Listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams 'Serenade to Music', first performed
in the 1930s as a tribute to the conductor Sir Henry Wood, I am again
struck by RVW's complete openness as a human being, and by his
generosity and humanity of spirit - to listen to his music is to listen
to the Earth turning.
It is also to listen to the man himself bestriding the landscape in giant musical steps as if some great static construction has freed itself and is on the move; just listen to his 3rd Symphony, the 'Pastoral' (1921) to hear what I mean. This symphony - which is as much an ironic statement about the First World War as it is a musical description of the English countryside - was a watershed in RVW's career, marking him out as a composer who was going to plough a very distinctive and idiosyncratic furrow, and by so doing create a body of
work that is always fresh to the ear and to the heart (a vital element), which renews itself and the listener each and every time.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, the second son and youngest child of Arthur Charles Vaughan Williams and Margaret Susan Wedgwood, was born on the 12th of October 1872 in Down Ambney, Gloucestershire, where his father was vicar.
But with Arthur's sudden death in 1875 Ralph's mother moved the family
back to her sister's home at Leith Hill Place in Surrey, which her
father, Josiah Wedgwood III, had bought in 1845, and where he
continued to live until his death in 1880.
And as the name Wedgwood suggests Ralph Vaughan Williams came from good patrician stock. On his father's side the family was of Welsh extraction, with John Williams, Ralph's great-grandfather, born in Job's Well, Carmarthenshire, in 1757. And as James Day writes, in his 1961 biography of Vaughan Williams, "John Williams, after leaving Carmarthen Grammar School went to Jesus College, Oxford, before becoming a scholar of Wadham in 1774 and a fellow in 1780. He enjoyed a distinguished career at the bar, notably as a 'special pleader'before becoming a Serjeant-at-law in 1794 and a King's Serjeant ten years later. As a legal scholar he was famous mainly for his edition of Blackstone's Commentaries and the Reports and Pleadings in the Court of King's Bench in the Reign of Charles II, [with] his highly valued, shrewd and lucid notes and references adding greatly to the appeal and
value of the latter book in particular."
John Williams had three sons and three daughters (one of whom, Mary,
married the sixth Earl of Buckingham), with Edward Vaughan Williams,
RVW's grandfather (the addition of the name 'Vaughan' came from Edward's
mother), born in Bayswater in 1797. He was educated at Winchester and
Westminster before winning a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge
in 1816, where, like his father before him, he studied law. After
establishing himself as a lawyer he brought out a new edition of his
father's book, 'Notes on Saunders Reports', which he followed with a
treatise called 'On the Law of Executors and Administration', which was
published in 1832 and reprinted many times during Edward's lifetime. In
the year he became a judge,1847, he was also knighted and went on to
become one of the most respected judges on the circuit.
Sir Edward Vaughan Williams married in 1828, and like his father had three sons and three daughters, with the earlier mentioned, Arthur Charles Vaughan Williams (RVW's father), born in London in 1834. He was educated at Westminster and later at Christ Church, Oxford, where he obtained his BA in 1857.
With a house already full of lawyers Arthur decided on a career in the church, and in 1860 was ordained deacon and sent to Bemerton, near Salisbury, where he served as a curate before becoming a fully-fledged vicar in 1865. He married the aforementioned Margaret Susan Wedgwood (who was also a niece of Charles Darwin) in February 1868, which takes us right back to the birth of RVW in 1872 and perhaps a larger understanding of the origins of his music - music that can clearly be traced back to the Age of Enlightenment, and the more caring and more tolerant - humanistic if you like - attitudes that his lawyer grandfather and great-grandfather brought to an almost moribund legal profession. Mix all of this together with the revolutionary theories of Charles Darwin (theories that must surely have permeated every corner of Leith Hill Place), plus the hugely influential creations of the Wedgwood family - and their own liberal attitudes to their workers - and you have an anvil of creativity, and
not least care for your fellow human beings, which comes shining through
every piece of music RVW wrote.
I remember as a child taking part in a country dancing competition put on by a handful of Warwickshire schools as part of the Shakespeare Birthday Celebrations in Stratford in the 1950s, a competition judged by Vaughan Williams, who I remember as a large elderly man slumped in a chair on
the Bancroft Gardens outside the Memorial Theatre. I also remember that
he tapped his walking stick in time to the music being played by a motley bunch of local musicians from several Morris Dancing groups. The point is he actually seemed to be enjoying himself. And that image of that old man - who had a much younger woman at his side - tapping his walking stick in time to music I now realise he must have known intimately, has remained with me.
And the abiding image we have of RVW is one of an old man, it is an image we have come across on LP and CD covers eversince his death in 1958. Much less often do we see images, or remember him, as a tall young man with passion and vision, a young man who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, travelled the countryside collecting English folk songs whose melodies and constructions he used again and again.
Seldom, if ever, are we reminded that he was the musical director of the
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1912 at the height of Benson's fame, or
that he risked his life along with millions of others (including Benson) in the trenches of France and Salonika during the First World War, an experience that changed his music forever after 1918, filling it with irony and even more humanity, but also with a new sound: that of the very bloodied early 20th century quite literally on the move.
All of this was in the future. In the 1880s, the decade after RVW's birth, one of the most respected principles of living at Leith Hill Place - and something RVW the child learned very early on - was that you would never, ever, show disrespect toward the servants - and there were many servants - plus, you must always be direct in your conversation (no lies or gossip), have an independence of spirit (and be prepared to argue your corner), and always be extremely industrious, attributes that should nevertheless also be mixed with charm and dignity (all traits of the Wedgwood, Darwin, Williams, and Vaughan families), which the young RVW inherited and lived by all his life.
As an eight year old he also taught himself to play the organ, a great beast of a thing that lived in the hallway of Leith Hill Place, persuading the servants to work the bellows as he filled the house with music, and this was usually around five in the morning, so no one slept late. Some biographers of RVW have suggested that his upbringing was no different from other children of his time and class. I can't really agree. I think RVW's home life was an extraordinary in its freedom, and for its time, extremely happy and unrestricted whereas most artists and writers of his generation seem to have been brought up in dreadfully restricted homes, with parents who either ignored their children completely, or tried to destroy whatever spark of creativity they had with corporal punishment.
In 1882 the already tall RVW was sent to a preparatory school in Rottingdene, where he learned piano under the forward looking educationalist, C.T. West, who, as James Day reminds us, "..introduced him to the music of Bach, and continued his violin lessons [which he practised in the evenings, so there wasn't much sleep in the Leith Hill Place household] under the Irishman, W.M. Quirke, a well known Brighton teacher of those days." The highlight of the young RVW's school musical career came when "Quirke's young charge performed Raffa's Cavatina, "double- stops and all", as Vaughan Williams insisted in later life.
In 1890 RVW entered the Royal College of Music, which had only been in
existence for seven years and had fewer than a hundred students who, in
those early days, were taught by Sir George Grove (who founded the
college), Sir Arthur Sullivan, Hubert Parry, and Charles Villiers
Stanford; Parry and Stanford were also professors of music at Oxford and
Cambridge. As well as this connection with Britain's two oldest
universities The Royal College of Music also, through Sullivan, kept
links with the stage and, through Parry, with the musical life of the
Church of England, although, as RVWs biographer, James Day, points out,
training,"...a serious composer in the late nineteenth century meant
training him (invariably a him) to write music for the organ-loft and
the festival platform rather than for the stage. Sullivan's operettas -
the real beginning of the English musical renaissance in which Vaughan
Williams was to be a leading figure - were 'sports', freak creations
which it was regarded as neither desirable nor possible for a serious
musician to emulate; even Stanford's gallant attempts to write both
heroic and comic operas met with consistent failure, not on account of
the music, but on account of operatic organization in England, which was
regarded as a rather peculiar business best left to foreigners. The
young composer of those days often tended, quite naturally, and quite
unconsciously, to envisage the orchestra as a kind of team version of
the organ which accompanied lesser choral works within the framework of
the Church's liturgy. If he thought in terms of large-scale
compositions, they were usually oratorios and sacred cantatas rather
than works for the stage." Ralph Vaughan Williams was to change all that.
RVW was taught initially at the RCM by F.E. Gladstone (a first cousin of
the Liberal prime minister), who was himself an organist, and a teacher
who made sure RVW worked his way methodically through Macfarren's
'Harmony', a dry technical volume that RVW absorbed like mother's milk
and which, in later years, ensured he became one of the surest-footed
orchestraters ever produced anywhere.
Ever since entering the RCM it had been RVWs desire to study under
Parry (who at that time was considered the greatest of all English
composers), and after two terms with Gladstone, and passing with a Grade
5 in composition, he was able to do so.
As Day reminds us, Parry always "...tried to find out whether the music of
his pupils had any individuality, if it contained something
'characteristic'; not merely content, as so many teachers are, with
pointing out faults, he also prescribed remedies for them which to him
suited the students personality."
Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (1848 - 1918) was born in Bournemouth
and is perhaps best now remembered as the composer of the music for the
hymn 'Dear Lord and Father of Mankind' and the musical setting of
Blake's 'Jerusalem', the orchestration of which was completed by Sir Edward Elgar (a
neighbour of Parrys) when the Dorset born composer fell ill in 1916.
Parry was a man of high principles whose politics, for the times, was
highly radical (he half jokingly suggested that the House of Lords would
be improved by the inclusions of a few criminals), with a highly
developed sense of artistic integrity, who nevertheless disliked French
opera (RVW became a great lover of Bizet nonetheless), but went on to
write some fine music - most notably 'The Ode on the Nativity' (1912),
and 'Songs of Farewell' (1916-18) - which influenced RVW hugely. Parry
the radical and the methodical was therefore the perfect teacher for
Ralph Vaughan Williams.
After leaving the Royal College of Music - and with very few money worries - RVW worked at becoming a composer, writing for both professional and amateur musicians and singers.
RVW married his first wife, Adeline, in 1897, a marriage that lasted until her death, in 1951, at the age of eighty. There were no offspring.
Throughout the last few years of her life RVW nursed his wife
with a devotion one would have expected of this extraordinary man, although he had met his second wife, Ursula, in the 1940s. She was to act as his sectretary until their marriage in 1953.
Ralph Vaughan Williams died at his London home on the 26th August, 1958.
As a composer Ralph Vaughan Williams is still one of those constants of
English music, and although he has been dead now for fifty - one years his presence and his magnificent music haunt us still.
I remember, in the late 1970s buying two huge box-sets of his work - one
contained the nine symphonies, plus a collection of smaller orchestral
pieces, with the other a collection of all his choral compositions,
something like twenty LPs in all. The majority of both collections were
recorded in the 1950s and conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, with VW close
at hand throughout the sessions. They are without question definitive
recordings with very few later ones coming anywhere near. These
recordings have real depth as if somehow Vaughan Williams is putting his
musical thoughts and passions (and his music tells us what a passionate
man he was) straight from his heart to the disc, that the orchestras
involved - the London Philharmonic, and the New Philharmonia - were part
of his heart and brain - in other words there is an immediacy. Obviously
it is Sir Adrian Boult's conducting ( and that of David Willcocks on
some of the choral pieces) and his own intuitive scholarship and love of
the music, and great friendship with and love of RVW, that helps bring
out this feeling ( he did the same with Elgar's work), creating a sense
that the music is simply part of the air we breath, and of the pulsing
of our own hearts. It is very very personal music fashioned out of love,
memory, hurt, danger, and the violence of the 20th century which, with
the genius of the man, is writ large for those of us who want to share
not only his music but something that is now as much a part of our
heritage and culture as Shakespeare and Barbara Hepworth. And I use
those two examples because Vaughan Williams was both traditional and
extremely modern, he is a continuation of the emotionality and melodic
orchestrating genius that was Sir Edward Elgar, and one of the
greatest inspirations for the atonal red-bloodedness of Sir Harrison
Birtwistle.