Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony for orchestra, chorus and solo voices, set to texts by Walt Whitman, is both a splendid homage to the English late Romantic choral tradition of Elgar and Parry, and a forerunner of Benjamin Britten’s Spring Symphony. While overtly descriptive of the sea in its many moods, the work nevertheless marks a radical departure from precedent. In his desire to free English music from the Austro-German framework, Vaughan Williams combines high art with folk-inflected music. In his setting of verses by Walt Whitman, the composer invites an analogy between the voyager at sea and the journeying of the soul towards the unknown regions on earth, as the ship finally vanishes over the horizon. “O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God? O farther, farther sail!” One of the greatest masterworks in the history of music, which makes considerable technical demands particularly of the soloists and the choir, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis was regarded by the composer as the summit of his artistic achievements. It is a work of enormous proportions and extraordinary emotional and musical contrasts, alternating passages of tense drama with interludes of blissful serenity. The conflict of exuberance, anguish, faith and doubt is seemingly resolved only by the final petition of the Agnus Dei, Bitte um innern und äussern Frieden (‘Prayer for inner and outward peace’), words that some have seen as a reflection of Beethoven’s own inner turmoil.