Ralph Vaughan Williams

Ralph Vaughan Williams was born on 12 October 1872 at Down Ampney, a village in Gloucestershire where his father was vicar. He pronounced his first name “Rafe”, the old way. When his father died in 1875 his mother took him to live with her parents at Leith Hill Place in Surrey. He belonged to a brilliant family: his mother was a Wedgwood, of the famous pottery family, and the naturalist Charles Darwin was his great-uncle. An aunt gave him his first piano and theory lessons, and he learned violin and then viola.

After school at Charterhouse he entered the Royal College of Music in London in 1890, studying with Hubert Parry, then went to Cambridge University, where he took degrees in music and history. He then returned to the Royal College of Music to study with Charles Villiers Stanford and formed a deep friendship with the composer Gustav Holst, with whom he exchanged advice and criticism all his life. In 1897 he married Adeline Fisher and went to study for a few months in Berlin with Max Bruch.

Vaughan Williams was at first a slow developer who doubted himself. In 1903 he discovered the riches of English folk song, passed down orally in the countryside and in danger of disappearing. He travelled through villages with a notebook and later a phonograph, collecting more than eight hundred songs from old farmworkers, shepherds and fishermen. This ancient music, based on old modes, transformed his style. From 1904 to 1906 he edited The English Hymnal, a collection of hymns for the Church of England in which he adapted many folk melodies.

In 1908, aged thirty-five and dissatisfied with his technique, he went to Paris to take orchestration lessons from Maurice Ravel, three years his junior. Ravel taught him lightness and colour, and the two became friends. In 1910 he premiered the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for double string orchestra, inspired by a psalm tune by the Renaissance composer, a work of mystical beauty that made him famous. That same year A Sea Symphony, on poems by Walt Whitman, was premiered in Leeds.

When the First World War broke out he volunteered at forty-one as a stretcher-bearer in the medical corps in France and Greece, later becoming an artillery officer. The experience of the front, where he lost many friends including the young composer George Butterworth, marked him deeply; the noise of the guns left him partly deaf. His Symphony No. 3, the “Pastoral” (1922), a serene yet sorrowful meditation, was partly inspired by the landscapes of France during the war.

After the war he taught composition at the Royal College of Music and conducted the Bach Choir. In 1921 he premiered The Lark Ascending, a romance for violin and orchestra inspired by a poem by George Meredith, in which the violin imitates the lark rising into the sky: it is now one of the British public’s favourite works. He composed nine symphonies, operas, choral music, the Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934), drawn from his opera Sir John in Love, and in 1948 the score for the film Scott of the Antarctic, which became the Sinfonia antartica (1952).

He refused a knighthood but accepted the Order of Merit in 1935. After Adeline’s death in 1951 he married the poet Ursula Wood in 1953. He remained active to the end, travelling to the United States past the age of eighty and composing his Ninth Symphony at eighty-five. He died in London on 26 August 1958. His ashes lie in Westminster Abbey, near those of Purcell. He is regarded as the father of the twentieth-century renaissance of English music.