Ralph Vaughan Williams

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), one of the most distinguished British composers of the 20th century, whose music established an English national musical style.

Born at Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, on October 12, 1872, of a family related to both the Wedgwoods and the Darwins, Vaughan Williams was educated at the University of Cambridge and the Royal College of Music in London, where he met and became close friends with Gustav Holst. His teachers included two British composers active in initiating the 20th-century revival of British music, Charles Hubert Hastings Parry and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. He also studied in Berlin (1897-1898) with the German composer Max Bruch and in Paris (1908) with the French composer Maurice Ravel, from whom he learned valuable skills in orchestration. From about 1903 he collected English folk songs, assimilating their rhythms, scales, and melodic contours into his own style. It was this influence in particular that formed the “pastoral” style that was to become the dominant idiom of English composers in the first half of the 20th century, as exemplified in Vaughan Williams's own work by the 3rd Symphony (1921; subtitled A Pastoral Symphony) and 5th Symphony (1943), and the romance for violin and orchestra, The Lark Ascending (1914). Also helping to form his style was English music of the 16th century, which can be seen in the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910), and English hymnody. He served as music editor for the English Hymnal (1906), for which he wrote the well-known hymn tune Sine Nomine (Without Name) as a setting of the text “For all the saints”, and he also edited Songs of Praise (1925) and The Oxford Book of Carols (1928).

Always deeply interested in the English choral tradition, he conducted local choruses at the Leith Hill Music Festival from 1905 to 1953 and wrote a setting of the Benedicite (1929) and other choral works for such festivals. He died on August 26, 1958, in London.

Vaughan Williams's nine symphonies include the Sea Symphony (No. 1, 1909), a grandiose choral work setting poems by Walt Whitman, whose poetry was a constant inspiration to the composer, the London Symphony (No. 2, 1913; revised 1920), and the Symphony No. 4 (1935), the driving rhythms and pungent dissonances of which show a little-known side of the composer. Flos Campi (Flower of the Field, 1925), for solo viola, chorus, and small orchestra, evokes passages from the Song of Songs of the Bible. His stage works include the ballad opera Hugh the Drover (1914); a setting (1932) of Riders To the Sea, by the Irish playwright J. M. Synge; and Job: A Masque for Dancing (1930). His largest opera, The Pilgrim's Progress, based on the book by John Bunyan, was completed in 1951 after 20 years work and is widely regarded as his masterpiece. In 1935 Vaughan Williams refused the offer of a knighthood, but accepted membership of the Order of Merit.