No, that doesn’t refer to the BBC’s latest classic serial Lark Rise at Candleford, but to Vaughan Williams’s famous piece The Lark Ascending, which topped Classic FM’s listeners’ poll for their favourite piece of music.

It was Ralph VW’s year, for he also came third with his more substantial work Fantasies on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.

Half a century after his death, the British composer’s 1914 programme piece of a lark singing over the English countryside took the number one spot in the Hall of Fame for the second year in a row.

More than 100,000 Classic FM listeners voted in the survey.

Darren Henley of Classic FM said: “The British public has spoken and declared Vaughan Williams their champion. In the 50 years since his death, Vaughan Williams has cemented his position as among the best-loved English composers of all time.”

At number two was Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, while Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto and Sixth Symphony took fourth and fifth place.

The full Top 20 :

1. Vaughan Williams - The Lark Ascending
2. Rachmaninov - Piano Concerto No 2
3. Vaughan Williams - Fantasia On A Theme Of Thomas Tallis
4. Beethoven - Piano Concerto No 5
5. Beethoven - Symphony No 6
6. Mozart - Clarinet Concerto
7. Elgar - Cello Concerto
8. Bruch - Violin Concerto No 1
9. Elgar - Enigma Variations
10. Beethoven - Symphony No 9
11. Pachelbel - Canon
12. Barber - Adagio for Strings
13. Jenkins - The Armed Man: A Mass For Peace
14. Vivaldi - Four Seasons
15. Rachmaninov - Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini
16. Holst - The Planets
17. Grieg - Piano Concerto
18. Tchaikovsky - 1812 Overture
19. Mozart - Requiem
20. Handel - Messiah.

No, I didn’t say that. It was a German, Oscar Adolf Hermann Schmitz, way back in 1904. Not so long ago that it doesn’t still wound.

Schmitz — or Fritz, as Sun readers would cry — had this to say of the land that bore Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Purcell, Parry and Holst :

England, he said is “Das Land Ohne Musik” — the land without music.

Thankfully, the country now has a champion. A man of many parts, a journalist and former editor of one of our top weekly magazines; a Member of Parliament and Shadow Minister for Higher Education, no less.

Step forward Defender of the Faith (musical variety) … (drum roll) : Boris Johnson.

A little late, we might murmur into our gins and tonic. And is he the best man for the job? After all …

But don’t look a gift horse in the mouth … even if Boris’s foot is already in it.

Enough of prelude and overture. Read Boris in his own words Here.

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

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