But I found myself thoroughly engrossed in it this morning as part of the great VW symphonic play-through. In truth this is not dissonant music in the sort of Schoenberg/Berg, and all those johnnies, tradition. No Germanic neuroticism here. Just the usual English gumption mixed with lashings of angry energy dropping off into sometimes a kind of disappointed plangency.
I get the feeling that VW was holding himself in on this one - that energy being somehow contained, which in itself adds a kind of tension. It's a very edgy piece. There's no sense of a programme here, unlike the first three symphonies. So the music develops simply as music, according to its own logic, without the sudden almost wilful accumulation of melodic ideas in the earlier pieces.
The scherzo is more than a bit Job-ish, with hints of Satan dancing around and about, but nothing else sounds obviously like something you've heard elsewhere.
Michael Kennedy in some notes on the symphony refers to VW's towering rages, as reflected in the music. I found that an interesting phrase. What makes anger towering as opposed to petty if not infantile? Can anger be big? generous? sort of impersonal? liberating? For too many of us anger is something small and skulking and sullen and scowling.
Whatever happened to wrath?
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I tend to think that the way we describe anger has a lot to do with the physical environment.
A mountainous calm has a lot to do with heights that don't move much and don't generate landslides and avalanches. A towering rage, surely, must have a lot to do with the traditional appearance of a formation of cumulonimbus 'anvils', tall dark clouds presaging a terrible few days of lashing winds and rain.
I've seen every kind of cloud in England, sometimes with more than one kind of rain.
Then again, it might have to do with the kind of invective used. A blistering rage is one that uses satire and sarcasm, with which the bards of old raised carbuncles upon the faces of the subjects of their poetry. A towering rage would be one that builds mountains out of molehills, then.
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