The Old Master

The audiences that crowd into London's Albert Hall are a respectful lot. But the 5,000 music lovers there last week were more reverential than usual. They had come for England's biggest musical event of the year--the premiere of the Symphony No. 6 of 73-year-old Ralph Vaughan Williams.

They heard four uninterrupted movements that went on for an hour and a half. The first three were tuneful, brassy and sometimes stridently dissonant. The last movement some found uncomfortably soft; muted strings and wood winds seemed to keep restoring to life a passage that was repeatedly ready to die. When the theme finally expired and Sir Adrian Boult put down his baton, there was a moment of silence and then a rush of applause. Up in his box, white-haired Composer Vaughan Williams rose, then brushed past autograph hounds to take four bows on the stage below.

Grand Old Man. In the 30 years since Vaughan Williams, then a subaltern in the British army, took his first bow for his London Symphony, he has become the grand old man of British music. English critics bestow handsome praise on young arrivals like Benjamin Britten (TIME, Feb. 16), or on middle-aged masters like William Walton, but they save their final tributes for Vaughan Williams.

His friends find Vaughan Williams a tall, lumbering man who seems to be without sham, and is often blunt. When he was already in his late 303, he went to Paris to study under Maurice Ravel, three years his junior, and when put to exercises, snapped: "If you think I have uprooted myself from London and broken up my career to write minuets in the style of Mozart, you are mistaken."

Servant of the State. Now, although he is quite deaf, Vaughan Williams still gets to work at his composing nearly every day by 8 a.m. His admirers consider his music characteristically English, without being able to define exactly what they mean. Vaughan Williams has already had his say on the subject, in his book National Music: "Why should not the musician be the servant of the state and build national monuments like the painter, the writer or the architect? . . . The composer must not shut himself up and think about art; he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community."

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