|
Home | Archive
| In memoriam
Ralph Vaughan Williams 1872–1958
Dr. Ralph Vaughan Williams, O.M., died at his home in
London on 26 August at the age of eighty-five. The world of music
mourns his passing, yet one is glad and grateful that he was able
to live so long and so full a life; one, moreover, that was so rich
in achievement.
He was a Gloucestershire man, born at Down Ampney on 12 October
1872, and all his life he had the look and the manner of a countryman.
His utterance was downright, his views were robust. In his music
he expressed the essential spirit of England as perhaps no other
composer has ever done before. He was never one to inhabit an ivory
tower; he took an active part in music-making, and an active interest
in all causes in which he believed. He went on writing music of
an astonishing freshness and vitality to the day of his death; his
Ninth Symphony was produced only last April. He was a great man
as well as a great musician; revered and beloved wherever he was
known.
His life and work are familiar to all who, in Purcell’s phrase,
‘carry musical souls about them’; he has been the subject
of a number of books and articles in recent years. Instead, therefore,
of giving an account of his career (which he himself sketched so
delightfully in his ‘Musical Autobiography’ that first
appeared in Hubert Foss’s study of his music), we have invited
musicians who were associated with him at different times in his
life – including members of the younger generation who came
to know him in his later years – to set down their impressions
of him.
Musical Times, October 1958
from John Ireland
In the concluding years of the ’nineties Vaughan
Williams was a student with Stanford during the period when I also
had that privilege. Among our fellow-students were Holst and Dunhill,
and a little group or coterie resulted, which included the pianist
Evelyn Howard-Jones, also a student. We were much together, attending
regularly Stanford’s bi-weekly orchestral rehearsals with the
R.C.M. Orchestra, led at that time by Sam Grimson of the distinguished
Grimson family. In those days we could attend comparatively few
orchestral concerts, and there were no gramophone records.
Our group were together frequently and discussed music voraciously.
We showed each other our compositions with much mutual criticism.
We used to frequent a teashop in High Street, Kensington, then known
as Wilkins’, where we could sit for hours in animated discussions.
At that time, though Vaughan Williams was by some years the eldest
of us, he had not developed his later love of paradox; he was, in
fact, just ‘one of us’, as the saying goes. There was
no question among us of which was the greatest. We were all humble-minded
students eager to learn from Stanford and from each other. We formed
a debating society with regular meetings when one or other of us
would read a prepared discourse followed by mutual arguments. These
were not confined to music. I recollect that Vaughan Williams delivered
a discourse on Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, at that time
considered rather a daring, if not shocking, work. On one of these
occasions I animadverted on Schopenhauer, some of whose less extended
works were known to us all.
When V. W. first married and went to Germany to study with Max
Bruch, he was organist of the Church of St. Barnabas, South Lambeth.
He persuaded me at the time to undertake his work there for the
period of his six months’ projected absence. Even in those
early days his activities were prodigious, for, in addition to the
normal work of a church organist and choirmaster, he ran a choral
society and an orchestral society in connection with the church.
He instructed me to prepare and produce performances of Mendelssohn’s
Lauda Sion and Stanford’s Revenge. This was no
easy task for a lad still in his ‘teens and quite inexperienced.
On his return from Germany, V. W. bought or leased what he described
as ‘a small, cheap house’ on Chelsea Embankment. The house,
a beautiful one, was at the eastern corner of the fine terrace of
houses, one of which, Queen’s House, was at one time the residence
of D. G. Rossetti, the great pre-Raphaelite painter and poet. The
house, always painted white, still stands where it did, though the
principal books I have read in Chelsea do not disclose the fact
that it was once the residence of England’s great and famous
composer. For many years during Vaughan Williams’s subsequent
life in Chelsea, he and I remained friends, and continued our musical
companionship and mutual advice and criticism.
In conclusion I have an anecdote which perhaps throws some light
on the character of this great figure. In 1908, when I was writing
my first Sonata for violin and piano, I showed him the slow movement,
then in manuscript. When we reached the central theme in E flat
minor (in Dorian mode dress) he stopped me and was silent for a
minute or two. Then he said, ‘Play that theme again’.
After another pause he said, ‘Well, that’s odd. I have
used practically the same theme in a song’. I was rather taken
aback and asked him what we should do about this curious coincidence
of a musical idea. After a moment V. W. said, ‘Well, we must
both have cribbed it from something else, so we had better both
leave it as it is – nobody will notice it’. And so far
as I know, nobody ever has!
[top]
from Sir Adrian Boult
We are often told that early memories are specially
vivid, and I can certainly agree that my early memories of Ralph
Vaughan Williams are as fresh as anything I can think of. Rather
strictly brought up as I had been on a diet mainly of Bach, Beethoven
and Brahms, it was a great experience as a youngster to be thrown
into a chorus, directed by Hugh Allen, singing The Unknown Region
and soon after, the Sea Symphony. The impact of Vaughan Williams,
this magnificent-looking young man, and his fresh and vital music
were unforgettable.
A few years later he came to my room in a distant outcrop of the
War Office and sat among the samples of boots, which then occupied
most of my time, and made some cuts in the score of the London Symphony,
ready for its third performance in 1918. Many of us regretted the
cuts at that time, but we now see that he was right. That score
was partly in Edward Dent’s writing, partly in George Butterworth’s,
for the original had been in Germany when the 1914 war broke out,
and several friends lent a hand with its reconstruction from the
parts, which were, mercifully, still in England.
Another early memory was concerned with the beginnings of the Pastoral
Symphony. It was actually first heard at a rehearsal of the Royal
College of Music’s Students’ Orchestra a week or two before
the first performance in Queen’s Hall. Vaughan Williams, like
Brahms (who never allowed a score to go through the press until
he had heard it at least once), always liked to make sure of his
orchestration, and I think he made some slight amendments after
that rehearsal, as well as a few more after the work was printed.
The Royal College of Music performance took place after the Royal
Philharmonic Concert, of course, but at the College a young clarinet
scholar dealt with the soprano cadenzas (which are cued in, in case
a singer is not available) so beautifully that the composer said
he must play them at the concert, it was not worth while to look
for a student soprano. The scholar’s name was Frederick Thurston,
whose work is still well remembered. The part was equally beautifully
sung by Flora Mann at Queen’s Hall.
The next Symphony, The F minor, came later, but it is specially
to be remembered as it brought many of us straight up against the
spectacle of war, and the ghastly possibility of it. A prophet,
like other great men, he foresaw the whole thing (this was in 1935),
and surely there is no more magnificent gesture of disgust in all
music than that final open fifth when the composer seems to rid
himself of the whole hideous idea, and, as we know, began soon after
to think of the serene beauty of the D major, and what the post-war
world could be if men could have more sense.
A great creator, who has done more for the reputation of our country
something that can be measured by the debt that we owe to William
Shakespeare.
[top]
from Sir John Barbirolli
Early on the morning of 26 August there passed from
us one of the greatest and most beloved figures in British musical
history. I have been privileged to have had his intimate musical
and personal friendship for many years; years that were to become
more and more precious as they passed. He was one of the most ‘complete’
(if I may use the word) men I have ever known. He loved life, he
loved work, and his interest in all music was unquenchable and insatiable.
Only a few weeks ago in Cheltenham at the Festival of British Contemporary
Music, he was in his place at ten o’clock every morning to
hear us rehearse the efforts of his youngest, sometimes even obscure,
contemporaries, and we all marvelled at him.
It is given to few men to touch the hearts and minds of his fellows
in such degree as he has done; and only to the anointed is given
the genius that can span such opposites as the lovely little ‘Linden
Lea’ and the tremendous Fourth Symphony.
Dear Ralph: we shall always honour, admire and be grateful to you;
but above all we shall always feel blessed that we walked the same
earth with you.
[top]
from Herbert Howells
Are we, perhaps, in these individual tributes to him,
covering the same ground, crowding the same paths?
In the immediate aftermath of a loss at once severe and serene,
affection for the man will give us a common voice, and will inevitably
direct us to a point at which we recall and see again the man as
he was. And which of us would willingly lose sight of him?
Search for a man at the time of his departure is a craving we all
share. In this Vaughan Williams moment we might well ask ourselves
why we share it. Immediate critical assessment will not provide
the answer: it could be as inopportune (again for a moment) as it
would be useless. Nor can Posterity lend us its critical estimate.
We who have grown up in English twentieth-century music to the sound
and under the compulsion of two major forces in our midst cannot
pretend to any overpowering desire to know what A.D. 2000 will think
of the Man of Worcester born in 1857 or the Man of Gloucestershire
registered in Somerset House in 1872.
Tribute here and now is paid, rather, within the frame of mind
engendered by our having moved not merely on the outer fringes of
the V.W. world but often near to the heart of it. But we
could not trespass over the whole of it. Doubtless there
were in that rare mind of his certain private, undeclared, unshared
and deeply-felt mental and spiritual reserves that are an inevitable
part of high genius. In the case of Vaughan Williams it was an early
error in diagnosis that marked him down as an aesthete; a still
grosser error that found in him an unregenerate technical clumsiness.
So wrong, indeed, were these that, at the end of a career familiar
as the rich products that marked it, a supreme and paradoxical claim
is due. It is that he – the seer and visionary – became
and remained the man who invaded and enriched English musical life
at almost every point – almost as the textbook extrovert, and
always as a man of high practical efficiency.
To this rare man the business of composing was a business:
something to be mastered by sweat and toil, requiring practice and
devotion at the level of a music-hall conjurer’s. For him,
composing was always a dedication, never a mere solitary self-communion.
He explored his own private mind as the prime means of addressing
a wide public. Composing was a way of life, but a life to be shared
with the causes and with the rank and file of a profession in which
he regarded himself as an ordinary member. In a word, his was a
genius shared. In its exercise he took a surging joy. He piled up
the fruits of it over the long years of an inveterate development.
We must hope (and surely we believe) that he was aware of the immense
tide of respect and affection that flowed back to him.
If you will, call it ‘Ralph’s Flood’.
[top]
from Sir Arthur Bliss
Vaughan Williams has been the great name in our music
for many years. Thousands have sung or played his music, and million,
perhaps, know one side or other of his great and varied output.
He has left his influence on every branch of music from grand opera
to hymn tunes. He is now part of our inheritance.
There is a rock-like strength in his musical personality that is
exceedingly uncommon in the history of music. His music is a real
affirmation of life. When Epstein was moulding in clay the bust
of Vaughan Williams he was reported as saying that looking at this
head gave him strength. Many listeners to his music must have felt
the same.
Vaughan Williams took great subjects for his music, and brought
his personal vision to bear on them: the sea, London, the English
countryside, the book of Job, Shakespeare, Bunyan. The opera and
the symphony inspired by The Pilgrim’s Progress could
not have been written by anybody else. In both, a national outlook
is combined with a very personal style.
Vaughan Williams was always a searcher, an explorer. It was so
characteristic of him to start his career with a work called Toward
the Unknown Region and to write in his old age a symphony commemorating
‘Scott of the Antarctic’.
He was a man greatly revered, and with reason. Among his acts were
countless kindnesses, known only to himself and the persons concerned.
He gave continuous advice and encouragement to younger men. He had
the dignified humility of a great man, and was utterly unself-seeking.
Our sorrow that he has gone is mingled with gratitude for all that
he has left us.
[top]
from Sir Steuart Wilson
I knew R.V.W. personally and continuously for close
on fifty years – he did more than anyone else to encourage
and help me as a singer. I met his music and himself when I was
an undergraduate at Cambridge, he offered me a room in his house,
13 Cheyne Walk, when the 1914-18 war was over, and now the fifty
years have ended, I am competent only to say what the character
and the devotion of the man meant to me, for I am not competent
to assess his music as eternity will see it – ‘private
affection bereaves us of judgement’.
There was no day passed when he did not work at something –
no sitting and waiting for inspiration, the mind must be kept agile
with exercises. He told me it took him a whole morning to write
four bars’s viola counterpoint to fill up the Agnus Dei
in the B minor Mass. Now that he and J.S.B. can talk things over,
I will hazard a guess that the older musician will say, ‘How
did you know that I used to play it just like that?’ Everything
had to be done by himself and no duty was too menial or trivial.
In the first war he was a private in the R.A.M.C. Before he could
return to England to get his commission in the R.G.A. he spent months
in a transit camp in Salonica, where his chief task was to separate
solids from liquids in their primitive sewage arrangements: ‘After
that,’ he said, ‘I learned to call nothing common or unclean.’
If he undertook to be President or Patron of any society or committee,
he meant to work with them, and attendance at their functions was
a first charge on his time. A small music society in Chelsea had
their annual meeting on the same Sunday afternoon that the first
German orchestra played in London after 1918: he attended the meeting
as President rather than hear his Tallis Variations at the Albert
Hall. The second war found him too old to fight, so he dug his garden
at Dorking and collected salvage – he had to help in any way
he could. He was as proud of a giant marrow as of a symphony –
prouder, perhaps, because it wasn’t his job!
Other musicians could plead their tender consciences or the sacred
needs of their art – he, like the Pilgrim in his own Progress,
‘kept that light in his eye and went straight up thereto’,
and early on Tuesday, 26 August, the trumpets sounded for him. But
I know not who will take up his sword where he had to lay it down
(for no one enters armed into that Presence). In the quotation from
Plato on the cover of Sancta Civitas V.W. spoke his own mind
in the words of Socrates on the immortality of the soul: ‘No
one can know exactly, but it is good for us to utter these words
as a sort of incantation’. He was one of the last of the Victorian
ascetic, conscientious, agnostic Christians for whom the Abbey is
a fitting resting place.
[top]
from Sir George Dyson
V.W.’s supreme rank in the creative music of our
time needs no emphasis. I will write rather of his day-to-day generosity
and friendliness. He was at one time a member of the Council of
the Royal College of Music, but as our statutes debar members of
the council from being members of the professorial staff, he at
once resigned when Sir Hugh Allen asked him to take a few pupils
in composition, and he taught for many years. Then, in 1939, when
the war reduced our numbers by half, he immediately offered his
class to colleagues whose work was most seriously depleted.
He was instantly ready to support from his own purse the many appeals,
professional or otherwise, that came to him. Indeed it was sometimes
difficult to persuade him that some causes were more deserving than
others. His instinct was to help first and judge later, a trait
of character occasionally too optimistic, but always endearing.
He would go far to assist a promising talent or an enterprising
programme.
His modesty could be embarrassing. I had great difficulty in persuading
him to sit for Sir Gerald Kelly’s magnificent portrait, now
in the College council-room. He took the whimsical attitude that
if you want a good portrait the subject of it is immaterial. If
you want a good likeness, why not a photograph? Luckily we got both.
One last reminiscence. Not long ago he wrote to me describing a
most vivid dream in which he heard some unknown music. He was told,
in the dream, that I had written it, and he actually copies out
a musical quotation from it! I could not recognize it, but I am
more than content to have been given that fleeting moment in a unique
imagination.
[top]
from Frank Howes
Apart from his compositions – if indeed the man, his music
and his social connections can be kept apart – Ralph Vaughan
Williams contributed incalculable services to music and through
music to our national life. One thinks first, naturally of folk-song,
a national heritage which he helped to preserve, but the mind goes
back over the years and recalls his practical music-making with
his village choirs at Leith Hill and with his more sophisticated
London Bach Choir, his editorial work on the English Hymnal
and the Oxford Carol Book, not to mention his volumes for
the Purcell Society, his assiduous attendance at obscure concerts
where new works by younger composers were having their first performance,
his fierce letters to The Times whenever he scented an injustice
done or about to be done, his forthright speeches from diverse platforms
on musical occasions, at annual general meetings or even, though
he was not fond of them, public dinners. Of his compositions this
is not the place to speak, and in any case they belong to us all,
nor of his importance for our musical history, which is surely great.
What embraced all these things was the forceful personality of a
great man – for musical genius he can only be likened to Byrd
and Bach. He was truly a great Englishman who for two generations
has been increasingly an inspiration to all who came within the
orbit of music.
[top]
from Norman Demuth
Among Vaughan Williams’s most lovable characteristics
were his fund of human kindness and his humility. He had the knack
of making even the most inexperienced young composer feel at ease,
as if he were talking to an equal. He had a prodigious memory for
small details. On the occasion of a party in honour of his eighty-fifth
birthday, he said to me when I shook hands with him, ‘I owe
you and your wife a letter of thanks’. He must have received
hundreds of congratulatory letters, and was in the course of answering
them. It struck me as remarkable that he remembered that he had
not yet reached ours.
I shall always remember being able to hear the first performance
of his Fifth Symphony while I was in the Army. The experienced overwhelmed
me and I felt that I had to write and tell him about it. This I
did with some diffidence and hoped that he would not think it condescending
on my part. The answer arriving almost by return of post, was characteristic:
‘You should not waste time listening to my music when you have
so little in which to write your own’. The postscript was even
more typical: ‘Don’t think I am one of those who don’t
like praise. I love it’.
Even to look at Vaughan Williams was an inspiration. He had the
face of a visionary – and how he would have hated it if anyone
had told him so.
There is no doubt that when he crossed over ‘the trumpets
sounded for him on the other side’.
[top]
from Alun Hoddinott
The music of Vaughan Williams has always had, for me,
a particular appeal and significance, and the conviction has grown
steadily in me that it has that extra indefinable quality that will
ensure its survival.
One often forms a mental image of an artist through his work and
is often disappointed on meeting him. The reverse was the case with
Vaughan Williams. Here, obviously, was a wonderful man and personality.
I was fortunate enough to have the privilege of meeting him several
times over the last few years – mostly at concerts where new
works were being played.
The last time I saw Vaughan Williams was at this year’s Cheltenham
Festival, where he attended both the rehearsals of the new works
and the evening concerts. I had the opportunity of speaking to him,
and I confess I waited, with some trepidation, for his remarks about
my Harp Concerto, which was performed for the first time. He was
very kind, however, and ended by saying, ‘I’m old-fashioned
enough to like a tune’.
I was particularly glad to have been present at the performance
of the London Symphony on the last night but one of the Festival.
The performance and the spontaneous ovation which greeted Vaughan
Williams at the end showed the depth of affection and esteem in
which he was held; it will remain one of my most moving experiences
and memories.
[top]
from Michael Kennedy
Since early childhood I have passionately admired the
music of Ralph Vaughan Williams: it came to me as naturally as the
power of speech. During the war, while I was overseas, I was overcome
by homesickness and the effects of going too long without music.
On the spur of the moment I wrote to V.W. and told him what his
music meant to me, never expecting an answer to such an impertinence.
On returning to port weeks later I found a warm-hearted reply awaiting
me which had been despatched by return post. Thereafter we corresponded
regularly, and eventually we met and there began a close friendship
which will ever remain the most moving experience of my life. It
was impossible to realize that fifty years separated our ages: so
young and vital a mind as his seemed to thrive in the company of
his juniors. His sympathies and interest were as wide as the ground
he covered in his music. His greatness stemmed from his unswerving
honesty and genuine, most touching, humility. No one ever left his
company without feeling that they had been strengthened and enriched.
He enjoyed every aspect of life: how he loved parties and laughter!
In our letters we discussed the books we were reading, his music
and other music we had recently heard, poetry we liked, the events
of the day, our gardens. I even have an account (which must be unique)
of when he played cricket as a boy. To sit in his beautiful study
at Hanover Terrace while he worked at the piano was to sense the
serenity of his genius, and, at the same time, the mysticism and
massive strength of the composer of the Fourth Symphony, Job
and Hodie.
The last years of his full and complete life were gloriously happy.
His energy was unabated to the last day. It was a great satisfaction
to him that in recent years he heard splendid performances of some
of his lesser-known and underrated works: Sancta Civitas, Sir
John in Love, The Poisoned Kiss and Pilgrim’s Progress,
but I am sure his greatest pleasure was in his Bach Passion performances
at Dorking. The contact of these two mighty minds was an unforgettable
experience.
What a rich harvest this wonderful man has left us, a musical testament
of beauty of a breadth unrivalled in English music. He is part of
the fabric of our nation, with Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Hardy and
Elgar. The other day he told me he had never lost his love of Whitman,
and it is a line from Whitman, marvellously set to music in the
Sea Symphony, which has haunted me since 26 August: ‘Thoughts,
silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death’.
[top]
|
