A Walk Through the English Countryside

The Vaughan Williams Society, which devotes itself to devoting and promoting the works of the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (pronounced if you’re in the know as “Rafe,” not Ralph), goes right out there on an English oak limb and calls Vaughan Williams the greatest British composer since Purcell.

Hmmm—are we forgetting a certain composer called Benjamin Britten? That War Requiem is acknowledged to be a major choral of the twentieth century…..

But nobody can deny—Vaughan Williams is major as well. All of the snobs who cannot stomach Elgar (sometimes called “Smellgar” by orchestra musicians) will at least tolerate Vaughan Williams, or not belittle you if admire him.

Nor can it be denied that he’s English—his great-uncle was Darwin, and his mother was a Wedgwood. Yes, the great granddaughter of Josiah, who started that little company…..

He’s not to everybody’s taste, but who—perhaps barring Bach and Mozart—is? Yes, there is a distinctly English feel to the music. But if you only know him, as I did until recently, through The Lark Ascending, the Variations on a theme by Thomas Tallis, and the Fantasia on Greensleeves, you're cheating yourself. There’s a lot more of Vaughan Williams, and some of it is surprising different.

Though he’s seen as the classic English composer, he actually studied in France with Maurice Ravel and in Germany with Max Bruch; the influence of Ravel especially can be heard in his early works.

And the nine symphonies—only two of which I know—are said to vary greatly; he was not a composer, like Copland, who composed new titles, not new pieces. Nor did he come early to composition—his first work was published when he was 30 (Vaughan Williams was born in 1872, and died in 1958)

One of the great things about Vaughan Williams is that he’s a supreme lyricist—he can write a song that wrenches the heart. Consider the poem below, Silent Noon, which is included in the “House of Life: A sonnet Sequence”:

 Silent Noon

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,

Your eyes smile peace.

The pasture gleams and glooms

‘Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.

All around our nest, far as the eye can pass,

Are golden kingcup filled with silver edge

Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.

Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly

Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky

So this wing’d hour is dropt to us from above.

Oh! clasp we to our heart, for deathless dower,

This close-companioned inarticulate hour,

When twofold silence was the song of love.

By Dante Gabriel Rossetti

It’s not a bad poem, but what Vaughan Williams does with it is extraordinary. And Vaughan Williams seems to have had a felicity for finding and interpreting text. We forget, sometimes, that Robert Louis Stevenson was also a capable poet, as well as the author of Treasure Island and A Child’s Garden of Verses. Stevenson was famous and esteemed in his lifetime, somewhat scoffed at through most of the twentieth century, and then “rehabilitated” late in the last century. It would be easy to dismiss the poem below, Whither Must I Wander, as just so much Victorian maudlin sentimentality, but listen to what Vaughan Williams does with it :

HOME no more home to me, whither must I wander?

Hunger my driver, I go where I must.

Cold blows the winter wind over hill and heather;

Thick drives the rain, and my roof is in the dust.

Loved of wise men was the shade of my roof-tree.

The true word of welcome was spoken in the door--

Dear days of old, with the faces in the firelight,

Kind folks of old, you come again no more.

Home was home then, my dear, full of kindly faces,

Home was home then, my dear, happy for the child.

Fire and the windows bright glittered on the moorland;

Song, tuneful song, built a palace in the wild.

Now, when day dawns on the broow of the moorland,

Lone stands the house, and the chimney-stone is cold.

Lone let is stand, now the friends are all departed,

The kind hearts, the true hearts, that loved the place of old.

Spring shall come, come again, calling up the moor-fowl,

Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers;

Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley,

Soft flow the stream through the even-flowing hours;

Fair the day shine as it shone on my childhood--

Fair shine the day on the house with open door;

Birds come and cry there and twitter in the chimney--

But I go for ever and come again no more.

Nor was it just the Victorian Era from which Vaughan Williams drew—he opened the top drawer of English verse and used what he found freely. Here, sung by the remarkable countertenor David Daniels, is Vaughan Williams setting of the song in the third act of Henry VIII by William Shakespeare:

Orpheus with his lute made trees 


And the mountain tops that freeze 


Bow themselves when he did sing: 


To his music plants and flowers 


Ever sprung; as sun and showers


There had made a lasting spring.






Every thing that heard him play, 


Even the billows of the sea, 


Hung their heads and then lay by. 


In sweet music is such art,


Killing care and grief of heart 


Fall asleep, or hearing, die.



(William Shakespeare, 1564--1616)

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One of the things that Vaughan Williams will always be remembered for was his interest in, and championing of, English folk song. But he did more than that—the folk song was facing extinction; with the advent of technology the oral traditions were being lost. Vaughan Williams traveled the countryside, hearing songs, writing them down. And he was no amateur; he served as president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, which named its library after him.

Appropriate, then, that his first published work, and our last song for this post, should be Linden Lea.