Music: Parish-Pump Composer

Son of a Gloucestershire clergyman and blessed with a private income, Ralph Vaughan Williams was never a man in a hurry. Not until his 35th year, when his Walt Whitman cantata Toward the Unknown Region was performed (1907), did he attract any real attention; by then he was already six years a Mus.D. from Cambridge. He wrote his first ballet (Old King Cole] at 51, his first film score (49th Parallel) at 68. Ever eager to try his hand at something new, he surprised Harmonica Virtuoso Larry Adler with a Romance for Harmonica with orchestral accompaniment. By then Composer Williams was 79. At 80, two years a widower, he married for the second time—his secretary. A year later he listened to the first performance of his pawky Concerto for Bass Tuba through a cantankerous hearing aid.

As a young man, Vaughan Williams in vain sought his own musical language in London (at the Royal College of Music) and Berlin (under Composer Max Bruch), finally found it in the modal, autochthonous abundance of the English countryside’s folk music. Together with his friend Gustav Hoist, he severed the bonds binding English music to Germany and France. He once wrote: “Have we not all about us forms of musical expression which we can take and purify and raise to the level of great art? For instance, the lilt of the chorus at a music-hall joining in a popular song, the children dancing to a barrel organ, the rousing fervor of a Salvation Army hymn . . . the cries of the street pedlars, the factory girls singing their sentimental songs. Have all these nothing to say to us?” For his pains he was at first dismissed as “a parish-pump composer.” But he brought stature to the parish pump, and in time the musical world acknowledged him a master.

Darling Man. A brief period of study with Ravel in France only purified his English idiom, resulting in the moving Housman song cycle On Wenlock Edge. His rare ventures into modernist techniques left him uncertain; after the first performance of his war-troubled (1935) Symphony No. 4, he said, “I do not know whether I like it,-but it is what I meant.” Several years later, after conducting it himself, he revised his opinion: “Well, gentlemen, if that’s modern music, you can have it.”

By the time his stirring Symphony No. 6 had its premiere in 1948, when he was 76, musical history offered few parallels of such creative longevity. Yet Ralph Vaughan Williams went on to write three more symphonies. King George V gave him the Order of Merit in 1935, but he declined many other honors, knighthood included. He may not have attained the wide popularity of that musical Kipling, Sir Edward Elgar, but international professionals respected Vaughan Williams as the more important musician. And all England loved him as Sir Malcolm Sargent described him: “A darling fat man walking about clasping a bowler hat to his tummy and wearing the widest trousers in Christendom.”

In the Morning. Last week he was to go to a recording session of his latest (1958) symphony, the Ninth, conducted by his old friend Sir Adrian Boult. The afternoon before, he had chatted with a guidance-seeking Israeli composer at tea at his house in London’s Regent’s Park. At dinner he looked tired. During the early morning hours, he turned to his wife Ursula, murmured that it hurt him to breathe. Before he was sufficiently awake to be conscious of real pain, Ralph Vaughan Williams was dead at 85—probably his country’s greatest composer since Purcell, and one of the few since the Elizabethans to reflect the spirit of all things English.