Musicology Commons^™

“Blaspheming Beethoven?”: The Altered Bach Motive In Vaughan Williams’S Fourth Symphony, Ryan M. Ross

College of Education Publications and Scholarship

Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony (1934) has elicited much discussion regarding its aesthetic nature and sources of inspiration. Early critics associated the work’s dissonances with a concession to continental European musical modernism, or with a depiction of the political tensions of 1930s Europe. More recent commentaries have noted its references to Beethoven, one of which the composer admitted to in print. These commentators have argued either that these references constitute a continuation of the Beethovenian tradition in the twentieth century, or that they present a critique of the German composer. This essay adds a new argument in favor of the latter …