Ralph Vaughan Williams

THE MOTHER of the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was a niece of Charles Darwin. Vaughan Williams was seven years old when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. One day the child asked his mother what the famous book was about. According to an anecdote I heard on the radio yesterday, his mother replied: “The Bible says the world was created in seven days. Uncle Charles thinks it took a lot longer. Either way, the world is wonderful.”

If you have never listened to Vaughan William’s beautiful meditation on a bird rising to the skies, “A Lark Ascending,” you can listen to it here.  Vaughan Williams was said to have been inspired by George Meredith’s poem To A Skylark:

O skylark! I see thee and call thee joy!
Thy wings bear thee up to the breast of the dawn;
I see thee no more, but thy song is still
The tongue of the heavens to me!

Thus are the days when I was a boy;
Sweet while I lived in them, dear now they’re gone:
I feel them no longer, but still, O still
They tell of the heavens to me.

                                                          — Comments —

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

On the topic of Ralph Vaughan Williams, I recommend to you and your readers Tony Palmer’s riveting film-biography of the man and his music, O Thou Transcendent (2007).  Aside from its rich offering of RVW’s music, especially his symphonies, Palmer’s film sensitively represents RVW as a spiritually sensitive agnostic, who was keenly aware that modernity was corrosive of tradition and who strove to conserve tradition.  Also well worth getting to know is the late Wilfrid Mellers’ book, Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion (1990). 

Here is the first movement (Molto Moderato) of RVW’s Third Symphony, subtitled “The Pastoral,” inspired by an experience that befell the composer when he was a volunteer ambulance driver in France in World War One; it is one of the quietest, yet most rapt and religious instrumental works of the twentieth Century.

Laura writes:

Thank you for the recommendations.

Vaughan Williams was one of the great traditionalists of the twentieth century.

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