Vaughan Williams - Symphony No. 5 in D

A symphony in which Vaughan Williams stole tunes from his opera of The Pilgrim's Progress, before he had even completed it.

On the evening of 24 June 1943, Vaughan Williams stood on the podium at the Royal Albert Hall in front of the London Philharmonic Orchestra to conduct the premiere performance of his Symphony No. 5.

The work had been a relatively long time coming. It was eight years since his Symphony No. 4 and, given the many periods of intense orchestral composition in Vaughan Williams's career, many were surprised that his follow-up hadn't come sooner.

In style this symphony saw the composer returning to the more romantic style of his earlier Pastoral Symphony. It is also perhaps the quietest symphony Vaughan Williams ever wrote, with only a very few passages rising even to a forte. Many of the musical themes in the Fifth Symphony stem from Vaughan Williams' then-unfinished opera, The Pilgrim's Progress which had been in gestation for decades, and the composer had temporarily abandoned it at the time the symphony was conceived. 

Despite its origins, the symphony has no story behind it, and is fundamentally an extended development of musical themes taken from the opera rather than an attempt to cast it directly into a symphony.