Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)

Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English

composer of symphonies, chamber music,
opera, choral music, and film scores. He
was also a collector of English folk
music and song; this also influenced his
editorial approach to the English Hymnal,
which began in 1904, many folk song
arrangements being set as hymn tunes, in
addition to several original compositions.

Life
Early years
Ralph Vaughan Williams was born on 12
October 1872 in Down Ampney,
Gloucestershire, where his father, the Rev.
Arthur Vaughan Williams, was vicar.
Following his father's death in 1875 he
was taken by his mother, Margaret Susan
Wedgwood (1843–1937), the great-granddaughter of the potter Josiah
Wedgwood, to live with her family at Leith Hill Place, the Wedgwood family
home in the North Downs. He was also related to the Darwins, Charles
Darwin being a great-uncle. Though born into the privileged intellectual upper
middle class, Vaughan Williams never took it for granted and worked all his
life for the democratic and egalitarian ideals in which he believed.

As a student he had studied piano, "which I never could play, and the violin,
which was my musical salvation." After Charterhouse School he attended the
Royal College of Music (RCM) under Charles Villiers Stanford. He read
history and music at Trinity College, Cambridge where his friends and
contemporaries included the philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell.
He then returned to the RCM and studied composition with Hubert Parry, who
became a friend. One of his fellow pupils at the RCM was Leopold Stokowski
and during 1896 they both studied organ under Sir Walter Parratt. Stokowski
later went on to perform six of Vaughan Williams's symphonies for American
audiences, making the first recording of the Sixth Symphony in 1949 with the
New York Philharmonic, and giving the U.S. premiere of the Ninth Symphony
in Carnegie Hall in 1958.

Vaughan Williams's composition developed slowly and it was not until he was
30 that the song "Linden Lea" became his first publication. He mixed
composition with conducting, lecturing and editing other music, notably that of
Henry Purcell and the English Hymnal. He had further lessons with Max Bruch
in Berlin in 1897 and later took a big step forward in his orchestral style when
he studied in Paris with Maurice Ravel.
In 1904, Vaughan Williams discovered English folk songs, which were fast
becoming extinct owing to the increase of literacy and printed music in rural
areas. He travelled the countryside, transcribing and preserving many
himself. Later he incorporated some songs and melodies into his own
music, being fascinated by the beauty of the music and its anonymous history
in the working lives of ordinary people. His efforts did much to raise
appreciation of traditional English folk song and melody. Later in his life he
served as president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS),
which, in recognition of his early and important work in this field, named its
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library after him.

In 1905, Vaughan Williams conducted the first concert of the newly founded
Leith Hill Music Festival at Dorking which he was to conduct until 1953, when
he passed the baton to his successor, William Cole.

In 1909, he composed incidental music for the Cambridge Greek Play, a stage
production at Cambridge University of Aristophanes' The Wasps. The next
year, he had his first big public successes conducting the premieres of the
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (at The Three Choirs Festival in
Gloucester Cathedral) and his choral symphony A Sea Symphony
(Symphony No. 1). He enjoyed a still greater success with A London
Symphony (Symphony No. 2) in 1914, conducted by Geoffrey Toye.

Two World Wars

Vaughan Williams was 41 when
World War I erupted. Though he
could either have avoided war
service entirely, or have tried for a
commission he chose to enlist as a
private in the Royal Army Medical
Corps. After a gruelling time as a
stretcher bearer he was
commissioned in the Royal Garrison
Artillery. On one occasion, though
too ill to stand, he continued to direct
his battery while lying on the ground.
Prolonged exposure to gunfire began
a process of hearing loss which
eventually caused severe deafness
in old age. In 1918, he was
appointed Director of Music, First
Army and this helped him adjust
back into musical life.

After the war, he adopted for a while a somewhat mystical style in A Pastoral
Symphony (Symphony No. 3), which draws on his experiences as an
ambulance volunteer in that war; and Flos Campi, a work for viola solo, small
orchestra, and wordless chorus. From 1924 a new phase in his music
began, characterized by lively cross-rhythms and clashing harmonies. Key
works from this period are Toccata marziale, the ballet Old King Cole, the
Piano Concerto, the oratorio Sancta Civitas (his favourite of his choral works)
and the ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing, which is drawn not from the Bible
but from William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job. He also composed a
Te Deum in G for the enthronement of Cosmo Lang as Archbishop of
Canterbury. This period in his music culminated in the Symphony No. 4
in F minor, first played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1935. This
symphony contrasts dramatically with the "pastoral" orchestral works with
which he is associated; indeed, its almost unrelieved tension, drama, and
dissonance have startled listeners since it was premiered. Acknowledging that
the fourth symphony was different, the composer said, "I don't know if I like it,
but it's what I mean." Two years later, Vaughan Williams made a historic
recording of the work with the same orchestra for HMV (His Master's Voice),
his only commercial recording. During this period, he lectured in America and
England, and conducted the Bach Choir. He was appointed to the Order of
Merit in the King's Birthday Honours of 1935, having previously declined a
knighthood.

Vaughan Williams was an intimate life long friend of the famous British pianist
Harriet Cohen. His letters to her reveal a flirtatious relationship, regularly
reminding her of the thousands of kisses that she owed him. Before Cohen's
first American tour in 1931 he wrote "I fear the Americans will love you so
much that they won't let you come back." He was a regular visitor to her home
and often attended parties there. Cohen premiered Vaughan Williams' "Hymn
Tune Prelude" in 1930 which he dedicated to her. She later introduced the
piece throughout Europe during her concert tours. In 1933 she premiered his
Concerto in C major for pianoforte and orchestra, a work which was once
again dedicated to her. Cohen was given the exclusive right to play the piece
for a period of time. Cohen played and promoted Vaughan William’s work
throughout Europe, the USSR, and the United States.

His music now entered a mature lyrical phase, as in the Five Tudor Portraits;
the Serenade to Music (a setting of a scene from act five of The Merchant of
Venice, for orchestra and sixteen vocal soloists and composed as a tribute to
the conductor Sir Henry Wood); and the Symphony No. 5 in D, which he
conducted at the Proms in 1943. As he was now 70, many people considered
it a swan song, but he renewed himself again and entered yet another period
of exploratory harmony and instrumentation. His very successful
Symphony No. 6 of 1946 received a hundred performances in the first year. It
surprised both admirers and critics, many of whom suggested that this
symphony (especially its last movement) was a grim vision of the aftermath of
an atomic war: typically, Vaughan Williams himself refused to recognise any
program behind this work.

Late Harvest
Before his death in 1958, he completed three more symphonies. His seventh,
Sinfonia Antartica, which was based on his 1948 film score for Scott of the
Antarctic, exhibits his renewed interest in instrumentation and sonority. The
eighth, first performed in 1956, was followed by the much weightier
Symphony No. 9 in E minor of 1956-57. This last symphony was initially
given a luke-warm reception after its first performance in May 1958, just three
months before the composer's death. But this dark and enigmatic work is
now considered by many devotees to be a fitting conclusion to his
sequence of symphonic works.

He also completed a range of instrumental and choral works, including a

tuba concerto, An Oxford Elegy on texts of Matthew Arnold, and the Christmas
cantata Hodie. He also wrote an arrangement of The Old One Hundredth
Psalm Tune for the Coronation Service of Queen Elizabeth II. At his death he
left an unfinished Cello Concerto, an opera Thomas the Rhymer and music for
a Christmas play, The First Nowell, which was completed by his amanuensis
Roy Douglas (b. 1907).

Despite his substantial involvement in church music, and the religious

subject-matter of many of his works, he was described by his second wife as
"an atheist … [who] later drifted into a cheerful agnosticism." It is noteworthy
that in his opera The Pilgrim's Progress he changed the name of the hero
from Bunyan's Christian to Pilgrim. He also set Bunyan's hymn Who would
true valour see to music using the traditional Sussex melody "Monk's Gate".
For many church-goers, his most familiar composition may be the hymn tune
Sine Nomine written for the hymn "For All the Saints" by William Walsham
How. The tune he composed for the mediaeval hymn "Come Down, O Love
Divine" (Discendi, Amor santo by Bianco of Siena, ca.1434) is entitled "Down
Ampney" in honour of his birthplace.

He also worked as a tutor for Birkbeck

College. In the 1950s, the composer
supervised recordings of all but his
ninth symphony by Sir Adrian Boult
and the London Philharmonic
Orchestra for Decca. At the end of the
sessions for the mysterious sixth
symphony, Vaughan Williams gave a
short speech, thanking Boult and the
orchestra for their performance, "most
heartily," and Decca later included this
on the LP. He was to supervise the first
recording of the ninth symphony (for
Everest Records) with Boult; his death
on 26 August 1958 the night before the
recording sessions were to begin
provoked Boult to announce to the
musicians that their performance
would be a memorial to the composer.
These recordings, including the speeches by the composer and Boult, have
all been reissued by Decca on CD.

He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Vaughan Williams is a central figure in British music because of his long

career as teacher, lecturer and friend to so many younger composers and
conductors. His writings on music remain thought-provoking, particularly his
oft-repeated call for all persons to make their own music, however simple, as
long as it is truly their own.

Style
Vaughan Williams's music has often been said to be characteristically
English, in the same way as that of Gustav Holst, Frederick Delius, George
Butterworth, and William Walton. In Albion: The Origins of the English
Imagination, Peter Ackroyd writes, "If that Englishness in music can be
encapsulated in words at all, those words would probably be: ostensibly
familiar and commonplace, yet deep and mystical as well as lyrical, melodic,
melancholic, and nostalgic yet timeless." Ackroyd quotes music critic John
Alexander Fuller Maitland, whose distinctions included editing the second
edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians in the years just before
1911, as having observed that in Vaughan Williams's style "one is never quite
sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new."

His style expresses a deep regard for and fascination with folk tunes, the
variations upon which can convey the listener from the down-to-earth (which
he always tried to remain in his daily life) to the ethereal. Simultaneously the
music shows patriotism toward England in the subtlest form, engendered
by a feeling for ancient landscapes and a person's small yet not entirely
insignificant place within them. His earlier works sometimes show the
influence of Ravel, his teacher for three months in Paris in 1908. Ravel
described Vaughan Williams as "the only one of my pupils who does not write
my music."

Works
Operas
Hugh the Drover or Love in the Stocks (1910-20). Romantic ballad opera.
Libretto: Harold Child
Sir John in Love (1924-28), from which comes an arrangement by Ralph
Greaves of Fantasia on "Greensleeves"
The Poisoned Kiss (1927-29; revisions 1936-37 and 1956-57). Libretto:
Evelyn Sharp (later amended by Ralph and Ursula Vaughan Williams)
Riders to the Sea (1925-32), from the play by John Millington Synge
The Pilgrim's Progress (1909-51), based on John Bunyan's allegory
The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains (1921). Libretto: Ralph Vaughan
Williams (from John Bunyan) (Later incorporated, save for the final section,
into The Pilgrim's Progress)
Ballets
Old King Cole (1923)
On Christmas Night (1926)
Job: A Masque for Dancing (1930)
The Running Set (1933)
The Bridal Day (1938-9)

Orchestral
Symphonies
A Sea Symphony (Symphony No. 1), a choral symphony on texts by Whitman
(1903-1909)
A London Symphony (Symphony No. 2) (1913)
A Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No. 3) (1921)
Symphony No. 4 in F minor (1931-34)
Symphony No. 5 in D (1938-43)
Symphony No. 6 in E minor (1946-47)
Sinfonia Antartica (Symphony No. 7) (1949-52) (partly based on his music for
the film Scott of the Antarctic)
Symphony No. 8 in D minor (1953-55)
Symphony No. 9 in E minor (1956-57)
In the Fen Country, for orchestra (1904)
Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 (1906, rev. 1914)
The Wasps, an Aristophanic suite (1909)
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910, rev. 1913 and 1919)
Fantasia on "Greensleeves" (1934)
Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus (1939)
Concerto Grosso, for three parts of strings requiring different levels of
technical skill (1950)

Concerti
Piano
Piano Concerto in C (1926-31)
Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (c. 1946; a reworking of Piano
Concerto in C)
Violin
The Lark Ascending for violin and orchestra (1914)
Concerto Accademico for violin and orchestra (1924-25)
Viola
Flos Campi for viola, wordless chorus and small orchestra (1925)
Suite for Viola and Small Orchestra (1936-38)
Oboe Concerto in A minor, for oboe and strings (1944)
Fantasia (quasi variazione) on the Old 104th Psalm Tune for piano, chorus,
and orchestra (1949)
Romance in D flat for harmonica and orchestra (1951) (written for Larry Adler)
Tuba Concerto in F minor (1954)

Choral
Toward the Unknown Region, song for chorus and orchestra, setting of Walt
Whitman (1906)
Five Mystical Songs for baritone, chorus and orchestra, settings of George
Herbert (1911)
Fantasia on Christmas Carols for baritone, chorus, and orchestra (1912;
arranged also for reduced orchestra of organ, strings, percussion)
Mass in G Minor for unaccompanied choir (1922)
Sancta Civitas (The Holy City) oratorio, text mainly from the Book of
Revelation (1923–25)
Te Deum in G (1928)
Benedicite for soprano, chorus, and orchestra (1929)
In Windsor Forest, adapted from the opera Sir John in Love (1929)
Three Choral Hymns (1929)
Magnificat for contralto, women's chorus, and orchestra (1932)
Five Tudor Portraits for contralto, baritone, chorus, and orchestra (1935)
Dona nobis pacem, text by Walt Whitman and other sources (1936)
Festival Te Deum for chorus and orchestra or organ (1937)
Serenade to Music for sixteen solo voices and orchestra, a setting of
Shakespeare, dedicated to Sir Henry Joseph Wood on the occasion of his
Jubilee (1938)
A Song of Thanksgiving (originally Thanksgiving for Victory) for narrator,
soprano solo, children's chorus, mixed chorus, and orchestra (1944)
An Oxford Elegy for narrator, mixed chorus and small orchestra (1949)
Three Shakespeare Songs for SATB unaccompanied, composed for The
British Federation of Music Festivals National Competitive Festival (1951)
Oh Taste and See The motet setting of Psalm 34:8. The original SATB version
was composed for the Coronation of HM Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster
Abbey in June 1953. (1953)
Hodie, a Christmas oratorio (1954)
Folk songs of the Four Seasons for unaccompanied SSA chorus.
Epithalamion for baritone solo, chorus, flute, piano, and strings (1957)
A Choral Flourish for unaccompanied SATB chorus, composed for a large
choral event in the Royal Albert Hall at the invitation of (and dedicated to) Alan
Kirby (c. 1952)

Arrangements of Christian Hymns

Vaughan Williams was the musical editor of the English Hymnal of 1906, and
the co-editor with Martin Shaw of Songs of Praise of 1925 and the Oxford
Book of Carols of 1928, all in collaboration with Percy Dearmer.

A Hymn of Glory Let Us Sing

All Creatures of Our God and King
Alleluia, Sing to Jesus
Amid the Thronging Worshippers
At the Name of Jesus
"Come Down, O Love Divine" original hymnody by Bianco of Siena (1434)"Di-
scendi, Amor santo"and entitled "Down Ampney" in honour of Vaughan
Williams birthplace
Come, Let Us with Our Lord Arise an Easter anthem
Come Thou Long Expected Jesus a carol for the season of Advent
For All the Saints harmonized from "Sine Nomine"
God Be With You Till We Meet Again
I Love You Lord, My Strength, My Rock
I Sing the Mighty Power of God
Jesus, Lord, Redeemer
"Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence", text of the Cherubic hymn of Liturgy of St
James, harmonized to the French folk tune Picardy (1906)
Make Room Within My Heart, O God
My God, My God, O Why Have You Forsaken Me? a lament for Good Friday
services during Passiontide
O Come to Me, the Master Said
"O Little Town of Bethlehem" a popular Christmas Carol penned by the
American Phillips Brooks adapted to the English tune "Forest Green"
O Sing a Song of Bethlehem
On Christmas Night All Christians Sing
When the Church of Jesus

Vocal
"Linden Lea", song (1901)
The House of Life, six sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, set to music (1904)
Songs of Travel (1904)
"The Sky Above The Roof" (1908)
On Wenlock Edge, song cycle for tenor, piano and string quartet (1909)
Along the Field, for tenor and violin
Three Poems by Walt Whitman for baritone and piano (1920)
Four Poems by Fredegond Shove: for baritone and piano (1922)
Four Hymns for Tenor, Viola and Strings (1914)
Merciless Beauty for tenor, two violins, and cello
Four Last Songs to poems of Ursula Vaughan Williams
Ten Blake songs, song cycle for high voice and oboe (1957)

Chamber and Instrumental

String Quintet in C minor for violin, viola, cello, double bass and piano (1903)
String Quartet No. 1 in G minor (1908)
Phantasy Quintet for 2 violins, 2 violas and cello (1912)
Six Studies in English Folk-Song, for violoncello and piano (1926)
Three Preludes on Welsh Hymn Tunes, for organ (1956)
String Quartet No. 2 in A minor ("For Jean, on her birthday," 1942-44)
Sonata in A minor for violin and piano (1952)
Romance for Viola and Piano (undated)

Organ
Three Preludes on Welsh Hymntunes (Bryn Calfaria, Rhosymedre, Hyfrydol)
(1920)
Prelude and Fugue in C minor (1921)
A Wedding Tune for Ann (1943)
The Old One Hundredth Psalm Tune, harmonization and arrangement (1953)
Two Organ Preludes (The White Rock, St. David's Day) (1956)

Film, radio, and TV scores

49th Parallel, 1940, his first, talked into it by Muir Mathieson to assuage his
guilt at being able to do nothing for the war effort
Coastal Command, 1942
BBC adaptation of The Pilgrim's Progress, 1942
The People's Land, 1943
The Story of a Flemish Farm, 1943
Stricken Peninsula, 1945
The Loves of Joanna Godden, 1946
Scott of the Antarctic, 1948, partially reused for his Symphony No. 7 Sinfonia
Antartica

Band
English Folk Song Suite for military band (1923)
Toccata Marziale for military band (1924)
Flourish for Wind Band (1939)
Sea Songs
Overture: Henry V for brass band
Variations for brass band (1957)