The recent war in Iraq, the continuing chaos and violence there, the endless killings in Israel-Palestine, the massacres in central Africa, not to mention the continuing uncertainty in Northern Ireland - all these intractable problems make the plea for peace at the heart of Ralph Vaughan Williams's cantata Dona Nobis Pacem as relevant today as at the time of its composition close to 70 years ago, writes Tony Williams
Dublin concert-goers have a rare chance to hear this stirring music in a concert devoted to the composer in the National Concert Hall next Saturday, June 7th.
Vaughan Williams had personal experience of war's horrors. At the outbreak of the first World War he had felt it his duty to enlist. He opted for the Royal Army Medical Corps and helped to ferry the dead and wounded from the trenches of northern France. He composed Dona Nobis Pacem ("Grant us peace") in 1936 as a warning - prescient, as it proved - against a new war engulfing Europe and the wider world.
For texts, he turned principally to two 19th-century figures: John Bright (1811-89), a Liberal MP at Westminster, and the American poet Walt Whitman (1819-92). Bright, a Quaker, supported many progressive causes of the day. He first came to prominence as a peace campaigner when, in a Commons speech of February 1855, he condemned Britain's participation in the Crimean War on the side of Turkey against Russia. The war was popular with the British public and MPs alike, and Bright received much abuse from the press and was even accused by some MPs of treason.
Several years later, parliamentary colleagues dubbed him the "Honourable Member for the United States" after he denounced the idea of war against the US during the "Trent Affair" of 1861, which blew up in the prelude to the American Civil War after the US navy stopped a British steamer and arrested two Confederate diplomats en route to Europe to rally support for the cause of the southern states.
It was the American Civil War itself which appalled Walt Whitman, and he expressed his revulsion in a collection of poems entitled Drum Taps. Incensed by the devastation and deeply moved by the suffering, Whitman devoted much of his time, during and after the Civil War (1861-65), to caring for the wounded as a hospital nurse.
In Dona Nobis Pacem Vaughan Williams set three poems from Drum Taps, part of Bright's famous Westminster speech - Vaughan Williams claimed to be the only man ever to put music to words spoken in Commons! - as well as biblical texts appropriate to his themes of war and peace, together with the "Agnus Dei" from the Mass.
The music is discordant and fiercely rhythmical when evoking the brutality of war, but also lyrical and, at times, exquisite in its expression of compassion for the victims, and radiant when conveying a vision of peace. The other two works in next Saturday's concert will be a setting of another Whitman poem, Toward the Unknown Region, and the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, for string quartet and double string orchestra, one of the composer's best-loved pieces.
Brian MacKay will conduct the 190 voices of the combined Enchiriadis Treis and Belfast Philharmonic choirs, with the Orchestra of St Cecilia and soloists Paula Anglin and Sam McElroy.
Born of wealthy parents on 12 October 1872 in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, Ralph Vaughan Williams never had to earn a living, yet no man worked harder at his chosen vocation. He was composing a new opera at the time of his sudden death, aged 85, on August 26th, 1958 - 45 years ago this summer. He was a gentle giant of a man, in middle and old age baggy and dishevelled in appearance, kindly, witty, but prone to towering, though short-lived, rages - as generations of choristers could testify. His output as a composer was prodigious, covering every musical genre, including five operas and nine symphonies.
Vaughan Williams was a leading light in the movement to collect traditional English folk-songs in the early part of the last century. Moreover, he saw in this music a rich resource for composers, and folk-song melodies, or melodies of his own in this style, are woven into the fabric of many of his works.
Though an agnostic, he often turned to Christian and biblical texts as inspiration for his choral music. His unaccompanied Mass in G Minor, with its repeated, impassioned plea "Dona nobis pacem" pointing forward to the great cantata composed 15 years later, is one of his most beautiful works. He was also a keen reformer of Anglican hymn-singing through his editorship of The English Hymnal in 1906.
One of his outstanding characteristics is his melodic invention - few 20th-century composers can have produced so many singable tunes. The Shakespearian setting Serenade to Music, for 16 solo voices and orchestra, moved to tears another great melodist, Sergei Rachmaninov, who was present at its first performance in October 1938.
After listening to a composition by an aspiring young composer at Cornell University in 1954, Vaughan Williams commented to the student: "My dear fellow, if a tune should occur to you, don't hesitate to jot it down!"
Lovers of melody in 20th-century classical music should be amply rewarded if they turn up at National Concert Hall next Saturday