Ralph Vaughan Williams
1872 - 1958
My recordings: click to listen
Tired - The Sky Above the Roof - Three Songs From Shakespeare
When Icicles Hang by the Wall Take Oh Take Orpheus with his Lute
This great English composer,
teacher, writer and conductor was a key figure in the 20th century
revival of British music. He was born in the heart of the English countryside
at Down Ampney in Gloucester on the 12th of October 1872. The
youngest of three children, he grew up at his mother’s family home, at Leith
Hill in Surrey, where he would spend most of his life.
His father the Reverend Arthur
Vaughan Williams was the Vicar of Down Ampney. Arthur’s family was lawyers and
judges of Welsh ancestry. After gaining his BA and MA from Christ Church,
Oxford, Arthur went to minister the parish of Halsall near Ormskirk, in
Lancashire between 1863 and 1865. He moved to Tanhurst near Leith Hill that
year, where he met his wife. They moved to his new parish at Down Ampney and
their children attended the village school. In 1875, when Ralph was only two
years old, he died and his grieving wife moved with her children to live with
her family at Leith Hill.
Ralph’s maternal grandparents
were Josiah Wedgwood III and a sister of Charles Darwin. They were wealthy, had
servants and provided private tuition for the children, yet instilled a sense
of responsibility that they felt came with an appreciation of their privileged
status. They made visits to stay with relatives at Bournemouth and in
Lincolnshire, and took family holidays in Normandy, visiting Mont St Michel.
Ralph’s older brother studied cello and his sister studied piano. Reading fairy
tales and the family Shakespeare book with its illustrations and musical
excerpts was Ralph favourite hobby. He began composing at only age 6, and
studied the Violin from age 7. His Aunt Sophy encouraged his music, teaching
him piano, harmony and bass theory and entering him for a correspondence
examination from Edinburgh University.
By time he went to ‘Field House’ Prep School (now St
Aubyn’s), at Rottingdean, Sussex he could play violin, piano and organ. Ralph’s
first contact with folk song was the singing of farm workers and fishermen of
the village, but the pupils were not allowed actual contact with the ‘lower
orders’. His music did get him into trouble on one occasion when his violin
playing in the dormitory set the other boys dancing in their nightshirts and
the masters caught them. Greek and Latin he found most enjoyable but he loved
walking above everything else. The magnificent South Downs with panoramic views
above his home would to call him all his life.
At the age of 15, Ralph went to Charterhouse at Godalming
in Surrey, not far from his home. For three years from 1887-9, he sang in the
chapel choir and played in the school orchestra, switching from violin to
viola. His compositions here included songs and chamber music. In the summer of
1890, aged 17, he went to Munich. All young composers with a serious intent on
a professional career made a study trip to Germany to absorb the musical
influences of Beethoven and Wagner. Ralph was more influenced by his discovery
of the ‘modern’ style of Brahms. He also enjoyed sight seeing, visiting art
galleries and the opera. This was a whole new world compared to England. He
returned to London, full of his experiences and impressions, and ready to work
hard on his future as a composer.
In the London of the late 19th Century,
‘English’ Music revolved around Shakespeare, music halls, Gilbert and Sullivan
operas, military marches and church music. Vaughan Williams enrolled at the
Royal College of Music (RCM) to study organ for two years. His family insisted
he became organist, as it was a safe and respectable career. The young
composer’s musical development was greatly influenced by Hubert Parry; although
Ralph enjoyed French music, which Parry disliked. His love of long distance
walking enabled him to make frequent visits home 30 miles away, and spend time
refreshing his spirits in the countryside.
In
September 1892 he enrolled at Trinity College Cambridge, where after three
years he gained his MusB in 1894 and a BA in history the following year. The
organist and composer Charles Wood gave him music lessons at Cambridge and
Ralph also had weekly lessons at Royal College of Music. He joined the
University Music Club because it was more informal than Music Society and
organised regular performances of chamber music. He met up with his cousin
Ralph Wedgwood, a fellow undergraduate and together they enjoyed walking and
cycling in the Cambridgeshire countryside and visited the Lake District, during
the holidays. They held ‘Reading parties’ at a cottage in Seatoller,
Borrowdale. Here Vaughan Williams met a childhood friend, Adeline Fisher, who
came from an artistic family and played cello and piano. They fell in love.
Some of his tutors, and even his own family, were not
convinced that Ralph should become a composer, but Ralph was determined to find
his own path and struggled against the accepted English musical style of the
period. He knew that in order to reach his goal, he had to improve his
technique and always endeavour to achieve the highest professional standards.
At the RCM he enrolled in Stanford’s composition class. Stanford was a hard
taskmaster and Vaughan Williams clashed with him on various occasions. He continued
his organ studies and found employment as the organist and choirmaster at St
Barnabas’ Church in South Lambert.
He hated his new job but his unhappy time was relieved by
his meetings with a group of student composers, known as the ‘Kensington Tea
Shop Set’. The group included Gustav Holst, John Ireland, Thomas Dunhill and
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Vaughan Williams formed a close and life long
friendship with Holst. They were both originally from Gloucester and both
enjoying long-distance walking and cycling but their circumstances and
background were very different. Vaughan
Williams, a Cambridge graduate, from a wealthy, well-connected family had no
problems with his personal finances. Holst was the son of a hard-working
Cheltenham musician of German-Scandinavian origin, who had struggled to get by
on a £l a week since enrolling at the RCM. He was eventually granted a
scholarship, but had to supplement his income, playing the trombone in dance
halls and seaside bands.
The two
men were also physically contrasted. Vaughan Williams was large and robust,
well dressed with the ‘air of an aesthete’. Holst was shorter, thin and pale,
shabbily dressed, short-sighted and had a neuritis in his right arm, which had
ended his chances of becoming a concert pianist. This often made writing down
his compositions unbearably painful. Yet these two completely different men
were kindred spirits until Holst's death forty years later.
Their
most important collaboration began when they decided to criticise each other's
compositions mercilessly, but honestly, and to hold 'field days' at each
other's lodgings to work on any improvements they suggested to each other. This
experience proved invaluable to them both as each struggled to find an
individual and essentially English musical voice. They joined the College's
Literary Society, reading Pre-Raphaelite literature, Swinburne, novels and
poems by George Meredith and Thomas Hardy, and European literature. When A. E.
Housman’s sequence of poems ‘A Shropshire Lad’ was published in 1896, a whole
generation of composers and poets was powerfully influenced and inspired.
The
Debating Society heard Holst and Vaughan Williams speak on 'The Future of
English Music', recommending the abolition of academic training and endorsing
the radical ideas of the Fabian-style Socialism of William Morris and Bernard
Shaw.
Vaughan Williams married Adeline in 1897. They honeymooned in Berlin where Ralph
enrolled at the Hochschule für Musik to study with Max Bruck. He enjoyed
his lessons and shared an interest in folk song with his tutor. Ralph and
Adeline spent Christmas in Italy at San Remo, then they visited Prague and
Dresden. In 1898 they returned to London and set up home in Cowley St, Westminster.
Vaughan Williams took the FRCO exam and began his thesis for a doctorate.
The couple began quickly found a close circle of friends including the ‘Tea Shop Set' from the RCM, friends from Ralph's 'Magic Circle' at Cambridge and relatives on both sides. There was much music-making with a group of friends who formed a string quartet nicknamed ‘The Cowley Street Wobblers', with Vaughan Williams playing the viola part. He was now composing chamber music, part-songs and choral works. He also set songs to texts by Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, including his ‘House of Life’ song cycle, to words by Rossetti. The song ‘Linden Lea’ also belongs to this early period. It reveals the composer beginning to find his unique ‘voice’ and style in setting a text, which was originally written in Dorset dialect by William Barnes, a friend of the novelist Thomas Hardy.
Gaining his Doctorate in Music
from Cambridge in 1899, there was really nothing more to learn academically,
yet Vaughan Williams was still very unsure of his direction. He felt drawn
towards the traditions of English Church music, which he particularly admired
but he also knew that as a ‘rational thinker and nominal unbeliever’, his
influences would go beyond these confines. He admired the brilliance of Purcell
and of his predecessors, and recognized that English music had never reached
such heights since Purcell’s death. He also admired Wagner, but felt this music
could suffocate his Englishness. Europe's politically oppressed minorities
expressed their identity through indigenous folk music but the suppression of
the English identity was occurring culturally from within. Vaughan Williams
realised that he had to research England’s native traditions if he were to
consolidate a ‘National Voice’. To avoid the imitation of
other countries’ styles, he searched for English sources and researched English
folk song, Elizabethan and Jacobean music and the philosophy of musical
citizenship - a national music. Holst shared these interests and ideals.
In 1899 the Vaughan Williams’ moved into 10 Barton Street
in Westminster. Their new home was more comfortable, yet they still enjoyed
occasional holidays in Yorkshire or the West Country. Adeline was nursing her
sick brother, whilst Ralph was composing for 8 hours a day. His works and
Holst’s began to receive wider public attention and performances. Their
research into English folk traditions inspired Vaughan Williams’ song cycle
‘Songs of Travel’, settings of R. L. Stevenson’s poems, with their idealised vision
of rural life.
By 1902 Vaughan Williams was openly expressing his
interest in folk song as a national asset. He gave lectures and began
collecting folk songs. He travelled to Essex, Norfolk, Yorkshire, Wiltshire and
Sussex, cycling and walking, with a note pad in his rucksack. The composer
George Butterworth later joined him on his travels, bringing the latest
recording equipment to capture the music in live performance.
‘We were dazzled, we wanted to
preach a new gospel, we wanted to rhapsodise on these tunes just as Liszt and
Grieg had done on theirs ... we simply were fascinated by the tunes.’
The
effect of this experience had an immediate impact on his compositions. He
composed rhapsodies and tone poems including 'A Symphonic Impression' entitled
’In the Fen Country’. The melodies of this impressionistic portrait of the damp
and chilly lowlands of East Anglia were presented in the style of folk music.
The tunes of Kings Lynn fishermen inspired his ‘Three Norfolk Rhapsodies’ and
although he later revised his music, a truly national English style began to
emerge, that would influence the future of English music.
The
Leith Hill Festival was established by his sister Meggie and Lady Farrer. This
music festival was based largely in nearby Dorking and provided a competition
platform for amateur choirs. With Vaughan Williams’ direction and support it
became a well-respected fixture for choral events. As Principal
Conductor from 1905-1953 he
encouraged the choirs to experiment with Elizabethan madrigals and church
music. The Festival gained a national reputation for his performances of
Bach. He also became involved
with arranging music for revivals of Shakespeare, Jonson and their
contemporaries at Stratford-on-Avon. In Sir Frank Benson’s Shakespeare season
at Stratford on Avon in 1913, he composed music for the productions of ‘Richard
II’ and ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’.
A commission from The Rev.
Percy Dearmer was the catalyst for one of his greatest compositions. Revising
‘Hymns Ancient and Modern’, the
authorised hymn book of the Anglican Church, would take two years. With Holst
he rediscovered a treasure trove of church music from Elizabeth I to Purcell.
Among them was a psalm tune by the Elizabethan composer Thomas Tallis.
The Vaughan Williams’ moved
to 13, Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, in 1905. This was London’s fashionable bohemian
quarter and Ralph’s study overlooked Thames. His neighbour Percy Grainger, the
Australian composer became a good friend. But Ralph could not settle into his
new home and felt blocked in his compositions…'In 1908 I came to the conclusion
that I was lumpy and stodgy, had come to a dead-end, and that a little French
polish would be of use to me". He decided to go to Paris and study with
Maurice Ravel. The two composers could not have been more of a contrast. Ravel
was small, neat and fastidious, whereas Vaughan Williams was large and untidy
with a frank English manner. When asked to compose 'a little minuet in the
style of Mozart’ Vaughan Williams quite forcefully refused in his best
schoolboy French. After that, they became great friends and Ravel taught him
how to orchestrate in points of colour rather than in lines and introduced him
to the music of Rimski-Korsakov and Mussorgski, who had already done for
Russian folk music what Vaughan Williams and his colleagues were doing for
English music.
When
Vaughan Williams returned to London three months later his music began to be
strongly influenced by the French 'Impressionist’ composers. 'I came home with
a bad attack of French fever…and wrote a string quartet which caused a friend
to say that I must have been having tea with Debussy.’
Ravel
came to stay with Ralph and Adeline in April 1909, enjoying the sights with his
hosts, and Debussy was also in London conducting his opera ‘Pelléas et
Mélisande’ to delighted audiences at Covent Garden. That year Vaughan Williams
composed his song cycle ‘On Wenlock Edge’, setting six poems from A. E.
Housman's ‘A Shropshire Lad’ for tenor, piano and string quartet. His enhanced
technique and lightness of style complemented the English atmosphere of the
poems. The work was hailed as a masterpiece at its premiere in November,
performed by the tenor Gervase Elwes.
Vaughan Williams always believed that music was for the
people and was deeply sympathetic to the common aspirations of ordinary people.
He took part in a wide range of musical activities, composing for all kinds of
situations from simple occasional pieces to visionary personal expressions. He
collected over 800 folk songs and variants, in 1910 began writing and editing
for musical publications. This year also saw the completion of his great
masterpiece ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’, which would embody the identity
of English music and become his most well-loved work.
At the outbreak of World War One, aged 41, Vaughan
Williams served as a wagon orderly with Royal Army Medical Corps in France and
on the Salonika front in Greece. Many of his friends died in combat, including
George Butterworth, who was killed on the Somme. By the Armistice, Vaughan
Williams had been made an artillery officer; the deafening noises from the guns
would lead to his eventually loss of hearing. After the Armistice he was made
Director of Music for the 1st Army of the British Expeditionary
Force, organising amateur music making among troops.
Before the war,
he had already composed ‘The Lark Ascending’ for violin and orchestra, based on
a poem by George Meredith. After the war, whilst staying with friends in the
Cotswolds, he began to revise it. The words of the poem reveal how Vaughan
Williams healed his emotional scars from the war, setting a beautifully
effective and lyrical tone poem:
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake...
For singing till his heaven fills,
‘Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes...
Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.
He became more involved in conducting, helping to revive
Leith Hill Festival and establish the English Folk Dance Society. He revised
his other pre-war compositions including ‘Hugh The Drover’ and composed new
pieces. All his life he would be actively involved in many activities. The
conductor Adrian Boult became a great friend and interpreter of his works. In
1919 Vaughan Williams became a teacher of composition at the RCM. His
generosity and encouragement inspired his pupils to discover their own style. His
lectures in the USA promoted English music as a national style and, with the
increased demand for performances of his works, his international reputation
grew and he became the leader of an ‘English School’. He won many awards but he
also refused some, including a Knighthood.
‘Hugh
the Drover’ was published, but Vaughan Williams had sent his manuscripts to
various publishers; many became lost in the process. The full score of the
‘London Symphony’ had been sent to a German publishing house before the war and
disappeared permanently. It had to be painstakingly recopied from orchestral
parts for submission to an English publisher. The Oxford University Press
accepted ‘The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains’ for publication and Hubert
Foss, the new Director of Music Publishing, made Vaughan Williams an offer to
oversee the publication of all his future scores. The composer found Foss and
the offer sympathetic and accepted. OUP would always deal with the practical
details of his publishing and Vaughan Williams would say 'ask Foss' whenever
any difficulties arose. The arrangement eliminated a great deal of pressure and
anxiety.
During a
much needed summer holiday with Adeline, at the village of Oare, on Exmoor, he
worked on his compositions. These included his biblical oratorio ‘Sancta Civitas’, a violin
concerto in D minor, his opera ‘Sir John in Love’, based on the Merry
Wives of Windsor and
‘Flos Campi’, a suite for viola, small chorus and small orchestra for the
virtuoso violist Lionel Tertis.
The following spring, on the 27th of March 1925, a recital of his songs was given by
Steuart Wilson. The programme included new songs to texts by Seamus O'Sullivan,
Fredegond Shove and Walt Whitman, and the ‘Three Songs from Shakespeare’. It
included a second setting of ‘Orpheus with his lute’; the first setting dating
form circa 1901. His inspiration for setting songs to Shakespeare came from
composing his opera ‘Sir John in Love’, which he completed that winter at his
new home in Dorking.
Malcolm Sargent conducted the premiere of
‘Sir John in Love’ the following March, in The Parry Memorial Theatre at the
RCM. In the programme notes Vaughan Williams pre-empted critical comparison
with other composers:
‘To write yet another opera
about Falstaff at this time of day, may seem the height of impertinence for one
appears in so doing, to be entering into competition with four great men -
Shakespeare, Verdi, Nicolai and Holst…with regard to Shakespeare, my only
excuse is that he is fair game, like the Bible, and may be made use of nowadays
even for advertisements of soap and razors. I hope that it may be possible to
consider that even Verdi's masterpiece does not exhaust all the possibilities
of Shakespeare's genius…and I hope that I have treated Holst with the sincerest
flattery not only imitating his choice of Falstaff as the subject of an opera
but in imitating his use of English folk tunes in the texture of the music. The
best I can hope will be that Sir John in Love may be considered as a sequel to
his brilliant Boar's Head. There remains Nicolai's Merry Wives, which in my
opinion is the most successful of all Falstaff operas, my excuse in this case
is that there is hardly any Shakespeare in his libretto’.
He
worried unnecessarily, as both audience and critics were enraptured by the
infectious merriment of the music and libretto. It was the first of three operas
he wrote between 1924 and 1932. He began composing a setting of Synge’s play
‘Riders to the Sea’ in 1925 and ‘The Poisoned Kiss’ in 1927.
That
year, Adeline fell and broke her thigh so badly that she had to be encased from
chest to toes in plaster. She never fully recovered and it triggered the onset
of crippling arthritis, from which she would suffer for the rest of her life.
In the summer of 1929, seeking a tranquil location for her convalescence and
for Ralph to compose in more peaceful surroundings, they moved to ‘White
Gates’. The house had a garden with flowering trees, an orchard and a tennis
court. The Study faced the Downs and had a French window, which opened into the
garden. It was here that Vaughan
Williams condensed ‘Sir John in Love’ into a chamber cantata ‘In Windsor
Forest’ and composed his
ballet ‘Job’, inspired by the works of William Blake. It was choreographed by
Ninette de Valois and premiered in 1931.
Adeline’s
health worsened and Ralph was devastated by Holst’s death in 1934. Elgar and
Delius had also died that year, but the loss of his friend and musical
‘partner’ affected Vaughan Williams so deeply that he said ‘what are we to do
without him.’
In 1935 Vaughan Williams accepted the Order of Merit and other honour from Universities across World. The ‘Shakespeare Prize’ from the University of Hamburg in 1937, caused him some discomfort and before accepting, he stated that he belonged to ‘more than one English Society whose object is to combat all that the present German regime stands for’. He went to Hamburg to receive it in June 1938. In his acceptance speech, he called for a greater appreciation of English music in Germany and hoped that the performances of his London Symphony and Tallis Fantasia would encourage mutual understanding. In Hamburg, he was fully aware of the visible ‘trappings’ of Nazism, the swastikas and Nazi salutes, yet Vaughan Williams bore in mind that this was also the city of Brahms. He visited Brahms’ birthplace and the nearby city of Lubeck, where Bach was born.
Shakespeare was the inspiration
for his next commission; a work for sixteen of Sir Henry Wood’s favourite
singers to perform in a concert, celebrating Wood’s Golden Jubilee of Wood.
Setting Lorenzo’s speech in praise of music from ‘The Merchant of Venice’, his
‘Serenade to Music’ is scored for sixteen soloists and orchestra is dedicated
to Sir Henry Wood 'in grateful recognition of his services to music’. This
beautifully serene and sensuous music was later recorded by the soloists, and
Vaughan Williams made a subsequent arrangement for chorus, and a reduced number
of soloists, so that it
could be more widely performed.
Vaughan Williams had a genuine compassion for the
under-privileged and deep conviction that the cultural identity of every nation
should be proudly maintained. He saw Federalism as the way forward for Europe.
When Germany banned his music in 1939, he aided German refugees and organised
lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery, promoting music from many European
nations. He became interested in composing film music, and wrote the score ‘The
49th Parallel’ and Ministry of Information films.
At the beginning of World War
Two, Vaughan Williams was sixty-seven, and too old for active service. However,
he got involved in every aspect of war work where he felt he could be useful.
He formed committees for refugees and organised campaigns for the release of
interned alien musicians. As the ‘Dorking Halls’ were turned into an emergency
government store, he arranged recitals for displaced people at a hotel, and
popular concerts for the servicemen stationed nearby. His fields became
allotments; he built hen-houses, and collected recyclable items for the war
effort, door to door with a handcart. Still concerned communicate his sympathy
as a composer to the needs of the people, he gave radio broadcasted talks. In
the 1940 broadcast of ‘The Composer in Wartime’ he said:
‘What is the composer to do in
wartime? ... Some lucky devils are… able to go on with their art as if nothing
had happened. To them the war is merely an irritating intrusion on their
spiritual and therefore their true life. I have known young composers refer
with annoyance to this 'boring war’…whatever this war is, it is not boring. It
may have been unnecessary, it may be wrong, but it cannot be ignored: it will
affect our lives and those of generations to come. Is it then not worthwhile
even for the most aloof artist to take some stock of the situation, to ensure
at least that if and when the war ends he will be able to continue
composing. What will be the musical
material on which the composer of the future can count? It will be no use
writing elaborate orchestral pieces if there are no orchestras left to play
them, or subtle string quartets if there are no subtle instrumentalists
available…One thing, I think, we can be sure of, no bombs or blockades can rob
us of our vocal chords; there will always remain for us the oldest and greatest
of musical instruments, the human voice.’
Throughout the war ‘White
Gates’ was a refuge for many guests. In addition to assorted nephews, honorary
nieces and friends who came and went, one particular friend and invaluable
helper was Ursula Wood, who came to recuperate in the countryside, following
the death of her husband. She was well loved by both Ralph and Adeline and
lived with them as a member of the family.
In the
summer of 1944, Ralph’s brother Hervey died, and he inherited Leith Hill Place.
This ancestral house with its estates and tenants was a great responsibility,
which he felt unable to shoulder. After
much soul searching he felt it was most appropriate to donate the property to
the National Trust, with its artefacts intact, retaining only a few personal
mementos.
Towards
the end of the war the BBC commissioned his ‘Thanksgiving for Victory’. Vaughan
Williams sourced a variety of texts that expressed relief for the end of war
yet also discussed its morality. He had seen Laurence Olivier's prestigious
colour film of ‘Henry V' with its phenomenally powerful music by William
Walton, and finding common ground with his commission he included a section of
Walton’s score in his own composition. During the war he had composed
his 5th Symphony but when the critics began to portray him as a
patriarchal figure and search for unreal prophetic significance and reference
to the war in his work, he was astonished.
He continued to compose film music, including the score for ‘Scott of
the Antarctic’ in 1948, which he developed into his ‘Sinfonia Antarctica’ and
completed in 1952.
In May 1951 Adeline died. Although she has been an invalid
and frail for years, Ralph was broken hearted. In his grief he was comforted by
the friendship and support of their companion and helper, Ursula Wood. She
attended concerts and festivals with him, and went with him on his aeroplane
trip to Paris. They visited Chartres, St Malo and Mont St Michel in Normandy,
where he had been on family holidays as a young boy.
His 40-year struggle to perfect ‘The Pilgrim's Progress’
was frustrated by a very poor production at Covent Garden. His bitter disappointment
was eased in 1952 by a whole week of celebrations for his 80th
birthday celebrations. The following year, on the 7th of February he married Ursula Wood and
went to Italy for the honeymoon. They visited Lake Garda, Verona and Padua and
stayed in Venice, returning for the Queen’s Coronation, and the dawn of a new
Elizabethan Age.
They left Dorking and went to live in London, at No 10
Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park. They took another holiday to Italy,
travelling to Pisa, Florence, Siena and Rome by train. Then they went to the
USA to New York, New England, the Pacific Coast and the Grand Canyon. Vaughan Williams was going
deaf but he was otherwise very healthy. He loved the cultural life of London
and travelling. He was always met with an enthusiastic welcome and inundated
with invitations. He composed, attended concerts and the Cheltenham Festival
and visited friends such as Gerald Finzi. He gave lectures at Cork University
in Ireland and met the poet Robert Graves, on Majorca, where he also visited
Chopin’s home at Valdemosa.
The Blake Centenary had commissioned a film of Blake
pictures, and asked Vaughan Williams to compose some songs set to Blake’s poems
for the film. He had always admired Blake as an artist, but he had little
affection for his poems. However, he agreed to attempt to set a selection of
them, providing they did not include 'that horrible little lamb—a poem I hate’.
When he began considering the poems he felt inspired to set them for tenor and
oboe and composed nine songs in four days, including ‘a tune for that beastly
little lamb...and it's rather a good tune.'
The Vaughan
Williams visited Italy again flying this time to Naples. In her
biography of Ralph, Ursula describes their visit:
‘It
rained for much of the three days we spent there, so we went to museums and
dined in little restaurants by the harbour and the Castel Ouovo. One morning
was fine for a couple of hours, long enough for us to see Herculaneum. Through
the good offices of the British Consul we were allowed a first tier box at San
Carlo—it was a concession for, not having brought evening clothes, we ought to
have been out of sight in the fifth tier. The season was near its end and the
opera we saw came from Sardinia, a rather dull and very long rigmarole about
bandits, but the pleasure was the opera house itself looking much as it must
have done to Nelson and the Hamiltons.
At last the sun came out, fortunately on the day we crossed to Ischia
where we had taken one of the houses owned by the Waltons. They met us, drove
us to Forio and installed us in the Villa Cristabella to unpack before we went
to them for lunch. We had a view of a bay and the little town with a white
chapel on the headland in front, a steep, wooded ridge behind, and from side
windows we could see the mountain, covered with vineyards and chestnut woods.
There was a garden with terraces everywhere, so that there was somewhere
sheltered to sit, which ever way the wind blew, and the house itself was rather
like the little houses at Herculaneum.
Everything had been done for us with
imagination and practicality, there was food in the larder, and spring flowers
in the sitting-room and bedroom. William was going to England so he very kindly
lent Ralph his piano, about six men carried it up, and as they arrived a
torrential storm broke. William commanded the situation, the piano was dried,
the water was swept out of the room, and the men rewarded, everyone talked at
once as the thunder rattled away over the bay. A few days later we had to
borrow candles, and, when William came to see what had gone wrong with the
electricity, he also brought a hot water bottle which we were very glad to
have.
There was a fireplace too and, though we were out whenever it was warm,
it was nice to have a fire to sit by in the evenings while Ralph read aloud and
I sewed. We read a great deal, and, having come to the end of our supplies, we
bought and borrowed many paperbacks… We also re-read Aldous Huxley's Brave New
World which had just been issued as a Penguin: so much- that had seemed
fantastic when it was first published was unpleasantly true or so nearly true
that it was quite bloodcurdling, so we returned to Lavengro, Ralph's favourite
novel, once again, and The Heart of Midlothian. We nearly blew ourselves up
pouring paraffin on to the damp wood to achieve a blaze, and the little grate
was usually surrounded by many sticks and logs put to dry. Ralph was glad to be
right away and to put all thoughts of the symphony out of his mind.
There were some fine days
when Sue Walton took us round the island or we made bus expeditions on our own.
One day we took a steamer to Capri for the day and a boat to the Blue Grotto.
Most people went by launch, and then disembarked into rowing boats, so there
was a queue by the cave mouth. Our boatman, who had rowed the whole way,
singing the Isle of Capri most of the time, for our operatic Italian did not
permit long conversations and he didn't seem to know any other songs, was glad
to rest till it was our turn to go in. The extraordinary electric-blue water
and the reflections from it made the people in the other boats seem all the
same neon colour. Their voices were intensified into a sound which seemed
almost solid, and when Ralph, looking round, said 'My God’, in a deep bass, it
cut through them and produced a silence. They all turned, mesmerized, to hear
what he would say. 'It's worse than Saint Peter's—let's go away.'
Lunch,
a quiet afternoon in the deserted ruins of a Roman garden and the steamer
journey home were all pleasant, but Ischia seemed far more beautiful to us.
For
our last week we had hot weather, bathing and basking: the fireflies came, and
the nights were full of their little, questing flames. We caught one and it sat
on my hand switching itself on and off with an extraordinary brightness,
illuminating every detail of rings and finger-nails, lines and graining of
skin.
Back
in Naples, we had time to see the Titians in the Capo di Monte to fulfil a
promise made to Gerald Kelly: we were glad he had commanded us to go there. We
spent a day driving through Sorrento and down the spectacular road to
Amalfi…The holiday had done all we had hoped for Ralph. He felt well and was
sunburnt and gay, ready for work and pleasure.’
Ralph Vaughan Williams died of coronary thrombosis on the 26th of August 1958. He had finished revising his ‘Symphony in E minor’. The final movement was inspired by Prospero’s line from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep’. On the 19th of September, a bronze casket containing his ashes was interred in the Musician's Corner of Westminster Abbey. The congregation sang the hymn ‘Come Down 0 Love Divine’ to his own setting ‘Down Ampney’ and Arthur Bliss, the Master of the Queen's Musick, spoke the tribute:
‘Vaughan Williams grew in
stature as the years went by like some magnificent tree. At the end, his mind
was full of music. He was always an explorer, a searcher. He was a great man as
we judge great men and it is wholly fitting that he should be laid to rest in
the Abbey beside Purcell and Handel.’
This emphatically English composer had re-created the
English musical language and established the symphonic form as the model for
the revival of English music. He was one of the new BBC’s first composers and
from 1924, was well served by his publisher OUP, who published his ‘Four Last
Songs’ after his death. In 1964, the RVW Society was formed to promote interest
in his life and works and is still going strong in the 21st Century.
Vaughan Williams’ evocative and sensual music is adored by professional and amateur
performers across the world. Redolent of the English countryside and a sense of
an age that has been lost forever, his sumptuous harmonies and glorious
melodies will continue to inspire many future generations.
His Shakespeare compositions include a
setting of ‘Three Shakespeare Songs’ for unaccompanied chorus from 1951 and
music for As you like it, Cymbeline, Henry V, King Henry VIII, Love’s Labours
Lost, Measure for Measure, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, Much ado about nothing, Othello, Richard II, Richard III, The Tempest,
Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale and Sonnet 71. He also arranged pieces for As
you like it, Henry IV (part 2), Love’s Labours Lost, The Merry Wives of
Windsor, Much ado about nothing, Richard II, Twelfth Night and Sonnet 146.
This biography of Vaughan Williams and the research for
the songs performed in the recital have been assisted by Maggie Hamilton at
Oxford University Press, Promotional Division. We are also most grateful for
the generous sponsorship of Stephen Connock, Chairman of the Ralph Vaughan
Williams Society.
© H Kean
Bibliography‘The Concise Oxford History of Music’ G Abraham OUP 1979
‘The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians’ 2nd Edition Grove 2001
‘Vaughan Williams : His Life & Times’ P Holmes Omnibus Press 1997
‘Vaughan Williams: A Life in Photographs’ J Northrop Moore OUP 1992
‘Ralph Vaughan Williams: a pictorial biography’ U Vaughan Williams & J E Lunn OUP 1971
‘R.V.W. A Biography of U Vaughan Williams OUP 1964
Letters and conversations with The RVW Society
All text book resources were obtained by Burnley Music Library and the British Library Service.
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