Vaughan Williams found his true voice only in his late thirties
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) broke British music free of its German habits, drawing on Tudor composers and English folk-song across nine symphonies written over sixty years. A late developer, he found his voice after lessons with Ravel, and he was still finishing symphonies in his eighties.
He was born in 1872 at Down Ampney in Gloucestershire, son of a vicar and of Margaret Wedgwood, great-granddaughter of Josiah Wedgwood. After his father died suddenly in 1875 the family moved to Leith Hill Place in Surrey, where a nurse taught the children good manners along with liberal opinions. At five he began piano with his aunt Sophy Wedgwood and wrote a four-bar piece called The Robin's Nest; he soon preferred the violin, and at eight passed a correspondence course in music from Edinburgh University.
At Charterhouse he drifted into atheism and then what he called a cheerful agnosticism, while keeping a lifelong love of the Authorised Version of the Bible. At the Royal College of Music he idolised Hubert Parry, who urged him to write choral music fit for an Englishman and a democrat. His family doubted his talent and sent him to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he befriended Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore and G. M. Trevelyan. Back at the college under Charles Villiers Stanford he met Gustav Holst, and the two became each other's most trusted critics for life.
His only salaried post was as organist at St Barnabas, South Lambeth, from 1895 to 1899 at £50 a year, a job he disliked but which taught him about choirs. He married Adeline Fisher in 1897 and honeymooned in Berlin, studying with Max Bruch. Linden Lea became his first published work in 1902, and from 1903 he tramped the countryside collecting folk-songs, saving many from extinction. Study with Ravel in 1907 and 1908 finally clarified his style.
The Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis of 1910 and The Lark Ascending of 1914 remain favourites. Army service in the First World War marked him deeply. In his sixties, still devoted to his marriage, he was swept up in an affair with a far younger woman, whom he would eventually marry, and he completed his last symphony months before dying at 85.
Source: Ralph Vaughan Williams
