Symphony No. 9 (Vaughan Williams)

In his early sketches for the symphony, Vaughan Williams made explicit reference to characters and scenes in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

By the time the symphony was complete he had deleted the programmatic details, but musical analysts have found many points in which the work nonetheless evokes the novel.

During the early stages of the composition of the symphony, Vaughan Williams conceived first a musical depiction of Salisbury, the Plain and Stonehenge[3] and then an evocation of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, set in the same surroundings.

[14][n 1] In preparation for the first commercial recording of the work in August 1958, Sir Adrian Boult discussed the ending of the last movement with Vaughan Williams, which he felt was too abrupt.

[21] In the composer's published analysis the Moderato first movement is described as not in strict sonata form but obeying the general principles of statement, contrast and repetition.

The clarinets, accompanied by harp chords, introduce a gentler theme in G minor that elides into the G major that conventional sonata form would suggest.

According to the musicologist Alain Frogley and others, the composer's original programmatic conceptions are essentially unaltered in the score despite his deletion of the labelling of themes, and in the opening it is possible to hear the sound of the wind blowing through Stonehenge.

[27][28] Vaughan Williams, avoiding mention of the original programme, describes the flügelhorn theme as "borrowed from an early work of the composer's, luckily long since scrapped, but changed so that its own father would hardly recognize it".

The music is interrupted by a repetition of the opening dissonance, out of which the solo B♭ saxophone and the side drum bring the movement to a quiet end.

[32] The last movement, marked Andante tranquillo, is in two distinct sections, the first in repeated binary form and the second a sonata allegro with coda.

[40] So far as the Ninth Symphony was concerned, the earlier view that it said nothing new began to be supplanted by the recognition that although it was, as The Times put it in 2008, "the synthesis and summation of all that had gone before", the music was visionary, violent, elusive and ambiguous.