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

A Film by Ken Russell

Watching Ken Russell’s film about Delius with the most beautiful woman in the world the other weekend I was again amazed at its effectiveness at conveying a period - the 1930s - and of the composer, who was an enigma unto himself, and a complete mystery to the rest of us.

And I say that as a man who has written and directed a play about Delius, and his meeting with Elgar in 1934, but who nevertheless felt he’d only scratched the surface of one of England’s greatest composers, a composer who often denied his Englishness anyway, living outside the country all of his adult life, yet nonetheless sometimes considered himself a Yorkshireman but never a German, and he was both, but of wholly German parentage; and perhaps within that lies the mystery which his beautiful music adds to because it is itself a mystery in that it doesn’t seem to belong anywhere geographical, but everywhere emotionally - and emotion in music is an important but often dangerous thing.

The film, made for the BBC in 1968, is a small masterpiece that really does make you think you are in the claustrophobic Delius household, and sometimes within the claustrophobic mind of the composer who, because of his paralysis and blindness is now unable to compose, a condition the young Yorkshireman, Eric Fenby ( a charming man I had the honour to meet in the early 1990s), reads about in the press, which results in his travelling to France to try and help Delius with some unfinished scores.

And at the heart of this remarkable film is the tortuous journey that Fenby and Delius have to make before they discover not only trust, but a practical way in which they can work together that allows Delius to express himself and Fenby to get it all down. These scenes are the most moving in the whole film as Delius calls out the notation and for which instrument or groups of instruments the notation is for. And as the two men work, initially in a frenzy of misunderstanding ( Delius was taught German notation in Leipzig which confuses Fenby), which slowly becomes an understanding of intent, we begin to hear the music and watch as Delius hears it to in his head. It is great emotional cinema that matches the emotion of the music superbly well.

The performance of Max Adrian as Delius is remarkable, as are those of Maureen Pryor as his wife Jelka, and Christopher Gable as Fenby.

It was also good to see again the old bath-chair the BBC allowed me to use for my own play about Delius, a creaking old thing from the 1910s that had been gathering dust in the BBC props warehouse in Birmingham.

The film is based on Eric Fenby’s book Delius As I Knew Him, which I think is still available from Faber & Faber, with the video of the film available from BBC Films. Get it, it’s worth every minute.

Steve Newman

I remember as a child taking part in a country dancing competition put on by a handful of Warwickshire schools as part of the Shakespeare Birthday Celebrations in Stratford, a competition judged by Vaughan Williams, who I remember as a large elderly man slumped in a chair on the Bancroft Gardens outside the Memorial Theatre. I also remember that he tapped his walking stick in time to the music being played by a motley bunch of local musicians from several Morris Dancing groups. The point is he actually seemed to be enjoying himself, which is more than could be said for me. All I wanted was for it to be finished so I could get home and see that evening’s episode of The Cisco Kid. But the image of that old man - who had a much younger woman at his side - tapping his walking stick in time to music I now realise he must have known intimately, has remained with me.

And the abiding image we have of RVW is one of an old man, it is an image we have come across on LP and CD covers eversince his death in 1958. Much less often do we see images, or remember him, as a tall young man with passion and vision, a young man who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, travelled the countryside collecting English folk songs whose melodies and constructions he used again and again. Seldom, if ever, are we reminded that he was the musical director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1912 at the height of Benson’s fame, or that he risked his life along with millions of others ( including Benson) in the trenches of France and Salonika during the First World War, an experience that changed his music forever after 1918, filling it with irony and even more humanity, but also with a new sound: that of the very bloodied early 20th century quite literally on the move.

All of this was in the future. In the 1880s, the decade after RVW’s birth, one of the most respected principles of living at Leith Hill Place - and something RVW the child learned very early on - was that you would never, ever, show disrespect toward the servants - and there were many servants - plus, you must always be direct in your conversation (no lies or gossip), have an independence of spirit (and be prepared to argue your corner), and always be extremely industrious, attributes that should nevertheless also be mixed with charm and dignity (all traits of the Wedgwood, Darwin, Williams, and Vaughan families), which the young RVW inherited and learned by the bucketful.

As an eight year old he also taught himself to play the organ, a great beast of a thing that lived in the hallway of Leith Hill Place (which was no semi), persuading the servants to work the bellows as he filled the house with music, and this was usually around five in the morning, so no one slept late. Some biographers of RVW have suggested that his upbringing was no different from other children of his time and class. I don’t really agree. I think RVW’s home life was an extraordinary in its freedom, and for its time, extremely happy and unrestricted whereas most artists and writers of his generation seem to have been brought up in dreadfully restricted homes, with parents who either ignored their children completely, or tried to destroy whatever spark of creativity they had with corporal punishment.

In 1882 the already tall RVW was sent to a preparatory school in Rottingdene, where he learned piano under the forward looking educationalist C.T. West who, as James Day reminds us, “…introduced him to the music of Bach, and continued his violin lessons (which he practised in the evenings, so there wasn‘t much sleep in the Leith Hill Place household) under the Irishman, W.M. Quirke, a well known Brighton teacher of those days…” with the high light of the young RVW’s school musical career coming when “…Quirke’s young charge performed Raff’s Cavatina…”, ‘double- stops and all’, as Vaughan Williams insisted in later life.

He was a born musician.

To Be Continued…

Steve Newman

Beware the man who hath no music in his soul…

Listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams Serenade to Music first performed in the 1930s as a tribute to the conductor Sir Henry Wood, I am again struck by RVW’s complete openness as a human being, and by his generosity and humanity of spirit - to listen to his music is to listen to the Earth turning.

It is also to listen to the man himself bestriding the landscape in giant musical steps as if some great static construction has freed itself and is on the move; just listen to his 3rd Symphony, the ‘Pastoral’ (1921) to hear what I mean. This symphony - which is as much an ironic statement about the First World War as it is a musical description of the English countryside - was a watershed in RVW’s career, marking him out as a composer who was going to plough a very distinctive and idiosyncratic furrow, and by so doing create a body of work that is always fresh to the ear and to the heart (a vital element), which renews itself and the listener each and every time.

Ralph (pronounced ‘Rafe’) Vaughan Williams, the second son and youngest child of Arthur Charles Vaughan Williams and Margaret Susan Wedgwood, was born on the 12th of October 1872 in Down Ambney, in Gloucestershire, where his father was vicar.

But with Arthur’s sudden death in 1875 Ralph’s mother moved the family back to her sister’s home at Leith Hill Place in Surrey, which her father, Josiah Wedgwood III, had bought in 1845, and where the old man continued to live until his death in 1880.

And as the name Wedgwood suggests Ralph Vaughan Williams came from good patrician stock. On his father’s side the family was of Welsh extraction, with John Williams, Ralph’s great-grandfather, born in Job’s Well in Carmarthenshire in 1757. And as James Day writes, in his 1961 biography of Vaughan Williams, John Williams, after leaving Carmarthen Grammar School went “…to Jesus College, Oxford, before becoming a scholar of Wadham in 1774 and a fellow in 1780. He enjoyed a distinguished career at the bar – notably as a special pleader – becoming a Serjeant-at-law in 1794 and a King’s Serjeant ten years later. As a legal scholar he was famous mainly for his edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries and the Reports and Pleadings in the Court of King’s Bench in the Reign of Charles II, [with] his highly valued, shrewd and lucid notes and references adding greatly to the appeal and value of the latter book in particular.”

John Williams had three sons and three daughters (one of whom, Mary, married the sixth Earl of Buckingham), with Edward Vaughan Williams, RVW’s grandfather (the addition of the name ‘Vaughan’ came from Edward’s mother), born in Bayswater in 1797. He was educated at Winchester and Westminster before winning a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1816, where, like his father before him, he studied law. After establishing himself as a lawyer he brought out a new edition of his father’s book, Note’s on Saunders’ Reports, which he followed with a treatise called On the Law of Executors and Administration which was published in 1832 and reprinted many times during Edward’s lifetime. In the year he became a judge,1847, he was also knighted and went on to become one of the most respected judges on the circuit.

Sir Edward Vaughan Williams married in 1828, and like his father had three sons and three daughters, with the earlier mentioned, Arthur Charles Vaughan Williams (RVW’s father), born in London in 1834. He was educated at Westminster and later at Christ Church, Oxford, where he obtained his BA in 1857. With a house already full of lawyers Arthur decided on a career in the church, and in 1860 was ordained deacon and sent to Bemerton, near Salisbury, where he served as a curate before becoming a fully-fledged vicar in 1865. He married the aforementioned Margaret Susan Wedgwood (who was also a niece of Charles Darwin) in February 1868, which takes us right back to the birth of RVW in 1872 and perhaps a larger understanding of the origins of his music - music that can, I feel, clearly be traced back to the Age of Enlightenment, and the newer, more caring, more liberal, and more tolerant - humanistic if you like - attitudes that his lawyer grandfather and great-grandfather brought to an almost moribund profession. Mix all of this together with the revolutionary theories of Charles Darwin (theories that must surely have permeated every corner of Leith Hill Place), plus the hugely influential creations of the Wedgwood family – and their own liberal attitudes to their workers - and you have an anvil of creativity, and not least care for your fellow human beings - that comes shining through every piece of music RVW wrote.

To Be Continued…

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