepted commissions soon after; Ivor Gurney remained a private throughout. And RVW accepted a commission in the Royal Artillery! We are not told this in the film, leaving the suspicion that being an artillery officer is not quite as noble as stretcher-bearer. Also, of course, RVW was Musical Director of the BEF First Army, and to top it all, he needn't have enlisted at all - he was almost 42 at the outbreak. We are not told any of this, either. He clearly wanted to 'do his bit', and we are later told that he did not agree with Michael Tippett's conscientious objector views about the next war, although he supported his right to have them.

The worst thing about this, however, is that it seems to underly the film's message. Time and again, RVW's works are related directly to war and famine. The Devil in Job cuts to the Third Reich, the Sixth Symphony calls up terrible images from Iraq. Even the Seventh Symphony is used to demonstrate lack of hope for the future (well, I suppose it does, but after all it grew out of a hopeless story). The gruesome scenes (particularly from wars that RVW did not know) spring up many times - as if RVW somehow saw all this future misery. It all smacks of being wise after the event.

And what did those who knew RVW him say? That the Fourth Symphony is a portrait of the composer raging against his 'imprisonment' in marriage to a crippled wife; that the Fifth is Ursula Wood, who brought him out of it; that the Devil's theme in Job came to him at a dinner party. I am sure that the Sixth must contain something of WW2 - how could it not, being written in 1946? - but not a vision of post-neuclear destruction written by chance several years before mutual destruction was a real possibility.

Interestingly, the Pastoral Symhony is the only one not mentioned, and the only one that almost certainly arose out of RVW's WW1 experience. If anything, it is a homage to George Butterworth (dedicatee of, and prime-mover in the creation of the London Symphony), a close friend who had died on the Somme. (The relationship between the two composers is not mentioned at all, even though we see a silent film of Butterworth with Cecil Sharp and the Karpeles sisters dancing.)

There are several factual errors, as you might expect in a three-hour documentary, and most amount to little, but it is amusing to see a fine portrait of Sir George Grove appear when the narrator talks about C. V. Stanford!

The music is well played, and given in big chunks, although the two orchestras are always shown with heavy backlighting, making it seem that they are playing in the dark (perhaps this is done to emphasise the pessimism). Tantalising, though, were excerps from historical performances, particularly a studio one of the Fifth Symphony conducted beautifully by Boult. Now that should be on DVD.

After three absorbing hours, RVW is actually summed up rather well - and completely against the trend of the narration - by Michael Kennedy (as a visionary) and Ursula Vaughan Williams (as a dear man whom she loved).

Do buy this DVD - it is good - but, oh!, how much better it could have been without the 21st century gloss..