Ralph Vaughan Williams

Early life
Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in 1872 in the pretty Gloucestershire village of Down Ampney. Though he received a cosmopolitan training, including studying with Max Bruch in Berlin and Maurice Ravel in Paris, he is regarded as one of the most quintessentially English of composers.

Finding success
During the 19th century, Britain had often been dismissed as a ‘land without music’. Vaughan Williams was a significant figure in putting Britain back on the musical map, dedicating himself to challenging the fact that British composers were, as he put it, ‘unappreciated at home and unknown abroad’. He made a significant contribution to the development of almost every musical genre and produced a vast body of works that would stand the test of time. Some of his works are charming and immediately accessible, others more stylistically bold and ambitious. Vaughan Williams’ success paved the way for later British figures such as Benjamin Britten, while numerous present-day composers, including James Macmillan, Mark-Antony Turnage and Cheryl Frances-Hoad, have stated that Vaughan Williams influenced their work. He was a great advocate for women’s composition and taught many women students at the Royal College of Music.

The World in Vaughan Williams’ Day
Born in the Victorian age but living well into the era of the Welfare State, Vaughan Williams witnessed a tremendous amount of social, political and cultural change over the course of his long life. He lived through two World Wars, serving in France and Salonika in the First (when his hearing was damaged by the sound of constant gunfire) and writing music for propaganda films in the Second, something that reveals him to have been a modern figure who wasn’t afraid of responding to changing technology.

A Composer of Contradictions
Vaughan Williams is a figure of contradictions. Often seen as a cosy, conservative purveyor of nostalgia for a lost rural arcadia, he was in fact a politically left-leaning figure who saw himself first and foremost as a Londoner, campaigned for social justice, and wrote some decidedly forward-looking works. His music is often regarded as spiritual, yet he was a non-believer. He was a devotee of ‘serious’ literature, yet also an avid reader of Vogue. Those who knew Vaughan Williams well recalled a genial man, and orchestral musicians respected him, despite what was said to have been his rather ponderous conducting technique. On occasions where he became annoyed in rehearsal, he would apologise profusely afterwards. He could also be witty and self-deprecating: when asked by one player whether a note in the Fourth Symphony was correct, he replied, ‘Well, it’s B-flat. I know it looks wrong – and sounds wrong – but it’s right.’

Having studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, the Royal College of Music and in Berlin, in 1907 Vaughan Williams relocated to Paris to study orchestration under Maurice Ravel. This period of study inspired one of his most prolific orchestral composition periods, with both A Sea Symphony and the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis premiering in 1910.

Vaughan Williams’ studies and love of English folk song fertilised his talent and cemented his musical style as both personal and deeply English. He wrote many part-songs, including hymn and folk song settings alongside his stage work Hugh the Drover (1924), a ballad opera about English life. Much like nationalist composers such as Modest Mussorgsky or Manuel de Falla, Vaughan Williams utilised folk song as a fountain of native musical style.

His love of folk music was only strengthened with the outbreak of war in 1914. Mobilised in the army from 1916 until 1919, the war affected Vaughan Williams deeply, inspiring works such as his ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, a profoundly sorrowful expression of the pain of war. This is a direct comparison to the beautiful The Lark Ascending, for violin and orchestra, was composed in 1914. In its gentle, untroubled lyricism, it seems to capture the tranquillity of those languid summer days before the outbreak of war on 5 August 1914.