Ralph Vaughan Williams

British composer

• Born: October 12, 1872
• Birthplace: Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, England
• Died: August 26, 1958
• Place of death: London, England

Through the use of folk songs and native idioms, Vaughan Williams helped bring about the twentieth century revival of English music and established himself as its foremost composer.

Early Life

Ralph Vaughan Williams (rayf vahn WIHL-yamz) was born in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, England. His ancestry included lawyers and pastors on his father’s side, and he was related to Charles Darwin on his mother’s side. The youngest of three children, Vaughan Williams (he was always called by both names and is listed as such in references) was reared in an upper-middle-class environment at his mother’s family home at Leith Hill Place in Surrey, having moved there in 1875 after the death of his father, the Reverend Arthur Vaughan Williams.

Vaughan Williams received private instruction in piano, violin, viola, and harmony and attended the Royal College of Music in London and Trinity College, Cambridge, completing his studies in 1896. This tall, heavyset man was often the recipient of stares and comments. He had a large head, with a pronounced square jaw and thin lips. Particularly noticeable were his sad eyes and his exaggerated air of absentmindedness. This seeming detachment from the realities of life was evident even during his student days, when he wrote music with a scrawling, sloppy script. His interest became the music of his native England, an interest that was heightened and encouraged by his lifelong friendship with fellow Englishman Gustav Holst. After marrying Adeline Fisher in 1897, Vaughan Williams traveled to Germany to study with the eminent composer Max Bruch. Returning to England, Vaughan Williams began a lifetime involvement with English folk music, as characterized by the songs “Linden Lea” (1901) and “Bushes and Briars” (1903). In 1904, he was given the opportunity to work on a project that would allow him to pursue his study of English music.

Life’s Work

From 1904 to 1906, Vaughan Williams served as music editor for a new edition of The English Hymnal (1906). Until this time, he had been generally frustrated with what he perceived as his country’s willingness to accept hymnody of generally poor quality and replete with Victorian excesses. He discarded numerous hymn tunes, replacing them with more than forty of his own arrangements of folk tunes that he had gathered, or heard and written down, in many cases for the first time. Other hymnal insertions included his own compositions, notably “Sine nomine,” known as “For All the Saints,” and “King’s Weston,” known as “At the Name of Jesus.” This immersion in English folk music was brought about by, and provided increased fervor to, Vaughan Williams’s attitude toward both the everyday life and the work of the composers.

The composer must not shut himself up and think about art; he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community.

This notion of music as “an expression of the whole life of the community” implied a very different course from that which was considered normal for musicians of his stature. In 1905, Vaughan Williams helped to organize and conduct the Leith Hill Musical Festival, a duty that he retained until 1953. This festival was by and for amateurs, with the exception of Vaughan Williams, and gained a reputation for the excellence and diversity of its musical offerings, ranging from folk music to the Passion According to St. Matthew of Johann Sebastian Bach.

In 1908, Vaughan Williams spent several months in Paris studying orchestration with Maurice Ravel. His lessons proved fruitful almost immediately, as Vaughan Williams combined Ravel’s emphasis on instrumental combinations with his own English musical heritage, in Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis (1910). This piece, for double-string orchestra, would come to be considered his first masterpiece.

Although in his forties, Vaughan Williams felt compelled to participate in World War I, serving as an orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps in France and, later, as a lieutenant operating heavy gunnery equipment. On returning to England, he resumed his affiliation with the Royal College of Music, this time as a teacher, a position he retained for the rest of his life. He demonstrated the rare ability to compose, revise, teach, write, conduct, and administrate, juggling these many positions at once. Early in the 1920’s, he met the young conductor Adrian Boult. Boult became not only a close friend but also one of the foremost interpreters of the music of Vaughan Williams.

Throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s, Vaughan Williams continued to champion English folk music. Unlike the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, to whom he is often compared, Vaughan Williams did not actually quote folk tunes in his compositions. Rather, through his gathering of folk tunes (he would gather more than eight hundred in the course of his lifetime) and arranging them for various occasions and publications, he came to write in a style that sounded like folk music without actually being folk music.

During the 1930’s, Vaughan Williams began a period of his life that was disturbing to some of his followers. It was at this time that he became increasingly vocal in his opposition to the regime and practices of Adolf Hitler in Germany. In particular, Vaughan Williams became an advocate of German refugees, including Jews. An indication of the effect of his protest and of his international stature was Hitler’s banning of all of Vaughan Williams’s music, composed or arranged, effective in 1939.

World War II disturbed Vaughan Williams greatly and resulted in his most disturbing composition. The Sixth Symphony (1948) was not the flowing, melodic music of his past; rather, it was dissonant and unsettling. The symphony was seen by some as a shift in compositional goals and musical direction. In fact, it stands as an example that, even at the age of seventy-six, Vaughan Williams had not stopped growing. The Sixth Symphony was the musical outworking of his social conscience.

His last years were spent as he had spent most of his life. He continued his administrative and conducting responsibilities with the Leith Hill Musical Festival, and he continued composing and teaching at the Royal College of Music. Honors and accolades came his way, and he rather enjoyed his elder-statesman status. Following the death of his wife in 1951, Vaughan Williams married Ursula Wood, a longtime friend of the family, in 1953. He died in his sleep on August 26, 1958, and his ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey near the resting place of the seventeenth century English composer Henry Purcell.

Significance

More than any of his contemporaries, Vaughan Williams wrote distinctively English music. This does not mean, as has sometimes been suggested, that he was so narrow that he could enjoy no appeal outside England. To the contrary, his music, in particular his A Sea Symphony (1910) for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, has been consistently popular internationally, especially in the United States, in part because of Vaughan Williams’s use of Walt Whitman’s poetry in the work. His Pastoral Symphony (1922) has gained a significant following on the Continent. Further evidence is the fact that he was the recipient of the Shakespeare Prize from the University of Hamburg, Germany, in 1937.

Vaughan Williams was accurately labeled as one who opposed the so-called Second Viennese School of atonal music as practiced by Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg. Part of his opposition was his desire to make use of his native English musical resources. In addition, Vaughan Williams opposed the German school’s emphasis on intellectualizing the art of composition. For him, composing was less an art than a craft, a practice, something that was natural to him. He thought of himself as an Englishman who happened to write music. His emphasis in his own work, and what he preached to his students, was to be more intuitive in writing music. Since he had so fully immersed himself in the folk music of England, it was natural to Vaughan Williams that his music should sound so distinctively English.

For some, Vaughan Williams stood as a Christian musician, with his extensive work on The English Hymnal and numerous church anthems. In fact, he was an agnostic who never embraced Christianity. Perhaps a better designation is that of a visionary, although not in the sense of one who ignores the past and looks only to the future. Rather, he can be seen as one who looked at the past and saw its usefulness in understanding and living life in the present.

Bibliography

Adams, Byron, and Robin Wells, eds. Vaughan Williams Essays. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003. In these essays, eleven North American scholars who have received Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellowships analyze various aspects of Vaughan Williams’s music.

Day, James. Vaughan Williams. 1961. Rev. ed. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1975. As part of the Master Musicians series, this is a very readable book. One nice feature is the year-by-year walk through the composer’s life via highlights. In addition, Day provides individual chapter analyses of symphonies, choral works, chamber music, and so on. A good section on significant people in the composer’s life adds breadth.

Dickinson, A. E. F. Vaughan Williams. London: Faber & Faber, 1963. This large (five-hundred-page) volume is probably the most thorough biography of Vaughan Williams. The author, who has written about the music of Vaughan Williams since 1928, not only covers all aspects of the composer’s life and career but also includes much commentary about the way Vaughan Williams’s music has affected England. Unfortunately, many American general readers will find this “very British” writing difficult reading.

Douglas, Roy. Working with Ralph Vaughan Williams. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. A close friend and associate of Vaughan Williams, Douglas served from 1944 to 1958 as chief copyist of Vaughan Williams’s compositions, and this volume chronicles their times together. In this role he had a unique opportunity to observe the compositional process. The book is short (sixty-eight pages) and is very easy reading. Douglas obviously cared deeply for the composer, and that affection comes across in a pleasant style.

Ewen, David, ed. The Book of Modern Composers. 2d ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956. A collection of essays by and about thirty-one composers of the twentieth century. The section on Vaughan Williams is only eighteen pages long, but is quite good in providing a thumbnail sketch of the man and his music. Includes a brief essay by the composer on nationalism and music.

Heffer, Simon. Vaughan Williams. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000. A useful introduction to Vaughan Williams’s life and music.

Vaughan Williams, Ralph. National Music. London: Oxford University Press, 1934. This is a compilation of a series of lectures given by the author-composer at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in October and November of 1932. Most of the book deals with subjects pertaining to folk music, with two chapters spelling out Vaughan Williams’s ideas on nationalism and music.

Vaughan Williams, Ursula (Wood). Ralph Vaughan Williams. London: Oxford University Press, 1964. An anecdotal and intimate biography by the composer’s second wife. Full of photographs, excerpts of conversations, and letters; the tone of the book is set by the author’s use of the familiar “Ralph” to refer to her husband, the composer.