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Vaughan Williams, Ralph
| Period: | 20th Century | | Home: | England | | Works Written: | 1 | | Preferred Language: | English |
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Biography
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Ralph Vaughan Williams
(Born; Down Ampney, 12 Oct 1872; Died; London,
26 Aug 1958). English composer. He studied with Parry, Wood and Stanford at the RCM and
Cambridge, then had further lessons with Bruch in Berlin (1897) and Ravel in Paris (1908).
It was only after this that he began to write with sureness in larger forms, even though
some songs had had success in the early years of the century. That success, and the
ensuing maturity, depended very much on his work with folksong, which he had begun to
collect in 1903; this opened the way to the lyrical freshness of the Housman cycle On
Wenlock Edge and to the modally inflected tonality of the symphonic cycle that began
with A Sea Symphony. But he learnt the same lessons in studying earlier English
music in his task as editor of the English Hymnal (1906) - work which bore fruit in
his Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis for strings, whose majestic unrelated consonances
provided a new sound and a new way into large-scale form. The sound, with its sense of
natural objects seen in a transfigured light, placed Vaughan Williams in a powerfully
English visionary tradition, and made very plausible his association of his music with
Blake (in the ballet Job) and Bunyan (in the opera The Pilgrim's Progress).
Meanwhile the new command of form made possible a first orchestral symphony, A London
Symphony, where characterful detail is worked into the scheme. A first opera, Hugh
the Drover, made direct use of folksongs, which Vaughan Williams normally did not do
in orchestral works.
His study of folksong, however, certainly
facilitated the pastoral tone of The Lark Ascending, for violin and orchestra, and
then of the Pastoral Symphony. At the beginning of the 1920s there followed a group
of religious works continuing the visionary manner: the unaccompanied Mass in G minor, the
Revelation oratorio Sancta civitas and the 'pastoral episode' The Shepherds of
the Delectable Mountains, later incorporated in The Pilgrim's Progress. But if
the glowing serenity of pastoral and vision were to remain central during the decades of
work on that magnum opus, works of the later 1920s show a widening of scope, towards the
comedy of the operas Sir John in Love (after The Merry Wives of Windsor) and
The Poisoned Kiss, and towards the angularity of Satan's music in Job and of
the Fourth Symphony. The quite different Fifth Symphony has more connection with The
Pilgrim's Progress, and was the central work of a period that also included the
cantata Dona nobis pacem, the opulent Serenade to Music for 16 singers and
orchestra, and the A minor string quartet, the finest of Vaughan Williams's rather few
chamber works.
A final period opened with the desolate,
pessimistic Sixth Symphony, after which Vaughan Williams found a focus in the natural
world for such bleakness when he was asked to write the music for the film Scott of the
Antarctic : out of that world came his Seventh Symphony, the Sinfonia antartica,
whose pitched percussion colouring he used more ebulliently in the Eighth Symphony, the
Ninth returning to the contemplative world of The Pilgrim's Progress.
Operas Hugh the Drover (1914,
perf. 1924); The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains (1921); Sir John in Love (1929);
The Poisoned Kiss (1929, perf. 1937); Riders to the Sea (1932, perf. 1937); The Pilgrim's
Progress (1951)
Ballet Job (1931)
Symphonies A Sea Sym., with
vv (no. 1, 1909); A London Sym. (no. 2, 1913, rev. 1920, 1933); Pastoral Sym. (no. 3,
1921); no. 4, f (1934); no. 5 D (1943); no. 6, e (1947); Sinfonia antartica, with vv (no.
7, 1952); no. 8, d (1955); no. 9, e (1956-7)
Other orchestral music The
Wasps, ov. (1909); Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, str (1910, rev. 1919); The Lark
Ascending, vn, orch (1914); English Folk Song Suite, band (1923); Toccata marziale, band
(1924); Conc. accademico, vn (1925); Pf Conc., C (1931); Suite, va, small orch (1934); 5
variants of Dives and Lazarus, str, harps (1939); Ob Conc., a (1944); Tuba Conc., f (1954)
Vocal-orchestral music Flos
campi, va, SATB (1925); Sancta civitas (1925); Five Tudor Portraits (1935); Dona nobis
pacem (1936); Serenade to Music (1938); An Oxford Elegy (1949); Hodie (1954)
Smaller choral Mass, g
(1921); many motets, partsongs, folksong arrs., carols, hymns
Songs On Wenlock Edge (1909);
10 Blake songs (1957); folksong arrs.
Chamber music String Qt, a
(1944); Violin sonata (1954)
(c)Groves Dictionaries, MacMillan Publishers Limited, UK
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