Ralph Vaughan Williams

Ralph Vaughan Williams played a pivotal role in the revival of English music during the opening decades of the twentieth century. He developed a personal post-Romantic idiom through extended, flowing melodic lines and modal harmonies drawn from folk traditions. Nine symphonies stand at the center of his catalog, joined by other orchestral scores including the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and The Lark Ascending. Several collections he co-edited contain his choral arrangements of hymns, carols, and folk songs, a number of which remain the standard versions.

His father died when Vaughan Williams was still a child, after which his mother raised him. Through his mother he was connected to both Charles Darwin and the Wedgwoods, the noted pottery family, so he grew up free of financial concerns. He read history and music at Trinity College, Cambridge, then completed his training at the Royal College of Music under Parry, Wood, and Stanford. The same year he married Adeline Fisher, 1897, Vaughan Williams went to Berlin to study with Max Bruch; several years afterward he sought lessons from Maurice Ravel, even though the French composer was three years his junior. Beginning in 1903 he gathered English folksongs, whose modal character shaped his compositional language in fundamental ways. While serving as editor of the English Hymnal, finished in 1906, he supplied several original hymn tunes, the most famous being Sine nomine for the text For All the Saints. That deep engagement with traditional English music is evident in the 1909 song cycle On Wenlock Edge, drawn from A. E. Housman’s widely read collection A Shropshire Lad. The Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, written in 1910, places antiphonal writing inside modal harmony by setting consonant yet unrelated triads side by side. His Symphony No. 2, “A London Symphony,” completed in 1914, evokes the city’s atmosphere from dawn to nightfall with notable grace. That same year he composed the pastoral The Lark Ascending for violin and orchestra. At the outbreak of World War I the forty-one-year-old composer joined the medical corps as an orderly and became known for arranging choral singing and other diversions in the trenches; he later received a commission and finished his service as an artillery officer. The conflict halted his work yet left the inner thread of his creative growth intact. Symphony No. 3, the “Pastoral,” written in 1922, summons a recognizable landscape by weaving folksong motifs into textures built from sequential chords. Although critics heard pessimistic undertones in the later symphonies and linked them to the composer’s supposed disillusionment with the world, Vaughan Williams declined to assign any programmatic meaning to those pieces. He did, however, produce a powerful evocation of a barren landscape in Symphony No. 7, “Sinfonia Antartica” (1952), prompted by a commission to score the film Scott of the Antarctic. Beyond the symphonies he created widely praised sacred music and works inspired by English spiritual literature, reaching a culmination in the 1951 opera The Pilgrim’s Progress, drawn from John Bunyan’s classic allegory. An artist of remarkable creative vitality, Vaughan Williams sustained his powers undiminished until his death at the age of eighty-seven.