Weekend Arts Feature: Ralph Vaughan Williams

In this, the 150th birthday anniversary year of Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Francis looks at the life and works of this great English composer.
The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in the little village of Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, where his father was vicar, in 1872. His Vaughan Williams ancestors tended to produce distinguished judges and clergymen, but his mother was both a Wedgwood and a Darwin and the naturalist Charles Darwin was his great uncle.

Vaughan Williams can scarcely have known his father, who died when he was two, and the family returned to the Wedgwood family home at Leith Hill near Dorking, Surrey. He was educated at Charterhouse School, the Royal College of Music and Trinity College, Cambridge, his teachers including both Stanford and Parry. He toyed with the idea of playing the viola for a living, but the family insisted that the only respectable job for a musician was that of organist – so he became one at a church in South Lambeth from 1895 to 1899; he loathed most aspects of the job, but learned a good deal about church music and the people who perform it.

From 1904 to 1906 Vaughan Williams worked as Musical Editor of The English Hymnal, where he rebelled against the more sentimental Victorian hymn-tune writers and created many new tunes from old folk songs, also writing a few tunes of his own. This pioneering work has had a big influence on all subsequent hymn books. He had known folk songs for many years, but worked as a serious collector of them from 1903 to 1913, collecting more than 800 tunes, which were to influence his music, especially in the early years.

In the Edwardian years, Vaughan Williams wrote songs, many of which were favourably received, as well as a number of folk-inspired orchestral works, such as the Norfolk Rhapsodies. A piece called In the Fen Country demonstrated his ability to write in a folk idiom without using folk times; he just absorbed it into his own style. His famous song, Linden Lea, is often mistaken for a folk song – but it was his own, composed in 1902 while sitting in the rectory gardens at Hooton Roberts, near Rotherham.

This was an exciting time to be a composer, with newspaper critics on the lookout for new works, and inclined to be harsh, especially when new ideas and styles were being developed. Inevitably some works which are popular today got a mixed reception – but Vaughan Williams’s reputation advanced in steps. Breakthroughs included Toward the Unknown Region, a setting of poetry by the American mystical poet Walt Whitman first heard in Leeds Town Hall for the Festival of 1907, and the Sea Symphony – the first of nine symphonies – also pioneered in Leeds, three years later.

The Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis was premiered in Gloucester Cathedral in 1910 and a second symphony, the London Symphony, was to be heard just before war broke out. The last piece that he wrote before the world changed for ever was The Lark Ascending, written before the war, but not heard until 1920. On New Year’s Eve 1914 the composer, then aged 42, took three years off his age and volunteered for the army. There was a long period of training in England which must have been very frustrating, but he finally saw action in France in summer 1916, serving as a wagon orderly behind the front lines with the Royal Army Medical Corps. Later on he was posted to Salonika, so the nightmare of trench warfare was over. In 1917 he returned to France as an officer in the Royal Artillery, taking part in the final battles of the war including the Fifth Battle of Ypres. It was probably service with the Artillery that caused him to become fairly deaf in later years.

After the war Vaughan Williams resumed composing, combining this with teaching at the Royal College of Music. He had settled in London with his wife, Adeline, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who he had married in 1897. He put the finishing touches to his first opera, Hugh the Drover, and composed a third symphony, A Pastoral Symphony, which he later revealed was expressly linked to his experiences in wartime, remembering a ‘Corot-like’ view over the ravaged French landscape – ‘not lambkins frisking at all’, as he wrote to Ursula Wood, who was to become his second wife after Adeline’s death in the 1950s.

What particularly characterises the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams is that he never repeated himself. It is difficult to listen to a piece and say “Ah, that’s Vaughan Williams”, because the characteristic stamps are concealed within music of infinite variety. Each symphony, every opera and major work, represents a fresh beginning. The nine symphonies might as well have been written by nine composers. The fourth Symphony of 1935 is bursting with discord and anger, though there is also beauty in it, while Herbert Howells described the end of the tranquil fifth Symphony of 1943 as ‘a balm for the whole of mankind.’ After World War 2, the sixth Symphony seems to describe the nuclear holocaust, though the composer vehemently denied this, and asked whether people could not accept that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

There were five operas - again, very varied. Hugh the Drover was a folk opera, including some folk songs, as also did Sir John in Love, based closely on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. The Poisoned Kiss was a comic operetta, with some wonderful tunes, while Riders to the Sea, an all but verbatim setting of J M Synge’s play of the same name, found musical expression for its themes of loss, grief, the sea and, finally, acceptance; many enthusiasts consider it his most perfect work. His last opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, produced in 1951, was the final expression of an exploration of the dramatic possibilities of that novel that began in 1906; it represented his own spiritual journey which transcended religion in a quest for the Celestial City, Albion, the New Jerusalem.

During World War 2 Vaughan Williams took to writing music for propaganda films as a form of war service, and found that he enjoyed writing film scores. His score for Scott of the Antarctic famously led to his seventh Symphony, Sinfonia Antartica. Two more symphonies were to follow, the cheerful Eighth and the magisterial Ninth, the latter linked to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but the music suggests that this was the moment when the composer looked into the abyss, and this was to be his last great work. Two weeks before his death, in 1958, Vaughan Williams said to a friend “In the next world, I shan’t be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.”

IVaughan William’s output was huge, including not only many published works, but also an old trunk full of manuscripts, which has given up all sorts of treasures in the years since 1958. In 1994 The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society was formed. The challenge was that the symphonies were popular, and a few well-known short works, but there was a good deal of music that was little known, including the five operas, some of the many choral works, and concertos for piano, violin, oboe and tuba. The Society now has more than 1,000 members world-wide (join at www.rvwsociety.com). It has brought about many performances and recordings over the past 28 years.

In 2007 Albion Records was formed as a subsidiary of the Society. It is run entirely by volunteer labour, despite which it has issued some 50 CD albums including 178 world premiere recordings, and garnered two Grammy nominations. Some of these are early works, even student pieces, but they often have a special charm. Albion has been able to record more substantial works such as Folk Songs of the Four Seasons (a cantata commissioned by the Women’s Institute in 1949), The Garden of Proserpine, The Cambridge Mass, and The Solent. Beyond my Dream brings together music written for Greek plays in 1911 and never used, while Discoveries presents three early Nocturnes, Four Last Songs and reconstructs a lost film score. Earth’s Wide Bounds includes the first recording of the Communion Service in G minor, the English version of the better known Mass in G minor, with a spoken contribution by former Archbishop Rowan Williams. Four recent albums present 81 folk song arrangements – a major rediscovery – while Pan’s Anniversary, last heard at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1905, will appear (with four more world premiere recordings) in June 2022.

n 2022 we proudly celebrate the 150th birthday of Ralph Vaughan Williams - a man who was known for his kindness and generosity, a patriot who fought for King and Country, and one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century.





This article originally appeared in April