Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

The work opens with soft descending chords. The low strings then pluck the first fragments of Tallis’s tune, and the bowed strings follow with a swaying phrase that returns several times as a refrain.

All the strings join for the first full statement of Tallis’s tune. Second violins, violas and first cellos play the melody in unison. After rising arpeggios it returns in the first violins and first violas, played in octave double-stopping.

The Fantasia was first played in Gloucester Cathedral on 6 September 1910, to about two thousand people who had come mostly for Elgar’s Gerontius. Herbert Brewer, the cathedral’s organist, called it “a queer, mad work by an odd fellow from Chelsea”.

In the first episode an abrupt statement of the second Tallis phrase alternates with the swaying chords. Later the small second orchestra plays the soft descending chords of the opening, and the large orchestra plays the sway against them.

The theme is the third of nine tunes Tallis wrote for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter of 1567, where it was set to Psalm 2. Vaughan Williams came across it while editing The English Hymnal, in which it carries Addison’s hymn “When rising from the bed of death”.

A solo viola opens the second episode with a variation on the tune’s rising Phrygian phrase. The other members of the solo quartet join it, and the tune passes from one player to the next in polyphony.

The solo quartet of two violins, viola and cello takes up the third phrase, and both orchestras follow with declaimed statements. The quartet then continues in polyphony. The large orchestra declaims the phrase once more.

The third episode develops the swaying figure. The small orchestra extends the quartet’s swaying phrase. Both orchestras then begin the long build to the largest climax of the work.

The third episode builds to the largest climax of the piece, on the rising phrase of the tune. The sound then dies down to the small second orchestra before the quiet fourth episode.

In the fourth episode the swaying chords return but go no further than two notes. They break into fragments of the opening chords.

The lower strings play Tallis’s tune pizzicato again over sustained chords. A solo violin and viola share the later phrases, and the full strings join for the fourth.

Herbert Howells, then seventeen, heard the first performance. Seventy-one years later he called the evening “so disturbing and moving that I even asked RVW for his autograph – and got it!” He and Ivor Gurney walked the streets of Gloucester for half the night.

In the coda the solo quartet plays the last phrases, marked p espr., and the orchestras slow down together. The final chord is played ff, held under a pause and reduced to pppp.