CHSA 5003

Inevitably the symphony's boisterous mood and its grinding opening discord led commentators to interpret it as a reflection of the increasingly dangerous international situation, especially in Germany. But writing to a friend in 1937, Vaughan Williams emphatically denied this. 'I wrote it', he said, 'not as a definite picture of anything external – e.g. the state of Europe – but simply because it occurred to me like that.'

Vaughan Williams's Mass in G minor looks back to the sixteenth century while employing a twentieth-century vocabulary. The composer uses deliberate archaisms such as consecutive fifths and false relations and the music is wholly characteristic of its composer in its visionary intensity.

There is nothing jingoistic about the Six Choral Songs – to be Sung in Time of War. Rather, they strike a deeper note, with a fervent climax to the fifth and a questioning glance in the sixth towards the peace that in 1940 (the date of the work's first performance) seemed so far off.