Conclusion
I
have considered three works in this paper. They are representative of the genre
of music which could (and often is, identified) as ‘pastoral’ music.
Ivor
Gurney’s A Gloucester Rhapsody is
sunshine all the way. In spite of considerable suffering during the Great War,
Gurney has written an optimistic work that furthers the ‘myth’ of an unspoilt
pre-industrial revolution English countryside with Yeoman stock. It is a work
that is purely descriptive of the landscape and the perceived, inherently good
people that lived there.
Gerald
Finzi’s Requiem da Camera uses many
of the clichés of musical pastoralism, however this is a deeply introverted
work that is more concerned with loss of life seen through the lens of
the arch-typical English countryside. Finzi was too young to have fought in the
First World War, but his Requiem is
one of most thoughtful meditations on loss, and futility. Yet beauty of landscape
and the pain of war cannot be disentangled in this work.
Ralph
Vaughan Williams, in his Pastoral
Symphony, has produced a masterpiece of reflection. He was present on the
battlefield and saw for himself the tragedy of war. Yet his music does not seek to exorcise the
evil of war nor to arouse pity or create a rose-coloured picture of foreign
fields forever England. He is neither a musical Rupert Brooke nor a Wilfred
Owen.
This
music presents the thoughts of a man longing for his homeland and at the same
time recognising that evil is an ever present feature of the Human Condition.
More than the other composers he evokes the balance of a pantheistic attachment
to the landscape with a deeply considered understanding of the inherently selfish,
fallen (and sometime evil) nature of humankind. It is a perfect definition of
that which is best and lasting in the genre. In this sense the Pastoral Symphony epitomises a genre
which can be redefined as Cows, Gates and the Sob of Memory.
John France July 2014
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