Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Man and His Music

Ralph Vaughan Williams (pronounced "Rayf") was born 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.

As a student he had studied piano, "which I never could play, and the violin, which was my musical salvation."

He attended the Royal College of Music (RCM) under Charles Villieres Stanford. He read history and music at Trinity College, Cambridge, where his friends and contemporaries included the philosophers George Edward Moore and Bertrand Russell. He then returned to the RCM and studied composition with Hubert Parry, who became a close friend. 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 a big step forward in his orchestral style occurred when he studied in Paris with Maurice Ravel for three months.

In 1904 he discovered English folk songs, which were fast becoming extinct owing to the increase of literacy and printed music in rural areas. He traveled the countryside with his friend, Gustav Holst, 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.

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

He chose to enlist as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps and had a grueling time as a stretcher-bearer before being commissioned in the Royal Garrison Artillery. Prolonged exposure to gunfire began a process of loss of hearing which was eventually to cause 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 profoundly mystical style in the Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No. 3) 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.

He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1935, having previously declined a knighthood.

His music now entered a mature lyrical phase, as in the Five Tudor Portraits; the "morality" The Pilgrim's Progress; 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 #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. Before his death in 1958 he completed four more symphonies, including No. 7 Sinfonia Antarctica, based on his 1948 film score for Scott of the Antarctica. He also completed a range of instrumental and choral works, including a tuba concerto, Oxford Elegy on texts of Matthew Arnold, and the Christmas cantata Hodie. 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). He also wrote an arrangement of The Old One Hundredth Psalm Tune for the Coronation Service of Queen Elizabeth.

He was married twice. His first wife, Adeline Fisher (daughter of the historian Herbert William Fisher), died in 1951 after many years of suffering from crippling arthritis. In 1953 he married the poet Ursula Wood (b. 1911), whom he had known since the late 1930s and with whom he collaborated on a number of vocal works. Ursula later wrote Vaughan Williams's biography RVW: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams, which remains the standard work on his life.

In the 1950s, the composer supervised recordings of all but his ninth symphony by Sir Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic Orchestra for Decca Records. 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 the night before the recording sessions were to begin resulted in Boult announcing to the musicians that their performance would be a memorial to the composer.

He died in 1958 and is buried in Westminster Abbey, in the North Choir Aisle.

Vaughan Williams was a rich man even before the royalties from his works made him richer. Not wishing to have more than he needed, he engaged not just in works of noblesse oblige but also became a one-man arts council.

He funded his friend Gustav Holst for much of his career, and funded his widow after Holst's regrettably early death. Young composers came to him later in his life with a begging-bowl that rarely went unfilled, if they had any talent.

After his death, the Trust that bears his name disbursed (and continues to disburse) funds to ensure performances and recordings of music by scores of composers. That we have a musical life in England today, and will continue to have one, is, in part, down to his practical help.

Yet there is a charming letter in the collection of them about to be published by the Oxford University Press to commemorate his anniversary that, to my mind, seals the point of Vaughan Williams's massive importance to our nation and its culture.

Six weeks before he died, he wrote to the headmaster of a primary school in Norfolk to speak of the honor he felt in the school's proposal to name one of its houses after him.

He enclosed a message to be read out to the children that contains thoughts he had expressed in earlier writings, and frequently in conversation with others, and which seem to sum up the point of him, and of his work. "I believe that all the arts, and especially music, are necessary to a full life.... Music will show you what to do with your life.

It is necessary to know facts, but music will enable you to see past facts to the very essence of things in a way which science cannot do. The arts are the means by which we can look through the magic casements and see what lies beyond."

To the English in particular, Vaughan Williams's music - however much he might have protested it had no "meaning" - is revelatory in this way. It reveals history, landscape, everyday life, the feeling that unites a homogenous group of people not just at times of great upheaval, such as during a war, but at all other times, too.

Operas

Hugh the Drover (1914, perf. 1924)
The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains (1921)
Sir John in Love (1929)
The Poisoned Kiss (1929, perf. 1937)
Riders to the Sea (1932, perf. 1937)
The Pilgrim's Progress (1951)

Ballet

Job (1931)

Symphonies

A Sea Symphony, with vv (no. 1, 1909)
A London Symphony (no. 2, 1913, rev. 1920, 1933)
Pastoral Symphony (no. 3, 1921)
· no. 4, f (1934)
· no. 5 D (1943)
· no. 6, e (1947)
Sinfonia antartica, with violins (no. 7, 1952)
· no. 8, d (1955)
· no. 9, e (1956-7)

Other orchestral music

The Wasps, overture (1909)
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, strings (1910, rev. 1919)
The Lark Ascending, violin and orchestra (1914)
English Folk Song Suite, band (1923)
Toccata Marziale, band (1924)
Concerto Accademico, violin (1925)
Pf Concerto, C (1931)
Suite, various, small orchestra (1934)
Five variants of Dives and Lazarus, strings, harps (1939)
Oboe Concerto, a (1944)
Tuba Concerto, f (1954)

Vocal/orchestral music

Flos campi, viola, SATB (1925)
Sancta civitas (1925)
Five Tudor Portraits (1935)
Dona nobis pacem (1936)
Serenade to Music (1938)
An Oxford Elegy (1949)
Hodie (1954)

Smaller choral

Mass, g (1921)
Many motets, part songs, folk song arrangements, carols, hymns

Songs

On Wenlock Edge (1909)
Ten Blake songs (1957)
Folk song arrangement

Chamber music

String Quartet, a (1944)
Violin sonata (1954)

Filmography

The Flemish Farm
The 49th Parallel
The Loves of Joanna Godden
Scott of the Antarctic
Bitter Springs

"I am told that when grapevines were first cultivated in California the vineyard masters used to try the experiment of importing plants from France or Italy and setting them in their own soil. The result was that the grapes acquired a peculiar individual flavor, so strong was the influence of the soil in which they were planted. I think I need hardly draw the moral of this, namely, that if the roots of your art are firmly planted in your own soil and that soil has anything individual to give you, you may still gain the whole world and not lose your own soul."

Ralph Vaughan Williams
National Music (1934)

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