Ralph Vaughan Williams (12 October 1872 - 26 August 1958) was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. He was strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, and his musical output marked a break from the German style that dominated British music in the 19th century.
He was born on 12 October 1872 in the Cotswold village of Down Ampney, where his father was vicar. Antecedents included the interconnected families of Wedgwood and Darwin. Following his father’s death in 1875 he was brought up at Leith Hill Place in Surrey and educated at Charterhouse School, the Royal College of Music and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a pupil of Charles Stanford and Hubert Parry, later studying with Max Bruch in Berlin and Maurice Ravel in Paris.
At the turn of the century, he was among the very first to travel into the countryside to collect folk songs and carols from singers, notating them for future generations to enjoy. As musical editor of The English Hymnal, he composed several hymn tunes that remain popular (including Sine Nomine, “For all the Saints” and Down Ampney, “Come down O love Divine”). A long and deep friendship with Gustav Holst was a constructive relationship that was crucial to the development of both composers.
Vaughan Williams took three years off his age in order to volunteer for the army during the 1914-1918 war; after a long period of training and waiting he was sent to France in 1916, serving as a stretcher-bearer in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Later, he was given a commission in the Royal Garrison Artillery and found himself in charge of both guns and horses. The carnage and the loss of close friends such as the composer George Butterworth deeply affected him and influenced his music after the war.
He was married twice: in 1897 to Adeline Fisher, and in 1953 to the poet Ursula Wood. A knighthood was offered and refused, but the Order of Merit was conferred upon him in 1935.
He died on 26 August 1958; his ashes are interred in Westminster Abbey, near Purcell. In a long and productive life, music flowed from his creative pen in profusion. Hardly a musical genre was untouched or failed to be enriched by his work, which included nine symphonies, concertos for piano, violin, oboe and tuba, five operas, chamber, ballet and film music, a large body of songs and song cycles, and various important unaccompanied and orchestral choral works. His orchestral works include such popular favourites as The Lark Ascending, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, The Wasps Overture and the English Folk Song Suite.
Tropes present in Vaughan Williams's life and works:
- Deaf Composer: Vaughan Williams volunteered for military service at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He was commissioned as a lieutenant of the Royal Artillery in 1917, seeing action in France from March 1918. The continual noise of guns damaged his hearing, and he eventually went deaf in later years. Of course, that did not stop him from composing.
- Patriotic Fervour: He was one of the leading figures of musical nationalism in the United Kingdom and drew extensively from Tudor music and English folk-song.
- Pronouncing My Name for You: Vaughan Williams insisted on the traditional English pronunciation of his first name, which is "Rafe" (rhymes with "safe"). According to his wife Ursula, he would get angry if people pronounced it any other way.
- War Is Hell: Dona Nobis Pacem was inspired by his experience as an ambulance driver in the Great War.
