This chapter provides an introduction to how Vaughan Williams’s music was received in interwar continental Europe, particularly within music magazines and scholarly periodicals. It is in two sections. The first considers the different contexts in which it was heard: choral performances of the Mass and folk-song arrangements, pieces played at International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) festivals, and performances of large-scale works in ‘seasonal’ orchestral concerts and recitals. For the most part, Vaughan Williams’s music was well received, even at ISCM festivals, where he might have been overshadowed by more radical figures; and the increased number of European performances that he received during the period reflected a growing interest among leading continental performers. The chapter then examines some of the writing on Vaughan Williams by continental critics, primarily those from France and Germany. These reveal two contrasting but not necessarily mutually exclusive narratives: one in which Vaughan Williams is presented as the leader of a new English school of composition that is underpinned by the language of English folk song, and another in which Vaughan Williams is considered in a pan-European context, where the influence of French impressionism is more keenly felt. A table of selected performances is also included.

VAUGHAN Williams's writings on music cover a period of over sixty years, from his 1897 article in The Musician, ‘The Romantic Movement and Its Results’, to the posthumously published ‘Introduction’ to Classic English Folk Songs in 1959. They include articles published in periodicals, encyclopaedia entries, programme notes, introductions to monographs and editions, and three collections of essays: National Music (based on lectures that Vaughan Williams had given at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, in 1932), Some Thoughts on Beethoven's Choral Symphony with Writings on Other Musical Subjects, and The Making of Music (based on lectures given at Cornell University in 1954). This substantial body of work reflects the wide range of the composer's musical interests: the art music of the past and present (including his own works), the folk song movement and the social function of music in Britain. As the leading British composer of his generation and a scholar in the field of hymnody and folk music, Vaughan Williams was both an artist and a public intellectual, and his opinions on music undoubtedly carried much weight.

Among the many influences on Vaughan Williams, four stand out in relation to his writings. First, his teachers, particularly Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford and Maurice Ravel, who, as Byron Adams has shown, refined Vaughan Williams's technique as a composer and did much to shape his views on compositional pedagogy. A second influence was the Folk-Song Society, of which Vaughan Williams was an active member from 1902. His many essays on folk song reflect not only his first-hand experience as a collector, but also his engagement with the views of other leading members of the society, especially Cecil Sharp. A third influence stems from the composer's student days at the Royal College of Music, where he was an active member of a debating society that met on Saturday afternoons. The society considered matters of both musical and wider cultural interest; among the papers Vaughan Williams contributed was ‘The Rise and Fall of the Romantic School’, which was probably the origin of ‘The Romantic Movement and Its Results’. The legacy of this was Vaughan Williams's willingness to discuss his music with close friends and contemporaries, above all Gustav Holst.

Bax, the Fourth Symphony, and the Sea

THE FOURTH SYMPHONY is the exception among Bax's symphonic output. Described by one of the composer's earliest advocates, Robert Hull, as ‘robust and genial’, ‘the most immediately attractive’ of Bax's symphonies, and ‘intentionally brighter than any of the others’, its extrovert ebullience and optimistic conclusion seem to uphold the Romantic symphonic paradigm of per aspera ad astra in a way that many other twentieth-century essays in the genre do not. The reasons for this optimism are multifold: a sense of release after the positive reception of the composer's Third Symphony, which brought to an end a symphonic triptych of violence, introspection, and resolution, and to which the Fourth stands in marked contrast; the conscious turning to northern Europe for inspiration, most notably in the Northern Ballad No. 1 (1927–31) and Winter Legends (1930); and the creative stimulation that arose from the deepening of Bax's relationship with Mary Gleaves. The Fourth was composed in short score between 13 July and 11 September 1930 in London, and completed between October 1930 and February 1931, mostly in Morar, Inverness-shire, where Bax had completed the Third Symphony in the winter of 1928–29, and to which he would return frequently in the 1930s. It was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Basil Cameron, at the Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, on 16 March 1932, and was first performed in Britain by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Malcolm Sargent at Queen's Hall on 5 December 1932. The reception of the work initially was positive. ‘Magnificent continuity is the splendour of this symphony’, wrote the reviewer in Musical Opinion following the British premiere; ‘it never sags; whilst its march-like rhythms sweep along with a rhythmic force and power that is remindful of Beethoven, Bruckner and Mahler’. Ferruccio Bonavia in The Musical Times praised the slow movement in particular, and claimed that Bax's gift for melody ‘lights up every movement, giving it grace, pace, and colour’. The reviewer in The Times acknowledged Bax's craftsmanship, and the consistency of the thematic treatment, but in some respects was disappointed: ‘this symphony nowhere cuts so deep as do some of the movements in the Third.