'Wasps’ Overture
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
This overture is part of incidental music composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams for a production of ‘The Wasps’ by Aristophanes at Trinity College, Cambridge. The play is a Greek comedy focusing on corruption, rife among Athenian lawyers and politicians at the time of its creation, 422 BC, 2438 years ago. (Plus ça change…) In the play, the machinations of the main protagonists are likened to the behaviour of wasps, and that is about as far as the connection with the title can be stretched.
The overture opens with some impressive orchestral buzzing clearly intended to sound like a swarm of wasps. Had Vaughan Williams heard ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, written ten years earlier in 1899? Either way, he seems to have abandoned all interest in wasps and, indeed, in Ancient Greece, once he had included this obligatory nod towards matters vespine. The remaining nine minutes of the overture are archetypical Vaughan Williams, reminiscent of English folk music, while occasionally betraying the influence of the tuition he received in Paris as a pupil of Maurice Ravel, especially in the middle section, with its piquant dissonances and departures from traditional tonality.
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
This overture is part of incidental music composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams for a production of ‘The Wasps’ by Aristophanes at Trinity College, Cambridge. The play is a Greek comedy focusing on corruption, rife among Athenian lawyers and politicians at the time of its creation, 422 BC, 2438 years ago. (Plus ça change…) In the play, the machinations of the main protagonists are likened to the behaviour of wasps, and that is about as far as the connection with the title can be stretched.
The overture opens with some impressive orchestral buzzing clearly intended to sound like a swarm of wasps. Had Vaughan Williams heard ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, written ten years earlier in 1899? Either way, he seems to have abandoned all interest in wasps and, indeed, in Ancient Greece, once he had included this obligatory nod towards matters vespine. The remaining nine minutes of the overture are archetypical Vaughan Williams, reminiscent of English folk music, while occasionally betraying the influence of the tuition he received in Paris as a pupil of Maurice Ravel, especially in the middle section, with its piquant dissonances and departures from traditional tonality.