Ralph Vaughan Williams
The English composer who broke his country's musical dependence on Germany by returning to Tudor polyphony and English folk song, then built nine symphonies on that foundation.
Ralph Vaughan Williams gave English music a voice it had lacked since Purcell: rooted in the modal harmonies of the Tudor composers and the pentatonic scales of English folk song, his nine symphonies and a vast range of vocal, choral, and orchestral works created a tradition that was distinctively English without being parochial. He remained productive into his eighties, revising and composing without apparent slowing until his death at eighty-five.
Formation and the folk song turn
Vaughan Williams was born in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, in 1872, the son of a clergyman. He studied at the Royal College of Music under Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, then at Cambridge, and then returned to the RCM for further study. Dissatisfied with what he felt was the German-dominated character of English musical training, he sought additional study abroad — first with Max Bruch in Berlin (1897) and then, decisively, with Maurice Ravel in Paris (1907–08). Ravel's orchestral clarity and precision sharpened his technique without redirecting his essentially modal instincts.
From 1903 he collected English folk songs systematically, often in the company of Cecil Sharp, the leading figure of the English folk revival. The encounter with folk melody reinforced his natural tendency toward modal and pentatonic writing and gave him a large body of melodic material that fed directly and indirectly into his compositions for decades.
The early works and the modal voice
The Lark Ascending (1914, revised 1920), for violin and orchestra, became his most widely loved work — a piece in which a solo violin traces a long, folk-inflected melodic line over a shimmering orchestral background, evoking the George Meredith poem of the same name. Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910, revised 1913) placed two string orchestras and a string quartet in dialogue over a melody from a 1567 psalter, producing a spatial, luminous work that had no obvious precedent.
A Sea Symphony (1910), his first, set Walt Whitman texts for soprano, baritone, chorus, and orchestra. The London Symphony (1914) followed, evoking the city without pictorialism.
The art of music above all other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.
The nine symphonies
The nine symphonies, composed over fifty years, form the central arc of his career. They range widely in character: the Pastoral Symphony (No. 3, 1921) is meditative and modal, an elegy for the dead of the First World War rather than a landscape painting. Symphony No. 4 (1935) is fierce and dissonant. No. 5 (1943) returns to a radiant modality. No. 6 (1948) ends in an eerie, almost inaudible pianissimo that occupied commentators for years. The Ninth (1958), completed shortly before his death, shows no diminishment of invention.
He also composed significant operas — The Pilgrim's Progress (1951) above all — choral works including Five Tudor Portraits and the Mass in G minor, and orchestral works including the Oboe Concerto and Tuba Concerto.
Legacy
Vaughan Williams's advocacy for English music extended to editing the English Hymnal (1906), rescuing hundreds of folk melodies for congregational use, and to decades of teaching, lecturing, and conducting. He died in London in 1958 at eighty-five, having completed the Ninth Symphony that year. His influence on subsequent English composers — notably Benjamin Britten, though Britten's relationship with his legacy was complex — was pervasive if contested.
