(v) The ostinato bass which plays out the РІР‚ВveteransРІР‚в„ў now plays in the Angel of Death. It would be easy to sentimentalize Whitman here, and this Vaughan Williams resolutely avoids. This works to his advantage since the music has a kind of rude solidity and strength which a more sophisticated musical language might have mellowed. Vaughan Williams based this movement on an earlier setting of the same words made before his mature style had crystallized. This time the drums are not of war but of its aftermath-death, and burial. The РІР‚ВenemyРІР‚в„ў is dead-РІР‚Вa man as divine as myselfРІР‚в„ў, as in Wilfred OwenРІР‚в„ўs РІР‚ВStrange MeetingРІР‚в„ў-and music of transcendent beauty and simplicity warms and cleanses the world. In an inspired transition (Vaughan Williams no less than Britten was a master of the seamless scene-change) the drums of war turn into the lapping, laving rhythms of РІР‚В¦ The Whitman setting is dominated by beating drums and blowing bugles, inbuilt in the music even when the text isnРІР‚в„ўt directly referring to them. (ii) War erupts: nothing and nobody is inviolate. At the end the drums of war are heard in the far distance. (i) The soprano solo leads the forces of apprehensive humanity (the chorus) in their quest for peace. But the humanitarian warmth and splendour of his vision remains and, after all, if the day ever dawns when composers fail to speak out through the medium of their art against mankindРІР‚в„ўs seemingly illimitable folly and wickedness, we shall be in a poor way, to put it mildly. In the event, Vaughan WilliamsРІР‚в„ўs warnings and entreaties went unheeded. Vaughan Williams compiled a text chiefly from the Bible and Whitman (though the workРІР‚в„ўs motto, and the words of its first movement, belong to the Mass) and Dona nobis pacem was first performed in Huddersfield in October 1936, with the Huddersfield Choral Society and the HallР“В© Orchestra conducted by Albert Coates. No question here but that the motivation was war, or the deepening sense of trouble which by the mid-1930s seemed set to explode into war. It is, if you like, РІР‚ВpropagandaРІР‚в„ў, an РІР‚ВoccasionalРІР‚в„ў piece-if pleas for peace and tolerance and understanding can ever suitably be described as РІР‚ВoccasionalРІР‚в„ў.

It has every right to do so, for its theme is anguished and impassioned on a cosmic scale. Dona nobis pacem fills a much larger canvas than anything else in this collection.

Dona dona nobis pacem