Ode to the serene majesty of England: Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Wasps’

British classical music of the 20th century has been defined by the works of Benjamin Britten and Edward Elgar. But one other composer belongs in that pantheon: Ralph Vaughan Williams. “Elgar’s style was quite consistent, and Britten changed over the years, but there was not the radical breadth of emotional range that you find in Vaughan Williams,” said Sir Andrew Davis in a 2022 New York Times article. 

Former music director of Lyric Opera of Chicago, Davis also was president of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society. (In April, Sir Andrew died at age 80.) On the society’s website, he had written, “It has always been for me a source of pride and happiness to present music from our sceptered isle overseas, and no composer more so than Vaughan Williams.

“There is a unity of style, it’s just that he was able to stretch it in so many different directions,” Davis said. 

In the New York Times piece, critic David Allen makes this observation: “Vaughan Williams was a pragmatist, with an independent streak as strong as his patriotism. He was not beholden to English music as he found it — neither Elgar’s imperial grandeur nor the examples of his tutors, Parry and Stanford — but sought through folk songs and hymnals to refine a national style that he could preserve, and through which he could prosper. Oxymorons work better for him than simplistic categories; he was a conservative iconoclast, an unconventional traditionalist.”

One of Vaughan Williams most frequently programmed works is the Overture to The Wasps (the CSO will perform the piece in concerts Sept. 26-28, under  Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider).

Written in 422 B.C., The Wasps is a comedy by Aristophanes. A son tries to help his father escape from the procedings at the Athenian court by locking him up at home, but the father is rescued by a swarm of wasps. The play is mainly concerned with the quarrels and a final reconciliation between father and son.

Vaughan Williams’ work was commissioned by the Greek Play Committee of Cambridge, England, as part of the incidental music for a 1909 performance of Aristophanes’ play. The music was first heard at a performance of the play on Nov. 26, 1909.

The Wasps satirizes the Athenian courts of law. The overture opens with the buzzing sounds of the judiciary and continues with a bouncy tune introduced by the woodwinds and joined by the entire band. A march theme and a pastoral tune are added later. All three themes are restated and altered throughout the piece, which eventually ends with the march tune.

The music became very popular, and Vaughan Williams extracted movements to form an Aristophanic Suite, which was first performed on July 23, 1912, with the composer conducting the New Symphony Orchestra. Though the full suite itself is very rarely performed, the overture became quite popular in the concert hall and has been much recorded. 

After the overture begins with the raspy buzzing of swarming wasps, the music that follows has little to do with the insect or with ancient Greece., Timothy Judd, annotator of the Richmond, Va., Symphony, observes: “Instead, it revels in the serene majesty of England’s ‘green and pleasant land.’ ”

A version of this article previously appeared on Experience CSO.