In 1890 RVW entered the Royal College of Music, which had only been in existence for seven years and had fewer than a hundred students who, in those early days were taught by Sir George Grove (who founded the college), Sir Arthur Sullivan, Hubert Parry, and Charles Villiers Stanford, with Parry and Stanford also professors of music at Oxford and Cambridge. As well as this connection with Britain’s two oldest universities The Royal College of Music also, through Sullivan, kept links with the stage and, through Parry, with the musical life of the Church of England, although, as RVW’s biographer, James Day, points out, training, “…a serious composer in the late nineteenth century meant training him (invariably a him) to write music for the organ-loft and the festival platform rather than for the stage. Sullivan’s operettas - the real beginning of the English musical renaissance in which Vaughan Williams was to be a leading figure - were ‘sports’, freak creations which it was regarded as neither desirable nor possible for a serious musician to emulate; even Stanford’s gallant attempts to write both heroic and comic operas met with consistent failure, not on account of the music, but on account of operatic organization in England, which was regarded as a rather peculiar business best left to foreigners. The young composer of those days often tended, quite naturally, and quite unconsciously, to envisage the orchestra as a kind of team version of the organ which accompanied lesser choral works within the framework of the Church’s liturgy. If he thought in terms of large-scale compositions, they were usually oratorios and sacred cantatas rather than works for the stage.” Ralph Vaughan Williams was to change all that.

RVW was taught initially at the RCM by F.E. Gladstone (a first cousin of the Liberal prime minister), who was himself an organist, and a teacher who made sure RVW worked his way methodically through Macfarren’s Harmony, a dry technical volume that RVW absorbed like mother’s milk and which, in later years, ensured he became one of the surest-footed orchestraters ever produced anywhere.

Ever since entering the RCM it had been RVW’s desire to study under Parry (who at that time was considered the greatest of all English composers) and after two terms with Gladstone, and passing with a Grade 5 in composition, he was able to do so.

As Day reminds us, Parry always “…tried to find out whether the music of his pupils had any individuality, if it contained something ‘characteristic’; not merely content, as so many teachers are, with pointing out faults, he also prescribed remedies for them which to him to suit the students personality.”

Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (1848 - 1918) was born in Bournemouth and is perhaps best now remembered as the composer of the music for the hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ and the musical setting of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ (soon to be heard again on the Last Night of the Proms) the orchestration of which was completed by Sir Edward Elgar (a neighbour of Parry’s) when the Dorset born composer fell ill in 1916. Parry was a man of high principles whose politics for the times was highly radical (he half jokingly suggested that the House of Lords would be improved by the inclusions of a few criminals), with a highly developed sense of artistic integrity, who nevertheless disliked French opera (RVW became a great lover of Bizet nonetheless), but went on to write some fine music - most notably The Ode on the Nativity (1912) and Songs of Farewell (1916-18) - which influenced RVW hugely. Parry the radical and the methodical was therefore the perfect teacher for Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Gustav Holst, one of RVW’s fellow students in Parry’s class, was also the best friend the aspiring, eager, young composer could have.

To Be Continued…

Steve Newman