- Written between 1953-55 (when the composer was in his eighties!), Symphony No. 8 in d minor is perhaps the only one of Vaughan Williams’s symphonies that is explicitly abstract and NOT programmatic.
- A few interesting features of the symphony:
- Vaughan Williams described the first movement, “Fantasia,” as “seven variations in search of a theme,” with no prominent theme coming to the forefront, keeping the listener on their toes.
- The second movement, “Scherzo alla marcia,” is scored solely for winds, while the third movement, “Cavatina,” is exclusively played by strings and quotes a chorale from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.
- Vaughan Williams scored tuned gongs in the fourth movement, “Toccata colle campanelle,” after seeing a performance of Puccini’s Turandot.
- Vaughan Williams dedicated the symphony to John Barbirolli, who conducted the first performance in Manchester in 1956 and was a known champion of the composer’s work.1
- Due to its small scale in relation to its predecessors and its relatively short run time of fewer than 30 minutes, Symphony No. 8 has been dubbed the endearing nickname “The Little Eighth.”2
Sources
- Michael Kennedy, “Symphony No. 6 in E minor” in accompanying booklet, Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Complete Symphonies performed by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Richard Hickox, CHAN 5303, 2022, compact disc.
- Hugh Ottaway, “Vaughan Williams’s Eighth Symphony,” Music & Letters 38, no. 3 (1957): 213, http://www.jstor.org/stable/730270.
Cut IDs
24792 23968