Ralph Vaughan Williams

Ralph Vaughan Williams, who lived from 1872 to 1958, was an English composer whose output spanned six decades and included nine symphonies, operas, ballets, chamber works, and both secular and religious vocal pieces. His music was deeply shaped by Tudor-era compositions and English folk songs, and it helped steer British music away from the German-influenced style that had dominated the 19th century. Born into a prosperous family that held strong moral principles and progressive social beliefs, he spent much of his life trying to serve the public, working to ensure that music was accessible to everyone. He often wrote pieces intended for amateur musicians and students. A late bloomer musically, he did not discover his own distinctive voice until he was nearly forty; a period of study with the French composer Maurice Ravel in 1907–1908 helped him refine his musical textures and shed lingering Germanic influences.

Vaughan Williams is remembered as one of Britain’s most famous symphonists, known for an unusually broad emotional range—from stormy and intense to calm, from mysterious to joyful. Among his best-known concert works are the *Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis* (1910) and *The Lark Ascending* (1914). He also composed hymns, folk-song arrangements, and large choral pieces. Between 1919 and 1951 he wrote eight works for the stage; while none of his operas became widely performed, his ballet *Job: A Masque for Dancing* (1930) was a success and has been staged many times.

Two events left especially deep marks on his personal life. His service in the army during the First World War had a lasting emotional effect. Twenty years later, although he was in his sixties and happily married, he was revitalized by a romance with a much younger woman, who later became his second wife. He continued composing into his seventies and eighties, finishing his final symphony just months before he died at 85. His works have remained staples of British concert programs, and nearly all of his major compositions—along with many minor ones—have been recorded.

Vaughan Williams was born in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, the third child and younger son of Reverend Arthur Vaughan Williams, the local vicar, and his wife Margaret, a Wedgwood descendant. His father’s family, of mixed English and Welsh background, included many lawyers and clergymen; his grandfather and uncle were both judges. Margaret was a great-granddaughter of Josiah Wedgwood and a niece of Charles Darwin. When Arthur died suddenly in 1875, Margaret moved the children to her family home, Leith Hill Place in Surrey. There, a nurse named Sara Wager taught them good manners and liberal social and philosophical views, consistent with the progressive traditions of both sides of the family. When young Vaughan Williams asked his mother about Darwin’s controversial book *On the Origin of Species*, she replied that the Bible says God made the world in six days, but “Great Uncle Charles thinks it took longer: but we need not worry about it, for it is equally wonderful either way.”

At age five, in 1878, he began piano lessons with his aunt Sophy Wedgwood and showed early talent, composing a short piece called “The Robin’s Nest” that same year. He disliked the piano, however, and was glad to switch to violin lessons the following year. In 1880, at eight, he took a correspondence music course from Edinburgh University and passed the exams. In September 1883 he became a boarder at Field House preparatory school in Rottingdean, where he was generally happy but shocked to encounter social snobbery and political conservatism for the first time. He moved on to Charterhouse school in January 1887, where his academics and sports were satisfactory and his musical development was encouraged. In 1888 he organized a concert at the school that included his own G major Piano Trio (now lost), with the composer playing violin.

At Charterhouse, Vaughan Williams gradually lost his religious faith, becoming an atheist for a time before settling into “a cheerful agnosticism.” He continued attending church regularly to avoid upsetting his family. His views on religion did not diminish his love for the King James Bible, whose beauty, according to his widow Ursula’s biography, remained “one of his essential companions through life.” In this and many other ways, biographer Michael Kennedy noted, he was “that extremely English product the natural nonconformist with a conservative regard for the best tradition.”

In July 1890 he left Charterhouse and enrolled at the Royal College of Music in London that September. After a required harmony course with Francis Edward Gladstone, he studied organ with Walter Parratt and composition with Hubert Parry. He greatly admired Parry, recalling later that Parry once told him, “Write choral music as befits an Englishman and a democrat.” Parry’s pupils, Vaughan Williams believed, inherited the great English choral tradition passed from Tallis to Byrd, Byrd to Gibbons, Gibbons to Purcell, and Purcell to Battishill and Greene.