"Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus" - sublime English music

The most achingly beautiful work of English classical music I know is Vaughan Williams’s Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, a 10-minute piece commissioned for the 1939 World’s Fair held in New York. Gorgeously lush and sweet, it evokes – as, under the terms of the commission,  it was intended to – a vision of rural England which must, even sixty years ago, have been based as much on nostalgia as reality.

It speaks of a world of peace and harmony, where a balance between man and nature prevails. It’s sometimes dangerous to claim to know what an artist meant to achieve through a particular work, but not in this instance: this is a supremely gifted English artist proclaiming love for his country.

Anyone – and there will be many – inclined to dismiss Five Variants as just another of Vaughan Williams’s hopelessly romantic pastoral idylls – “musical cowpats” as they were glibly dismissed by modish critics during the composer’s lifetime – might like to take into account the significance of the date of its composition. When Sir Adrian Boult conducted the first performance at Carnegie Hall, Britain was three months away from a war which many feared would destroy all vestiges of this island’s traditional way of life forever.

This was not an example of a middle-aged composer wallowing in cheap nationalism: there is something urgent, almost desperate, in the stirring majesty of this small masterpiece. 

At the heart of this glorious piece for string orchestra is a simple traditional folk tune or carol, “Dives and Lazarus”, which tells the tale, from St. Luke’s gospel, of a rich man (Dives – pronounced “Divers”, unnamed in the gospel) who refuses to help a beggar dying at his door. (As I mentioned in a previous article, this is the melody which Vaughan Williams felt he had somehow known all his life.) 

“Dives and Lazarus” has been traced back to the 16th Century, and the melody is the same as that of the well-known Irish folk song, “Star of the County Down”, and several others: “Gilderoy”, “Thresher”, “Cold Blows The Wind” and “The Murder of Maria Martin”. Vaughan Williams used it again and again in all sorts of contexts over many decades. 

In 1906, it served as the melody for the hymn, “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say” and “O Sing A Song of Bethlehem”. It was included in the composer’s English Folk Song Suite in 1923. The next recorded use is the Five Variants in 1939, after which it crops up as the music for a 10-minute government information film, The Dim Little Island, released in 1949.

What was it about “Dives and Lazarus” that created a semi-mystical experience for Vaughan Williams? Why did he feel he had known it all his life?

Most folk music tends to be modal – as does all medieval church music. This means (I suggest anyone with any actual knowledge of musical theory looks away now) that the scales – i.e. the conventions which determine  the intervals between notes – differ from those used in most Western classical and popular music.  Each mode is supposed to imbue the music composed within it with a different quality – to make it sound angelic, pious or happy etc. 

Modes have somewhat daunting names - for example, Mixolydian, Dorian and Phrygian, but a  guitar teacher once explained them to me in very practical terms – playing in a mode means using the notes of one scale (say G minor) when the piece you are performing is in a different key (say A major). If you can play keyboards or guitar, try it – the results are startlingly evident. In some modes, whatever you play tends to sound like the soundtrack to an epic film.

Most modal music is as boring as the majority of any kind of music. But the best of it seems to have a peculiar, ancient power, as if it comes from a distant past that somehow already exists deep inside us: it suggests ancient ways (or modes) of thinking and living which are strangely familiar to the listener.  (I would be very surprised if the power of modal music didn’t have something to do with Jung’s theory of the Collective Unconscious.)

In Vaughan William’s case, “Dives and Lazarus” seems to have acted as a tuning fork struck against his soul; instead of emitting a single musical tone, sublime masterpieces poured from this great English composer for decades on  end, enriching the life of anyone fortunate enough to hear them.