Musings on the Vaughan Williams Tallis Fantasia

Written by Quinn Riley

I first heard Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis about twenty or so years ago and fell in love with it immediately. It is one of those works I can listen to over and over and it never gets old. The work was endeared to me even more when it was deftly used in the score for Peter Weir’s 2003 film Master and Commander: Far side of the World, an adaptation of some of Patrick O’Brien’s seafaring Aubrey/Maturin novels. Though the title indicates it is a “fantasia on a theme,” I never bothered to research and discover just what “theme” by Tallis Vaughan Williams had used until earlier this year.

In 1910, when in his late thirties, Vaughan Williams’ reputation as a composer received a boost when he was commissioned to write a work for the famed Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester Cathedral that year. As he had for several works, Vaughan Williams turned to music of the English Renaissance for inspiration. He had come across Thomas Tallis’ 1567 collection of Tunes for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter while editing the English Hymnal, which had been published in 1906. The third tune, a setting of “Why fum’th in sight,” based on Psalm 2, came to the mind of Vaughan Williams and he used Tallis’ melody as the basis for his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. The work is scored for double string orchestra and solo string quartet and had its premiere on September 6, 1910, to generally warm reviews. Over the last one hundred years, this beautiful and moving work has been regularly voted by listeners into the top five of British radio station Classic FM’s “Hall of Fame” and is one of my top ten favorites of all time.