Through Lent with Vaughan Williams (25): ‘Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis’

The enclosed monastery cloisters in Gloucester Cathedral … Vaughan Williams conducted the first performance of his ‘Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis’ in the cathedral in 1910 (Photograph: Paradoxplace)

Patrick Comerford

For my reflections and devotions each day during Lent this year, I am reflecting on and invite you to listen to a piece of music or a hymn set to a tune by the great English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).

This morning [14 March 2015], I encourage you to join me in listening to his ‘Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis.’

The word fantasy or fantasia is sometimes used in music to describe a work that does not follow any set form or pattern. It is also used for compositions that are based on another musical work.

Vaughan Williams’s ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’ is also known as the ‘Tallis Fantasia.’ It was written string orchestra by Vaughan Williams in 1910 and it was performed for the first time on 6 September 1910 in Gloucester Cathedral at the Three Choirs Festival, with Vaughan Williams conducting himself.

That evening, most of the attention that evening was devoted to Elgar’s oratorio The Dream of Gerontius. Elgar had once declined a request from Vaughan Williams to take him on as a pupil. Most critics present that evening found Vaughan Williams’s work difficult to take. The critic of the Musical Times wrote: “It is a grave work, exhibiting power and much charm of the contemplative kind, but it appears overlong for the subject-matter.”

But the audience that evening also included Herbert Howells and Ivor Gurney, two organ scholars at Gloucester Cathedral who went on to become celebrated composers.

Vaughan Williams had been cycling round the lanes and pubs of Wiltshire, Somerset and Norfolk since 1903, jotting down tunes and ballads from the countryside that inspired his arrangements for hymns in the English Hymnal in 1905, and the music he was writing at the time, including: In the Fen Country, his Norfolk Rhapsodies, The Wasps and On Wenlock Edge.

However, his contributions to the English Hymnal were still anonymous by 1910, and the ‘Fantasia’ heralded the making of his career as well as a new clarity in his art. His A Sea Symphony would have its premiere two months later in Leeds, and he was soon on the way to composing his second, the London Symphony, as well as embarking on his first opera, Hugh the Drover, and the Five Mystical Songs. Folk music, hymn tunes, visionary literature, Renaissance polyphony and cutting-edge orchestration fused in a potent summoning of the humanist New Jerusalem.

The night after the premiere of this Fantasia in Gloucester Cathedral in 1910, Sir Hubert Parry gave a speech in which he declared music to be a socially inclusive agent “to get the people from the slums to be elevated by [its] power.” Vaughan Williams, along with HG Wells and Gustav Holst, attended meetings of the Hammersmith Socialist Society at William Morris’s home. This brought him into contact with a Fabian circle that included George Bernard Shaw and George Trevelyan.

A contributor to the Musical Times that month had commented: "It is our idiosyncrasy as a nation to prefer religious sentiment to patriotic and national feeling.” But for Vaughan Williams, the two were inextricably entwined, and the ‘Tallis Fantasia’ is a perfect expression of that unity. He said later: “I feel that I am perhaps beginning to emerge from the fogs at last.”

Vaughan Williams went on revise this work twice, in 1913 and 1919. Yet it was not recorded until 1936.



The work is his homage to the Elizabethan composer, Thomas Tallis (ca 1505–1585). Many of Vaughan Williams’s works were inspired by the music of the English Renaissance. In 1906, he included Tallis’s ‘Third Mode Melody’ in the English Hymnal, which he was editing with Percy Dearmer, as his melody for Joseph Addison’s hymn ‘When Rising from the Bed of Death’ (No 92).

Thomas Tallis was a Catholic given a stay of execution among Elizabeth I’s clergy in order to take part in restructuring the Anglican church. The psalm that Vaughan Williams based his Fantasia on is short: a four-line verse which appears in The Whole Psalter Translated into English Metre, published by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1567, nine years after Elizabeth’s coronation.

Tallis’s original words for the hymn, based in Psalm 2: 1-2, are:

Why fumeth in fight the Gentile's
spite, in fury raging stout?
Why taketh in hand the people
fond, vain things to bring about? The Kings arise, the Lords devise,
in counsels met thereto,
Against the Lord with false accord,
against His Christ they go.

Tallis’s words hover, unvoiced, in the distant background to Vaughan Williams’s ‘Fantasia.’ Tallis and fellow Catholics in the Elizabethan era were entrusted with making church music accessible to untrained congregations while preserving a sense of spiritual wonder. They achieved this by drawing on popular songs and ballads, just as Vaughan Williams did for the English Hymnal.

Although this ‘Fantasia’ was not recorded until 1936, later classic post-war recordings by John Barbirolli, Adrian Boult and Richard Hickox have become bestsellers. It is a regular fixture in the BBC’s Hundred Best Tunes.

Last year [2014], in an annual poll of the most popular classical pieces of music, listeners voted this piece third on the Classic FM “Hall of Fame.” First place has gone consistently to a later Vaughan Williams’s piece, ‘The Lark Ascending.’

Vaughan Williams’s ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’ is scored for an expanded string orchestra divided into three parts: orchestra I, a full-sized string orchestra; orchestra II, a single desk from each section (ideally placed apart from Orchestra I); and a string quartet.

Vaughan Williams made this configuration resemble an organ in sound, with the quartet representing the swell division, orchestra II the choir division, and orchestra I the great division. The score specifies that the second orchestra should be placed apart from the first. This spacing emphasises the way that the second orchestra several times echoes the first orchestra.

In structure, this piece resembles the Elizabethan-age “fantasy.” The theme is heard in its entirety three times during the course of the work, but the music grows from the theme’s constituent motives or fragments, with variations upon them. A secondary melody, based on the original, is first heard on the solo viola about a third of the way into the Fantasia, and this theme forms the climax of the work about five minutes before the end.

Vaughan Williams’s ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’ provides a bridge between the Tudors and the early 20th century. It contains many of his trademarks, particularly the way he whets his chord harmonics with the flattened seventh, a staple of English folk, and the minor third, the key feature of Tallis’s setting.

The piece is open to a rich range of readings, even fantasies, not least that it enacts and heals the rupture of English Catholicism and Protestantism. It is not rapturous, like ‘The Lark Ascending,’ composed four years later, but a solemn, controlled release, the product of a mind in visionary mode, and appropriate listening for this Saturday morning in Lent.

● On Wednesday week (25 March 2015), Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is part of the programme in the National Concert Hall, Dublin, with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra (John Wilson, conductor; Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, piano).

Tomorrow: ‘Virgin born, we bow before thee’

Back on the Pugin trail in the FitzGeralds’ heartland

Pugin Hall in Maynooth, restored in 1992 said to be Pugin’s finest hall (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

Patrick Comerford

It has been a bright, sunny day all day, with warm sunlight streaming into my study all morning. I decided to finish work after an early lunch and to go to Maynooth where I have long wanted to photograph the Pugin Hall since its restoration.

Yes, I was back on the Pugin trail, after a brief rest from my exploration of AWN Pugin’s great legacy of gothic revival architecture. It is a project that has taken me to cathedrals, churches, chapels, convents and private houses throughout Ireland from Wexford and Waterford to Kerry and Limerick, Kildare and Dublin, and to a variety of places in England, including Cambridge, Oxford, London and Birmingham, and throughout Staffordshire.

Walking through the corridors of Saint Patrick’s House, Maynooth (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

Pugin Hall now serves as the self-service canteen for staff and students of Maynooth University and is located in Saint Patrick’s House on the South Campus. But it was designed by Pugin as the refectory for Maynooth College and was built between 1845 and 1852.

It was restored in 1992 and is often said to be Pugin’s finest hall.

The College Chapel seen from the corridors in Saint Patrick’s House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

The Victorian corridors and squares of Maynooth, designed by Pugin and James Joseph McCarthy, equal any quad in Oxford or court in Cambridge.

Sadly, the main college chapel, completed by McCarthy, was locked this afternoon, and Maynooth Castle, once a bastion of the FitzGerald family, and Saint Mary’s Church, where many of the Earls of Kildare and Dukes of Leinster are buried, were both closed.

Carton House … one of the great houses of the FitzGerald family, Dukes of Leinster and Earls of Kildare (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

On the eastern edges of Maynooth, we drove into Carton estate to visit Carton House, once the home of the Dukes of Leinster and one of the most elegant stately homes on these islands.

Queen Victoria knew Carton well, Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier spent a holiday there, and Peter Sellers and Marianne Faithfull lived there for years. The 1st Duke of Leinster chose it for his country seat in 1739, and it stayed in the FitzGerald family until the mid-20th century.

Carton House is the finest example in Ireland of a Georgian-created parkland landscape. Now it is luxury hotel standing in a walled estate of 4.5 sq km (1,100 acres), stretching across two counties, Kildare and Meath, with two world-class championship 18-hole golf courses, yet it is only 23 km from Dublin’s city centre and 30 minutes from Dublin Airport.

The lands at Carton were part of the Maynooth estate of the FitzGerald family from 1176. They became Earls of Kildare in 1315 and for almost 800 years were one of the most influential political families in Ireland.

The FitzGerald family were the virtual rulers of Ireland from 1477 until 1513 and the rebellion of “Silken” Thomas, who was executed in 1537 with his five uncles for rebellion.

Carton House was designed by Richard Castles in the 1730s and remodelled by Richard Morrison a century later (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

The first record of a house at Carton was in the 17th century when William Talbot, Recorder of Dublin, leased the lands from the 14th Earl of Kildare and is thought to have built a house. Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, is said to have built Tyrconnell Tower as his mausoleum. Its official name is The Prospect Tower.

After the defeat of the Jacobites at the Battle of the Boyne, the Talbot interests in the Carton estate were forfeited to the crown in 1691 and in 1703 sold to Major-General Richard Ingoldsby, Master General of the Ordnance.

But by the early 18th century the FitzGeralds had won back their lands and titles, and they regained their position at Court in the early 18th century, when Robert FitzGerald, 19th Earl of Kildare, became a noted statesman.

In 1739, the lease was sold back to Robert FitzGerald, 19th Earl of Kildare, who employed Richard Castles (originally Cassels) to build the present Carton House. This was the same year the FitzGerald family bought Frescati House.

At the time, it cost £26,000 to build Carton House. Castles also designed some of the other great Irish houses, including Summerhill House, Co Meath, Westport House, Co Mayo, and Powerscourt House, Co Wicklow, and in 1745 he built Leinster House as the Dublin town house for the FitzGeralds.

In 1747, James FitzGerald, 20th Earl of Kildare (and from 1766 1st Duke of Leinster) married Lady Emily Lennox, daughter of the Duke of Richmond. She was a great-granddaughter of King Charles II and a sister of Lady Louisa Conolly of neighbouring Castletown House, near Celbridge. The story of the life and times of these two sisters has been told by Stella Tillyard in her book and BBC mini-series, The Aristocrats.

Lady Emily played an important role in the development of the house and estate as it is today. She designed the Chinese room, which would later be a bedroom for Queen Victoria, and decorated the Shell Cottage on the estate with a collection of shells from around the world.

Lady Emily was the mother of 23 children, including Lord Edward FitzGerald, one of the leaders of the1798 rebellion.

Carton remained unaltered until 1815, when the 3rd Duke of Leinster decided to sell Leinster House to the Royal Dublin Society and make Carton House his principal residence. Richard Morrison, who was commissioned to enlarge and remodel the house, moved the entrance to the house to the north side and replaced the curved colonnades with straight connecting links to obtain additional rooms, including the dining room.

The boat house and lake at Carton were designed for Queen Victoria’s second visit (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

Queen Victoria stayed twice at Carton, and the lake was created especially for her before her second visit. The Boat House on the banks of the Rye River by the bridge on the drive up to Carton House, is said to have been built for her second visit. The FitzGeralds were told that Queen Victoria had a dream that she was rowing on the lake at Carton House. But Carton had no lake, and so the lake, the boathouse and a special boat were commissioned for her visit.

Carton remained in the FitzGerald family until the early 1920s when the future 7th Duke of Leinster sold his lifetime interest in the possible reversionary rights to a moneylender, Sir Harry Mallaby-Deeley to pay off gambling debts of £67,500.

At the time, Lord Edward FitzGerald was third in line to the family titles and did not expect to succeed. However, one brother had died in World War I, another died of a brain tumour, and when Edward succeeded in 1922, Carton was lost by the FitzGeralds.

In 1936, the Duke of Leinster testified at a bankruptcy hearing that he had travelled to the US in 1928 to find an heiress to marry. On his trip, he “entertained lavishly on borrowed money in efforts to find an American wife who would pay off his debts.” Although wo heiresses appeared to be interested, each woman turned down the opportunity to become the Duchess of Leinster.

Looking out onto the parkland at Carton House from the courtyard (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

Unable to repay his debts, the duke spent the final years of his life living in a small bedsit in Pimlico. He died by suicide in 1976 by taking an overdose of pentobarbital.

Gerald FitzGerald (1914-2004) was the only child of the7th Duke of Leinster and his first wife, May Juanita Etheridge, a chorus girl. His parents separated in 1922 and were divorced eight years later, the future duke spent most of his childhood with his great-aunt, Lady Adelaide FitzGerald, in Johnstown Castle, Co Wexford, before being sent to Eton.

He was a major in the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards during World War II, and was wounded during the Normandy landings. After the war, he tried to farm the family estate at Kilkea Castle, Co Kildare, but in the early 1960s he moved to Oxfordshire and worked in the aviation industry.

When his father died, he was prevented momentarily from using his title when a California artist, Leonard FitzGerald, claimed to be the son of his father’s elder brother, Lord Desmond FitzGerald, who died in 1916. Again, in 1999, he failed to prevent a half-brother being recognised by both Debrett’s Peerage and Burke’s Peerage. Adrian FitzGerald was the illegitimate son of the 7th Duke.

Today, the FitzGerald family titles are held by Maurice FitzGerald, a landscape artist who was born in 1948 and succeeded as 9th Duke of Leinster in 2004.

Meanwhile, Ronald Nall-Cain, 2nd Baron Brocket, who lived at Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire, bought Carton House in 1949. In 1977 his son, David Nall-Cain, who had moved to the Isle of Man, sold Carton House to the Mallaghan family.

The Irish government turned down opportunities to buy Carton House in the 1980s and again in the 1990s, and in 2000 Carton was redeveloped as a golf resort and hotel.

Carton House has many links with the IRFU and the Irish rugby teams, and many soccer teams have trained there, including , AC Milan, Birmingham City, Chelsea, FC Barcelona, Internazionale, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Middlesbrough, Newcastle United, Real Madrid, Shamrock Rovers, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Brazil’s national team.

A fairy sculpture in a tree in the grounds of Carton House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)