Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, also known as the Tallis Fantasia, is a one-movement work for string orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The theme is by the 16th-century English composer Thomas Tallis. The Fantasia was first performed at Gloucester Cathedral as part of the 1910 Three Choirs Festival, and has entered the orchestral repertoire, with frequent concert performances and recordings by conductors and orchestras in various countries.
Like several of Vaughan Williams’s other works, the Fantasia draws on the music of the English Renaissance. Tallis’s tune is in the Phrygian mode, characterised by intervals of a flat second, third, sixth and seventh; the pattern is reproduced by playing the white notes of the piano starting on E. Tallis’s theme was one of nine tunes he wrote for the Psalter of 1567 of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. It was a setting of Parker’s metrical version of Psalm 2, which in the King James Bible version begins, “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?”, and is rendered by Parker as “Why fumeth in sight: The Gentils spite, In fury raging stout? Why taketh in hond: the people fond, Vayne things to bring about?”. The tune is in Double Common Metre (D.C.M. or C.M.D.). According to his biographer Michael Kennedy, Vaughan Williams came to associate Tallis’s theme with John Bunyan’s Christian allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, a subject with which the composer had a lifelong fascination; he used the tune in 1906 in incidental music he composed for a stage version of the book. For the Hymnal, he adapted the tune as a setting of Joseph Addison’s hymn “When rising from the bed of death”.
The Fantasia is scored for double string orchestra with string quartet, employing antiphony between the three contributory ensembles. Orchestra I is the main body of strings; Orchestra II is smaller.] The published score does not stipulate the number of players in Orchestra I; Orchestra II consists of two first violins, two seconds, two violas, two cellos and one double bass/ The composer’s metronome marking indicates a playing time of 11½ minutes, but in recorded performances the duration has varied between 12m 40s (Dimitri Mitropoulos, 1958) and 18m 12s (Leonard Bernstein, 1976), with a more typical time of between 15 and 16½ minutes.
The premiere of the Fantasia received a generally warm welcome, with a few exceptions: Herbert Brewer, the Gloucester cathedral organist, described it as “a queer, mad work by an odd fellow from Chelsea”. The Musical Times reviewer said, “It is a grave work, exhibiting power and much charm of the contemplative kind, but it appears over long for the subject-matter”. Other reviews were more enthusiastic. The reviewer in The Daily Telegraph praised Vaughan Williams’s mastery of string effect and added that although the work might not appeal to some because of its “seeming austerity”, it was “extremely beautiful to such as have ears for the best music of all ages”. In The Manchester Guardian, Samuel Langford wrote, “The melody is modal and antique in flavour, while the harmonies are as exotic as those of Debussy … The work marks out the composer as one who has got quite out of the ruts of the commonplace”. In The Times, J. A. Fuller Maitland also commented on ancient and Debussian echoes, and observed: “Throughout its course one is never quite sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new. … But that is just what makes this Fantasia so delightful to listen to; it cannot be assigned to a time or a school, but it is full of the visions which have haunted the seers of all times.“
