Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of England’s best-loved composers, was something of a musical revolutionary. Rebelling against the German tradition that permeated British music during the 19th century, he pioneered a new style of English national music inspired by traditional folk songs and the music of Tudor England. He devoted considerable time to travelling through rural England collecting folk songs, thus helping to preserve a tradition that might otherwise have been lost forever, and many of these tunes found their way into his own music.

He was also inspired by his love for nature and the English countryside, particularly the Surrey landscape of his childhood.

Best known for pieces such as ‘The Lark Ascending’, ‘Fantasia on Greensleeves’ and ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’, Vaughan Williams’ career spanned 60 years – he was still composing in his eighties – and his output was vast, covering all musical genres, including nine symphonies, numerous songs and song cycles, hymns, operas, ballets, chamber works, choral works and film scores.

Early life
Born in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, on 12 October 1872, the youngest of three children, Ralph Vaughan Williams was a descendant of both the Wedgwood and Darwin families. His father, the Reverend Arthur Vaughan Williams (1834–1875), vicar of All Saints’ Church, Down Ampney, was married to Margaret Wedgwood (1842–1937), the great-granddaughter of pottery founder Josiah Wedgwood. Margaret’s father was Josiah Wedgwood III (1795–1880) and her mother was Caroline Sarah Darwin (1880–1888), sister of naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Charles was married to Josiah III’s sister, Emma Wedgwood (1808–1896).

Ralph was baptised in the church at Down Ampney, but his stay in the village was brief; his father died when he was just two years old, and his mother moved the family back to her childhood home, Leith Hill Place in Surrey.

Many years later, Ralph wrote a tune for the hymn ‘Come Down, O Love Divine’, and named it ‘Down Ampney’ in honour of his first home.

Leith Hill Place
Leith Hill Place, an imposing mansion with spectacular views across the Surrey Hills, was quite different to the rural cosiness of Down Ampney. For Margaret, the familiarity of her childhood home would undoubtedly have brought some comfort as she grieved the untimely loss of her husband. This was where she had grown up with her sisters, Sophy and Lucy, and where her famous uncle, Charles, had been a frequent visitor.

Ralph quickly developed a love for the house and the surrounding countryside, spending many happy hours exploring the woodlands and playing with his siblings, Margaret and Hervey. His aunt, Sophy, taught him the piano, violin and music theory from the age of five, and soon he was writing his first pieces of music. One of the earliest of these, written when he was just six, was The Robin’s Nest, reflecting the love of nature that would shape so much of his writing later on. He also wrote operas for his toy theatre.

He was educated at Field House School, Rottingdean, from 1883, before going on to Charterhouse in 1887. There his musical talent was allowed to flourish, and in 1888 he put on a school concert that featured his ‘G Major Piano Trio’ in which he played the violin part.

Vaughan Williams presented Leith Hill Place to the National Trust in 1944, and it was opened to the public in 2013. It is now a shrine to his memory, with his piano on display alongside manuscripts, correspondence and other memorabilia.

College and early career
In 1890 Ralph enrolled at the Royal College of Music, where he studied organ and composition, the latter with Jerusalem composer Hubert Parry. Vaughan Williams took great pride in inheriting the ‘great choral tradition’ from composers such as Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Purcell and Parry: ‘He has passed on the torch to us,’ he wrote in his Musical Autobiography (1950), ‘and it is our duty to keep it alight.’

After two years he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, at the insistence of his family, graduating in 1895 with a Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Arts. He returned to the RCM, finishing his studies two years later. Shortly afterwards, he married Adeline Fisher, whom he had met during his Cambridge days. After an extended honeymoon in Berlin, during which Ralph studied with leading German composer and conductor Max Bruch, the couple returned to live in London, first in Westminster and later in Chelsea. A doctorate in music from Cambridge followed in 1899, and for the next few years Ralph worked variously as a church organist, choirmaster, lecturer and writer while trying to establish a career as a composer.

In 1905 he helped found the Leith Hill Music Festival, an event designed to encourage music making for amateur singers. The festival took the form of a choir competition followed by an evening concert. Vaughan Williams became the first festival conductor, a post he held for 48 years. The festival continues to this day.

Meanwhile, his first published piece, ‘Linden Lea’, a setting of words by poet William Barnes, appeared in The Vocalist magazine in 1902 and is now one of his best-loved songs.

It was around this time that Vaughan Williams began collecting traditional English folk songs in his former home county of Surrey, spending numerous evenings in local pubs carefully writing down the notes and words of the songs he heard. He continued travelling through other counties, seeking out rural communities and adding more songs to his collection.

Over a period of around ten years he collected more than 800 songs, and these informed his music for the rest of his career. As editor of The English Hymnal from 1904 to 1906, he included 35 hymns based on tunes of English folk songs, including ‘He who would valiant be’ (‘from Monk’s Gate’) and ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ (from ‘Forest Green’).

The war years
By the outbreak of the First World War Vaughan Williams had become established as a new and exciting voice on the English music scene. In 1909 he wrote the incidental music for a production of Aristophanes’ The Wasps at Trinity College, Cambridge, which he later arranged into an orchestral suite. This was followed in 1910 by two of his most popular works: ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’, which premiered at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester Cathedral in September, and the premiere of A Sea Symphony at the Leeds Festival a month later. Samuel Langford of the Manchester Guardian declared that the latter work placed “’a new figure in the first rank of our English composers’.

In 1914, with Britain on the cusp of war, Vaughan Williams produced the much-loved ‘The Lark Ascending’, the sublime, bucolic nature of the piece providing a stark contrast to the horrors that lay ahead.

During the war, the 42-year-old Vaughan Williams served as an ambulance driver for the Royal Army Medical Corps in France and Greece. As with all who served, Vaughan Williams was left emotionally scarred by his experiences, especially as he lost a number of friends, including the promising young composer George Butterworth, who died at the Somme in August 1916, aged just 31.

During the interwar years Vaughan Williams took up a teaching post at the RCM, which he held for the next 20 years, became conductor of the Bach Choir in London, and in 1932 was elected president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Major works from this period include A Pastoral Symphony and Mass in G Minor (1922), the ballet Old King Cole (1923), operas Hugh the Drover (1924) and Sir John in Love (1928) and oratorio Sancta Civitas  (1925).

By the mid-1930s, following the deaths of Elgar, Delius and his great friend Holst, Vaughan Williams was the leading composer of his generation. His work took a darker turn with the turbulent fourth symphony (1935) and the anti-war cantata ‘Dona nobis pacem’ (1936).

At the outbreak of the Second World War Vaughan Williams was 57 and too old for active service, but he was determined to contribute to the war effort, serving on several committees and putting on concerts both for civilians and for the troops. In 1943 he conducted the premiere of his fifth symphony at the Proms, prompting music critic William Glock to praise its ‘exquisitely flowing language’.

He marked the end of the war with Thanksgiving for Victory, which was followed in 1948 by his sixth symphony and in 1951 by his final opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, as part of the Festival of Britain.

The final years
Vaughan Williams’ wife, Adeline, died in 1951, aged 80, and two years later Ralph married Ursula Wood, with whom he had embarked on an affair just before the war, despite a 39-year age gap. The couple moved to 10 Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park, which is now marked with a blue plaque.

In 1954, he established the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust to support young composers and to promote new and neglected music, and was also active in the Society for the Promotion of New Music.

Among his final works were Three Shakespeare Songs (1951), the Christmas cantata Hodie (1954), Ten Blake Songs (1957) and the last two symphonies.

Vaughan Williams died suddenly at home on 26 August 1958, aged 85. He was cremated at Golders Green two days later, with his ashes being interred at Westminster Abbey during a memorial service on 19 September.

His extraordinary legacy was to establish a distinctive idiom that no longer drew upon the Teutonic influences of his predecessors but instead rescued and breathed fresh life into traditional English tunes. More than 60 years later, his music remains as popular as ever. {