Early years Vaughan Williams was born at
Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, the third child and younger son of the Reverend Arthur Vaughan Williams, the
vicar, and his wife, Margaret,
née Wedgwood. His paternal forebears were of mixed English and Welsh descent; many of them went into the law or
the Church. The judges
Sir Edward and
Sir Roland Vaughan Williams were respectively Arthur's father and brother. Such views were consistent with the progressive-minded tradition of both sides of the family. When the young Vaughan Williams asked his mother about Darwin's controversial book
On the Origin of Species, she answered, "The Bible says that God made the world in six days. Great Uncle Charles thinks it took longer: but we need not worry about it, for it is equally wonderful either way". In 1878, at the age of five, Vaughan Williams began receiving piano lessons from his aunt, Sophy Wedgwood. He displayed signs of musical talent early on, composing his first piece of music, a four-bar piano piece called "The Robin's Nest", in the same year. He did not greatly like the piano, and was pleased to begin violin lessons the following year. In 1880, when he was eight, he took a correspondence course in music from
Edinburgh University and passed the associated examinations. From there he moved on to the
public school Charterhouse in January 1887. His academic and sporting achievements there were satisfactory, and the school encouraged his musical development. In 1888 he organised a concert in the school hall, which included a performance of his G major Piano Trio (now lost) with the composer as violinist. In this, as in many other things in his life, he was, according to his biographer
Michael Kennedy, "that extremely English product the natural nonconformist with a conservative regard for the best tradition".
Royal College of Music and Trinity College, Cambridge , Vaughan Williams's first composition teacher at the
Royal College of Music In July 1890 Vaughan Williams left Charterhouse and in September he was enrolled as a student at the
Royal College of Music (RCM), London. After a compulsory course in
harmony with
Francis Edward Gladstone, professor of organ, counterpoint and harmony, he studied organ with
Walter Parratt and composition with
Hubert Parry. He idolised Parry, and recalled in his
Musical Autobiography (1950): Vaughan Williams's family would have preferred him to remain at Charterhouse for two more years and then go on to
Cambridge University. They were not convinced that he was talented enough to pursue a musical career, but feeling it would be wrong to prevent him from trying, they had allowed him to go to the RCM. Nevertheless, a university education was expected of him, and in 1892 he temporarily left the RCM and entered
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he spent three years, studying music and history. He felt intellectually overshadowed by some of his companions, but he learned much from them and formed lifelong friendships with several. Among the women with whom he mixed socially at Cambridge was Adeline Fisher, the daughter of
Herbert Fisher, an old friend of the Vaughan Williams family. She and Vaughan Williams grew close, and in June 1897, after he had left Cambridge, they became engaged to be married. , Vaughan Williams's second composition teacher at the RCM During his time at Cambridge Vaughan Williams continued his weekly lessons with Parry, and studied composition with
Charles Wood and organ with
Alan Gray. He graduated as
Bachelor of Music in 1894 and
Bachelor of Arts the following year. Beneath Stanford's severity lay a recognition of Vaughan Williams's talent and a desire to help the young man correct his opaque orchestration and extreme predilection for
modal music. In his second spell at the RCM (1895–1896) Vaughan Williams got to know a fellow student,
Gustav Holst, who became a lifelong friend. Stanford emphasised the need for his students to be self-critical, but Vaughan Williams and Holst became, and remained, one another's most valued critics; each would play his latest composition to the other while still working on it. Vaughan Williams later observed, "What one really learns from an Academy or College is not so much from one's official teachers as from one's fellow-students ... [we discussed] every subject under the sun from the lowest note of the
double bassoon to the philosophy of
Jude the Obscure". In 1949 he wrote of their relationship, "Holst declared that his music was influenced by that of his friend: the converse is certainly true."
Early career Vaughan Williams had a modest private income, which in his early career he supplemented with a variety of musical activities. Although the organ was not his preferred instrument, the only post he ever held for an annual salary was as a church organist and choirmaster. He held the position at St Barnabas, in the inner London district of South
Lambeth, from 1895 to 1899 for a salary of £50 a year. He disliked the job, but working closely with a choir was valuable experience for his later undertakings. ,
Chelsea, from 1905 to 1929 In October 1897 Adeline and Vaughan Williams were married. They honeymooned for several months in Berlin, where he studied with
Max Bruch. The song "Linden Lea" became the first of his works to appear in print, published in the magazine
The Vocalist in April 1902 and then as separate sheet music. In addition to composition he occupied himself in several capacities during the first decade of the century. He wrote articles for musical journals and for the second edition of ''
Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', edited the first volume of Purcell's
Welcome Songs for the
Purcell Society, and was for a while involved in adult education in the University Extension Lectures. From 1904 to 1906 he was music editor of a new hymn-book,
The English Hymnal, of which he later said, "I now know that two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues". Always committed to music-making for the whole community, he helped found the amateur
Leith Hill Musical Festival in 1905, and was appointed its principal conductor, a post he held until 1953. Collections of the songs were published, preserving many that could otherwise have vanished as oral traditions died out. Vaughan Williams incorporated some into his own compositions, and more generally was influenced by their prevailing modal forms. His compositions included the
tone poem In the Fen Country (1904) and the
Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 (1906). He remained unsatisfied with his technique as a composer. After unsuccessfully seeking lessons from
Sir Edward Elgar, he contemplated studying with
Vincent d'Indy in Paris. Instead, he was introduced by the critic and musicologist
M.D.Calvocoressi to
Maurice Ravel, a more modernist, less dogmatic musician than d'Indy. Vaughan Williams spent three months in Paris in the winter of 1907–1908, working with him four or five times each week. There is little documentation of Vaughan Williams's time with Ravel; the musicologist
Byron Adams advises caution in relying on Vaughan Williams's recollections in the
Musical Autobiography written forty-three years after the event. The degree to which the French composer influenced the Englishman's style is debated. Ravel declared Vaughan Williams to be "my only pupil who does not write my music"; nevertheless, commentators including Kennedy, Adams,
Hugh Ottaway and Alain Frogley find Vaughan Williams's instrumental textures lighter and sharper in the music written after his return from Paris, such as the String Quartet in G minor,
On Wenlock Edge, the Overture to
The Wasps and
A Sea Symphony. Vaughan Williams himself said that Ravel had helped him escape from "the heavy contrapuntal Teutonic manner". In the years between his return from Paris in 1908 and the outbreak of the
First World War in 1914, Vaughan Williams increasingly established himself as a figure in British music. For a rising composer it was important to receive performances at the big provincial music festivals, which generated publicity and royalties. In 1910 his music featured at two of the largest and most prestigious festivals, with the premieres of the
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis at the
Three Choirs Festival in
Gloucester Cathedral in September and
A Sea Symphony at the
Leeds Festival the following month. The leading British music critics of the time,
J. A. Fuller Maitland of
The Times and
Samuel Langford of
The Manchester Guardian, were strong in their praise. The former wrote of the fantasia, "The work is wonderful because it seems to lift one into some unknown region of musical thought and feeling. Throughout its course one is never sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new". Between these successes and the start of war Vaughan Williams's largest-scale work was the first version of
A London Symphony (1914). In the same year he wrote
The Lark Ascending in its original form for violin and piano. Frogley writes of this period that Vaughan Williams was considerably older than most of his comrades, and "the back-breaking labour of dangerous night-time journeys through mud and rain must have been more than usually punishing". In 1917 Vaughan Williams was commissioned as a
lieutenant in the
Royal Artillery, seeing action in France from March 1918. The continual noise of the guns damaged his hearing, and led to deafness in his later years. After the armistice in 1918 he served as director of music for the British
First Army until demobilised in February 1919. In 1921 he succeeded Allen as conductor of
The Bach Choir, London. It was not until 1922 that he produced a major new composition,
A Pastoral Symphony; the work was given its first performance in London in May conducted by
Adrian Boult and its American premiere in June conducted by the composer. Throughout the 1920s Vaughan Williams continued to compose, conduct and teach. Kennedy lists forty works premiered during the decade, including the
Mass in G minor (1922), the ballet
Old King Cole (1923), the operas
Hugh the Drover and
Sir John in Love (1924 and 1928), the suite
Flos Campi (1925) and the oratorio
Sancta Civitas (1925). During the decade Adeline became increasingly immobilised by arthritis, and the numerous stairs in their London house finally caused the Vaughan Williamses to move in 1929 to a more manageable home, "The White Gates",
Dorking, where they lived until Adeline's death in 1951. Vaughan Williams, who thought of himself as a complete Londoner, was sorry to leave the capital, but his wife was anxious to live in the country, and Dorking was within reasonably convenient reach of town. In 1932 Vaughan Williams was elected president of the
English Folk Dance and Song Society. From September to December of that year he was in the US as a visiting lecturer at
Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. Holst's death was a severe personal and professional blow to Vaughan Williams; the two had been each other's closest friends and musical advisers since their college days. After Holst's death Vaughan Williams was glad of the advice and support of other friends including Boult and the composer
Gerald Finzi, but his relationship with Holst was irreplaceable. In some of Vaughan Williams's music of the 1930s there is an explicitly dark, even violent tone. The ballet
Job: A Masque for Dancing (1930) and the
Fourth Symphony (1935) surprised the public and critics. The composer dismissed such interpretations, and insisted that the work was
absolute music, with no programme of any kind; nonetheless, some of those close to him, including Foss and Boult, remained convinced that something of the troubled spirit of the age was captured in the work. She was a poet, and had approached the composer with a proposed scenario for a ballet. Despite their both being married, and a four-decade age-gap, they fell in love almost from their first meeting; they maintained a secret love affair for more than a decade.
1939–1952 During the Second World War Vaughan Williams was active in civilian war work, chairing the
Home Office Committee for the Release of Interned Alien Musicians, helping
Myra Hess with the organisation of the daily
National Gallery concerts, serving on a committee for refugees from Nazi oppression, and on the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the forerunner of the
Arts Council, and even driving a lorry about to collect scrap metal. In 1942 Michael Wood died suddenly of heart failure. At Adeline's behest the widowed Ursula was invited to stay with the Vaughan Williamses in Dorking, and thereafter was a regular visitor there, sometimes staying for weeks at a time. The critic Michael White suggests that Adeline "appears, in the most amicable way, to have adopted Ursula as her successor". Ursula recorded that during air raids all three slept in the same room in adjacent beds, holding hands for comfort. The music Vaughan Williams wrote for the BBC to celebrate the end of the war,
Thanksgiving for Victory, was marked by what the critic
Edward Lockspeiser called the composer's characteristic avoidance of "any suggestion of rhetorical pompousness". Any suspicion that the septuagenarian composer had settled into benign tranquillity was dispelled by his
Sixth Symphony (1948), described by the critic
Gwyn Parry-Jones as "one of the most disturbing musical statements of the 20th century", opening with a "primal scream, plunging the listener immediately into a world of aggression and impending chaos." Coming as it did near the start of the
Cold War, many critics thought its
pianissimo last movement a depiction of a nuclear-scorched wasteland. The composer was dismissive of programmatic theories: "It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music." In 1951 Adeline died, aged eighty. In the same year Vaughan Williams's last opera, ''
The Pilgrim's Progress'', was staged at
Covent Garden as part of the
Festival of Britain. He had been working intermittently on a musical treatment of
John Bunyan's allegory for forty-five years, and the 1951 "morality" was the final result. The reviews were respectful, but the work did not catch the opera-going public's imagination, and the Royal Opera House's production was "insultingly half-hearted" according to Frogley.
Second marriage and last years In February 1953 Vaughan Williams and Ursula were married. He left the Dorking house and they took a lease of 10
Hanover Terrace,
Regent's Park, London. It was the year of
Queen Elizabeth II's coronation; Vaughan Williams's contribution was an arrangement of the
Old Hundredth psalm tune, and a new setting of "O taste and see" from
Psalm 34, performed at the service in
Westminster Abbey. in 1954 Having returned to live in London, Vaughan Williams, with Ursula's encouragement, became much more active socially and in
pro bono publico activities. He was a leading figure in the
Society for the Promotion of New Music, and in 1956 he set up and endowed the RVW Trust to support young composers and promote new or neglected music. He and his wife travelled extensively in Europe, and in 1954 he visited the US once again, having been invited to lecture at
Cornell and other universities and to conduct. He received an enthusiastic welcome from large audiences, and was overwhelmed at the warmth of his reception. Kennedy describes it as "like a musical state occasion". Of Vaughan Williams's works from the 1950s,
Grove makes particular mention of
Three Shakespeare Songs (1951) for unaccompanied chorus, the Christmas cantata
Hodie (1953–1954), the Violin Sonata, and, most particularly, the
Ten Blake Songs (1957) for voice and oboe, "a masterpiece of economy and precision". The predominant works of the 1950s were his three last symphonies. The seventh—officially unnumbered, and titled
Sinfonia antartica—divided opinion; the score is a reworking of music Vaughan Williams had written for the 1948 film
Scott of the Antarctic, and some critics thought it not truly symphonic. The
Ninth, premiered at a
Royal Philharmonic Society concert conducted by
Sir Malcolm Sargent in April 1958, puzzled critics with its sombre, questing tone, and did not immediately achieve the recognition it later gained. Two days later, after a private funeral at
Golders Green, he was cremated. On 19 September, at a crowded memorial service, his ashes were interred near the burial plots of Purcell and Stanford in the north choir aisle of Westminster Abbey. ==Music==