Biography
Vaughan Williams was introduced to music from a very early age, with his mother and aunt encouraging him to learn the organ, piano and violin.
By the time he was nine they had also enrolled him for a correspondence course in the theory of music.
He was born into a very well-connected family and his father was a clergyman, who sadly died when young Ralph was only three.
By the age of fifteen he had already decided that he was going to be a composer, and this was at the forefront of his mind throughout his whole time at Charterhouse School.
He went on to study with Sir Hubert Parry (composer of ‘Jerusalem’) at the Royal College of Music and on finishing his course there decided to continue to study at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Ever striving for more knowledge, he went back to the Royal College and worked with Charles Stanford (another respected English composer) and later travelled to Berlin to study with Max Bruch.
This was not enough for Vaughan Williams and he ended up having a course of lessons from the French composer Maurice Ravel.
Vaughan Williams had no financial worries and was able to pursue these activities under relaxed and unpressured circumstances.
However, he took a highly professional attitude to his work and composed some very fine music.
He was much acclaimed all over the world and went down particularly well in the United States of America where he was hailed as the ‘Grandfather of English Music’.
The symphonies are perhaps his best-known pieces and, like Beethoven, he wrote nine, two of which stand out above the rest: No. 2 (‘London’) and No. 3 (‘Pastoral’).
He also had an avid interest in folk-song and hymns, which led to his revising the English Hymnal in I906.
Much of his work is based upon traditional folk-song ideas, and this characterises the music as being quintessentially English.
Songs of Travel
Songs
Based on English folk songs, the cycle Songs of Travel is exactly what its title suggests.
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
1910, Orchestral
Around the beginning of this century, Ralph Vaughan Williams and his musical friends were acutely aware that English music had been fairly sterile for the past two hundred years or so, since the death of Purcell, so it is hardly surprising that he wanted to undertake a composition that would have some nationalistic significance. When he was asked to edit a new edition of the ‘English Hymnal’, Vaughan Williams searched through as many sources of English church music as he could find, and was rewarded with nine melodies by the English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, written in 1567. The third melody, ‘Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing?’, appealed particularly to Vaughan Williams, and he used it to form his Fantasia.
It is essentially a peaceful yet powerful work, written for two small orchestras and a string quartet all separated from each other. It was intended that the woro be performed in a cathedral, and it is clear that Vaughan Williams had in mind the Renaissance practice of taking two, three or even four choirs and placing them in large spaces of the building so that they could alternate with and echo each other.
The Fantasia opens with a quiet introduction, and soon the main Tallis melody is introduced by cellos, violas and second violins all playing together. This is immediately followed by a more passionate version by the violins, after which a brief interlude takes place where the separate orchestras answer each other back and forth. Later a solo violin takes up the tune. It is soon joined by other members of the string quartet and eventually the two other orchestras, until the whole work builds to a passionate climax. The brief conclusion recalls some fragments of the introduction before dying away in a whisper.
London Symphony
A London Symphony (No. 2): 4th Movement
1914, Symphonies, Orchestral
Ralph Vaughan Williams was both a Romantic and a nationalist – particularly before 1915 – and, considering how both styles became unfashionable towards the mid-twentieth century, it is a tribute to his genius that his London Symphony still holds us and moves us as it does today. Actually, this was probably the peak of his musical nationalism, which relaxed quite noticeably in the years after the First World War. The work was created from a combination of English folk song, the sixteenth-century Tudor composers, the spirit of Purcell and his ownpersonal intense English style, and Vaughan Williams makes no apologies for his patriotic approach, saying:
’ . . . 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 souls.’
The four-movement work is best described in Vaughan Williams’s own words.
‘The first [movement] begins with a slow prelude; this leads to a vigorous allegro – which may perhaps suggest the noise and hurry of London with its always underlying calm. . . . The second [slow] movement has been called “Bloomsbury Square on a November Afternoon”.
This may serve as a clue to the music, but it is not a necessary explanation of it. . . . If the hearer will imagine himself standing on Westminster Embankment at night, surrounded by the distant sounds of the Strand, with its great hotels on one side and the “New Cut” on the other, with its crowded streets and flaring lights, it may serve as a mood in which to listen to this [third] movement. . . . The last movement consists of an agitated theme in triple-time alternating with a march movement at first solemn and, later on, energetic. At the end . . . comes a suggestion of the noise and fever of the first movement . . . then the “Westminster Chimes” are heard once more . . .’
The Lark Ascending
1914, Orchestral
This work is a wonderfully imaginative ‘flight’ of fancy in which one can almost visualise the lark disappearing into the clean air on a country afternoon.