Fantasia on “Greensleeves”

“Let the sky rain potatoes, let it thunder to the tune of Greensleeves!” It was no doubt because of Falstaff’s invocation of that traditional English tune in The Merry Wives of Windsor that Vaughan Williams drew on it for an entracte he wrote for a production of the play at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1912. He turned to it again sixteen years later for his Falstaff opera Sir John in Love where it is incorporated into the introduction to the third act. Under the title of Fantasia on “Greensleeves” that intoduction has become one of the most popular of all Vaughan Williams’s orchestral pieces. In this case the invocation is made by a rhapsodic flute accompanied by harp, which latter adds its strummed harmonies to the melody as it makes its first entry on the strings. The contrasting tune introduced in the middle section is another English folk song, “Lovely Joan,” which the composer had collected in Norfolk in 1908.