Ralph Vaughan Williams's Symphony in E minor, published as Symphony No. 6, was composed in 1946-7, during and immediately after World War II. Dedicated to Michael Mullinar, it was first performed by Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in April 1948. Within a year it had received some 100 performances. Vaughan Williams, very nervous about this symphony, threatened several times to tear up the draft. At the same time, his programme note...
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Ralph Vaughan Williams's Symphony in E minor, published as Symphony No. 6, was composed in 1946-7, during and immediately after World War II. Dedicated to Michael Mullinar, it was first performed by Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in April 1948. Within a year it had received some 100 performances. Vaughan Williams, very nervous about this symphony, threatened several times to tear up the draft. At the same time, his programme note for the first performance took a defiantly flippant tone.
The composer never intended the symphony to be programmatic, but it was inevitable that his post-war audience should associate its disturbing and often violent character with the detonation of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He is widely quoted as having said, "It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music" in response to these questions. In connection with the last movement, the composer did eventually suggest that a quotation...
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