Steve writes ...
"Vaughan Williams pays homage to Byrd, Tallis, and
Taverner and comes up with the finest a cappella mass since the Elizabethans
- the vocal equivalent of the Tallis Fantasia. A modern work nevertheless,
it creates and explores a variety of choral textures. RVW dedicated it
to Gustav Holst and his Whitsuntide Singers. Roger Wagner led his Chorale
in the piece's best performance to date, with a stirring account of Bach's
Cantata No. 4 on the flip side - a classic recording of the stereo LP era.
All others have paled in comparison. Wagner succeeds because he recognizes
the energy within. The other performances sound like an extremely sedate
and genteel Sunday sermon, the kind the writer Alan Bennett used to make
fun of. Avoid Stephen Darlington and the Christ Church (Oxford) Cathedral
Choir. Matthew Best and the Corydon Singers stand at the head of versions
currently available."
Biography
Ralph Vaughan Williams was born on 12 October 1872 at Down Ampney,
a village near Cricklade in Gloucestershire where his father was vicar.
He composed his first work at the age of six and learned the piano, organ
and violin as a child. In 1887 he went to Charterhouse, where some of his
music was performed at a school concert, and from there to the Royal College
of Music to study composition with Parry. After two years he went up to
Trinity College, Cambridge, to read history and take his B. Mus. He returned
to the college in 1895 as a pupil of Stanford and began his lifelong friendship
with another student, Gustav Holst. They shared a determination to be 'English
composers' and candidly dissected each other's efforts to find an individual
style while at the same time encouraging each other.
At the turn of the century Vaughan Williams was known only as composer
of a few songs, although one of them,Linden Lea, soon became a favourite
with singers, and the Stevenson cycle Songs of Travel (1904) earned him
a bigger reputation. From 1902 he was deeply involved in collecting folk-songs.
Like many others, he believed that industrialisation might cause the country
songs to be lost and he acted rather like an archaeologist in his determination
to preserve what he could (over 800 folk-songs) of this heritage. From
1904 to 1906 he also edited the music of The English Hymnal, himself providing
several memorable tunes.
Although a short setting of Whitman, Toward the Unknown Region, was
well received at the 1907 Leeds Festival, Vaughan Williams was dissatisfied
with his work and went for three months to Paris in 1908 for an intensive
period of study with Ravel. So effective was this that on his return to
England he began to write music of originality and power in an unmistakably
individual style. Thus the G minor String Quartet, the 'Shropshire Lad'
song-cycle On Wenlock Edge and the great Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas
Tallis for strings were all composed between 1908 and 1910. He also composed
delightful incidental music for Aristophanes' The Wasps and completed his
large-scale Whitman choral work, A Sea Symphony, which was the outstanding
success of the 1910 Leeds Festival. By now he was the acknowledged leader
of the post-Elgar generation.
A London Symphony followed in 1914, the year in which, although 42
years of age, he joined the Army, serving throughout the First World War
in France and Salonika. On his return he gave expression to the emotional
experience of the war not in an angry outburst but in the reflective yet
ominous quietude of A Pastoral Symphony, sketched in France in 1916 and
in reality an orchestral requiem. At the same time came the one-act opera
The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, part of his lifelong preoccupation
with Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and incorporated in 1951 into the
full-scale opera (or 'morality') of that name, and the Mass in G minor
for unaccompanied choir, in which he again seemed to reach across the centuries
to the era of Byrd and Tallis while remaining firmly anchored in the 20th
century.
His first opera, which he had completed in 1914 and put away until
the war was over, was Hugh the Drover, set in the Cotswolds during the
Napoleonic Wars and making use of some folk-songs from his own and others'
collections. This was first performed in 1924. A year later he completed
the short and incandescent oratorio Sancta Civitas, his own favourite among
his choral works and a remarkable example of the concentrated power which
his work had by now attained. The contrast between the lyrical charm of
Hugh the Drover and the fierce blaze of Sancta Civitas is the contrast
between pre- and post-1914 England, but the ballet Old King Cole of 1923
was a further lighthearted excursion into a seam mined from folk-song and
dance.
Between 1926 and 1939, three more operas were composed, Sir John
in Love, his treatment of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, The Poisoned
Kiss, almost a musical, and the grim one-act Riders to the Sea, a masterly
setting of Synge's play about Aran fisherfolk. A Blake ballet (or masque
for dancing), Job, was written in 1930 and became acknowledged both as
a concert-hall masterpiece and a landmark in the history of British ballet.
In 1935 came the angry Symphony No 4 in F minor, which seemed to reflect
a world drifting towards another world war, although that was not the composer's
intention.
In 1942, when he celebrated his 70th birthday, he was completing
his Fifth Symphony, music which in its beneficence sounded to some listeners
like a summing-up, a Nunc Dimittis. But Vaughan Williams was in no mood
for farewells, for since 1940 he had been enjoying the novelty of composing
film music. There were 15 more years of prolific composition to follow,
including four symphonies (among them the Sinfonia Antarctica of 1952-3,
a re-working of music for the film Scott of the Antarctic), the opera The
Pilgrim's Progress, produced at Covent Garden in 1951, some choral works
and concertos, a violin sonata and several songs. In addition he went to
the United States to give lectures, continued to conduct at the annual
Leith Hill Festival and elsewhere, and attended concerts, plays or operas
almost every night of his life up to its sudden end on 26 August 1958.
He personified the pioneering spirit of English music in the 20th century
and was an inspiring encourager of the young. He refused all honours except
the O.M. and his musical creed was that 'every composer cannot expect to
have a worldwide message, but he may reasonable expect to have a special
message for his own people'.
Michael Kennedy
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 - 1958)
Introduction
(born Down Ampney, 12 October 1872; died London, 26
August 1958).
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 ensuring 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). Menwhile
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 his 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 coloring he used more ebulliently
in the Eighth Symphpny, the Ninth returning to the contemplative world
of The Pilgrim's Progress.
Extracted with permission from
The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music
edited by Stanley Sadie
© Macmillan Press Ltd., London.
Vaughan Williams, Ralph (1872 1958)
English composer. His style was tonal and often evocative
of the English countryside through the use of folk themes. Among his works
are the orchestral Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis 1910; the opera
Sir John in Love 1929, featuring the Elizabethan song 'Greensleeves'; and
nine symphonies 190957.
Vaughan Williams was born at Down Ampney, Gloucestershire,
the son of a clergyman. He was educated at Charterhouse School 188790,
and Trinity College, Cambridge 189295, the intervening years being
devoted to study at the Royal College of Music in London, where he returned
for another year after Cambridge. He learnt the piano and organ but was
from the first determined to be a composer. On leaving the Royal College
of Music in 1896 he became organist at South Lambeth Church in London and
saved enough money to gain further experience by study abroad, first at
the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, under Bruch, and in 1909 with Ravel,
who was younger than him, in Paris. In 1901 he completed a doctorate at
Cambridge.
In 1904 he joined the Folk-Song Society (established
in 1898) and began to take an active share in the recovery and study of
old country tunes, collecting some in Norfolk. (When the society
amalgamated with the English Folk Dance Society to form the English Folk
Dance and Song Society in 1932, Vaughan Williams became its president.)
His first public success was with Toward the Unknown Region at the Leeds
Festival 1907 and this was followed
1909 by his first great and charactistic compositions,
the Wasps overture, song cycle On Wenlock Edge, and A Sea Symphony (the
first to employ a chorus throughout). From 1906 he was editor of the English
Hymnal, and this resulted in one of his best-loved works, the Fantasia
on a theme of Thomas Tallis for strings, 1910. (The sense of religious
wonder evoked by this music was later enhanced in such Biblically-inspired
works as the masque Job
and the opera The Pilgrim's Progress).
In World War I he first served as a private in Macedonia
and France, but later rose to officer's rank. After the war he was appointed
professor of composition at the Royal College of Music. The English pastoral
tradition was revived in his 3rd symphony, 1921, and the complementary,
visionary source of his inspiration was renewed in such sacred works as
the Mass in G minor, Sancta Civitas, and Benedicite. His two best-known
symphonies, nos. 4
and 5, were composed between 1934 and 1943; the angularity
and fierce accents of the earlier work lead to the repose and serenity
of its companion. The last four symphonies continue the composer's spiritual
quest, already begun in The Pilgrim's Progress. Although Vaughan Williams'
compositions are usually classified broadly as pastoral, making use of
folk melodies, or at least the lyrical and often model aspects of such
melodies, he was conscious of contemporary musical developments and often
involved a
greater degree of dissonance in his later works.
Works include:
OPERA The Pilgrim's Progress (after Bunyan, begun
1925, premiered 1951); masque Job (on Blake's illustrations, 1931); incidental
music for Aristophanes' Wasps (1909), film music including Scott of the
Antarctic (1948). CHORAL Mass in G minor, Anglican services; (with orchestra)
Toward the Unknown Region (Whitman), A Sea Symphony (no. 1) (Whitman, 190309),
Five Mystical Songs (Herbert, 1911), Flos Campi (Song
of Solomon, 1925), Five Tudor Portraits (Skelton, 1935), Serenade to Music
for 16 solo voices and orchestra (from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice,
1938). ORCHESTRAL In the Fen Country, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
(strings, 1910), A London Symphony (no. 2, 191213), A Pastoral Symphony
(no. 3, 1921),
symphonies nos. 49 (1937, 1943, 1947, 1952, 1955,
1957), Five Variants of 'Dives and Lazarus' (strings and harps, 1939);
The Lark Ascending (after Meredith) for violin and orchestra (1914), concerto
for oboe and strings (1944), tuba concerto (1954). CHAMBER AND SONGS On
Wenlock Edge (Housman)
for tenor, string quartet, and piano (1909); many
songs including Songs of Travel (Stevenson, 190104); ten Blake songs
for high voice and oboe; folk-song arrangements.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
From The Hutchinson Family Encyclopedia.
© Copyright Helicon Publishing Ltd 2000. All
rights reserved.
