Ralph Vaughan Williams

Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in Down Ampney, England, on October 12, 1872. After attending the Royal College of Music, he studied composition privately with Max Bruch in Berlin. In 1901 he was appointed organist of the St. Barnabas Church in London. For the next few years he devoted himself mainly to church music. His interest in the English folk songs of the Tudor period, first stimulated in 1904, proved for him a decisive turning point. Besides dedicating himself henceforth to intensive research in English folk music (much of which he helped to revive from neglect and obscurity through his editions and adaptations) he found a new direction as composer: in the writing of music with a national identity, music absorbing the melodic, harmonic and modal techniques—at times even the actual material—of these old songs and dances. This new trend first became evident in 1907 with his Norfolk Rhapsodies. After an additional period of study with Maurice Ravel in Paris, Vaughan Williams embarked upon the writing of his first major works which included the famous Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, London Symphony, and the opera Hugh the Drover. Subsequent works in all fields of composition placed him with the masters of 20th-century music. These compositions included symphonies, operas, concertos, fantasias, choral and chamber music. For more than thirty years, Vaughan Williams taught composition at the Royal College of Music in London; from 1920 to 1928 he was the conductor of the Bach Choir, also in that city. He paid two visits to the United States, the first time in 1922 to direct some of his works at a music festival in Connecticut, and the second time a decade later to lecture at Bryn Mawr College. He received the Order of Merit in 1935 and the Albert medal of the Royal Society of Arts in 1955. He died in London on August 26, 1958.

Only a meagre number of Vaughan Williams’ compositions have popular appeal. One of these is the Fantasia on Greensleeves, for orchestra. “Greensleeves” is an old English folk song dating from the early 16th century, and mentioned in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. In the 17th century it became the party song of the Cavaliers. Americans know it best through a popular-song adaptation in 1957. Vaughan Williams’ delightful fantasia appears as an orchestral interlude in his opera Sir John in Love (1929), based on The Merry Wives of Windsor. A brief episode for flute leads to “Greensleeves,” which is harmonized opulently for strings. Two brief variations follow. Then the opening flute episode is recalled as is the folk song itself—the main melody in lower strings with embellishments in the upper ones.

The March of the Kitchen Utensils is an amusing little episode for orchestra, part of the incidental music prepared by the composer for a production of Aristophanes’ The Wasps in Cambridge in 1909. This march opens with a humorous little theme for the wind instruments in the impish style of Prokofiev. The theme is taken over by the strings. The middle section is much more in the identifiable national style of Vaughan Williams with a melody that resembles an old English folk dance.