Фантазия на тему Томаса Таллиса Ральфа Вогана Уильямса

1910 composition by Ralph Vaughan Williams

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, also known as the Tallis Fantasia, is a one movement work for string orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The theme is by the 16th century English composer Thomas Tallis. The Fantasia was first performed at Gloucester Cathedral as part of the 1910 Three Choirs Festival, and has entered the orchestral repertoire, with frequent concert performances and recordings by conductors and orchestras of various countries.

Vaughan Williams did not achieve wide recognition early in his career as a composer, but by 1910, in his late thirties, he was gaining a reputation. In that year the Three Choirs Festival commissioned a work from him, to be premiered in Gloucester Cathedral; this represented a considerable boost to his standing. He composed what his biographer James Day calls "unquestionably the first work by Vaughan Williams that is recognizably and unmistakably his and no one else's". It is based on a tune by the 16th century English composer Thomas Tallis, which Vaughan Williams had come across while editing the English Hymnal, published in 1906. Vaughan Williams conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the first performance of the Fantasia, as the first part of a concert in Gloucester Cathedral on 6 September 1910, followed by Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, conducted by its composer.

Like several of Vaughan Williams's other works, the Fantasia draws on the music of the English Renaissance. Tallis's tune is in the Phrygian mode, characterised by intervals of a flat second, third, sixth and seventh;

Tallis's theme was one of nine tunes he wrote for the Psalter of 1567 of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. It was a setting of Parker's metrical version of Psalm 2, which in the King James Bible version begins, "Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? ", and is rendered by Parker as "Why fumeth in sight: The Gentils spite, In fury raging stout? Why taketh in hond: the people fond, Vayne things to bring about?". The tune is in Double Common Metre (D. C. M. or C. M. D.). According to his biographer Michael Kennedy, Vaughan Williams came to associate Tallis's theme with John Bunyan's Christian allegory, The Pilgrim's Progress, a subject with which the composer had a lifelong fascination; he used the tune in 1906 in incidental music he composed for a stage version of the book. For the Hymnal, he adapted the tune as a setting of Joseph Addison's hymn "When rising from the bed of death". refn|The Hymnal notes that Horatius Bonar's hymn "I heard the Voice of Jesus Say" and many other D. C. M. hymns may also be sung to this tune. Vaughan Williams's fantasia draws on but does not strictly follow this precept, containing sections in which the material is interrelated, although with little wholly imitative writing, and antiphony in preference to contrapuntal echoing of themes. The published score does not stipulate the number of players in Orchestra I; Orchestra II consists of two first violins, two seconds, two violas, two cellos and one double bass The composer's metronome marking indicates a playing time of 11½ minutes, but in recorded performances the duration has varied between 12m 40s (Dmitri Mitropoulos, 1958) and 18m 12s (Leonard Bernstein, 1976), with a more typical time of between 15 and 16½ minutes. The piece is structured with an introduction, opening statement of the themes (Tallis’ original hymn melody broken up into its four constituent phrases and interspersed with a “swaying chord” motif), four episodes (exploring different variations of those themes and different voicings across the three ensembles), and then a restatement of the themes and a coda. The Introduction begins in B flat major with all three groups playing together, ppp molto sostenuto for two bars of time before moving to and the low strings plucking hints of the first two phrases of the Tallis theme interspersed with the bowed sway motif. Kennedy describes the introduction as “a hauntingly poetic introduction before we hear its first full statement in Tallis's four part harmonisation". The first violins join for a restatement of the fourth phrase. In the 30th bar the time signature changes back to and the music rises to a climax. Schwarts says “There's much octave double stopping (each string player sounds two notes at once), a higher dynamic, and an appassionato marking after all!” The statement ends dying away in section dying with a texture remeniscent of the opening two bars. In the First Episode the two orchestras divide, the key switches to C major and the time signature (but not the pulse of the music) changes rapidly. The section uses the second and third Tallis phrases alternating with the sway motif. The solo viola leads off the Second Episode with a variation on the third Tallis phrase in E phrygian marked Poco più animato. The other three members of the quartet join, followed by the two orchestras, while “the string quartet continues its polyphonic meditation”. The Third Episode explores the sway motif. The quartet and orchestra 1 play together, contrasting with orchestra 2, and moving poco a poco animando to a crescendo to fortissimo. The climax is in This dies down to a pianissimo "afterglow". In the Fourth and shortest episode, marked molto adagio, the sway motif is fragmented. Schwartz describes it as the "deep heart's core of the entire piece a miracle of the imagination”. The music reverts to the original time and key for the Restatement. The themes return once again plucked on the low strings then taken up by solo violin and viola, while the reunited orchestras provide a “featherbed of sound”. In Howes's analysis, "by way of coda the solo violin soars [and] The work ends on a chord of G major". taking a total of about two minutes off the original 1910 playing time.