Vaughan Williams’s genius is now beyond dispute

Classical music plays hell with people’s posthumous reputations, as any admirer of the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams will tell you. In 1972, on the centenary of his birth, ample respects were shown. Not only were there special concerts of his music but the Post Office, which is now more focused on commemorating gay pride, issued a stamp. Since the composer’s death in 1958 he and his works had gone into an eclipse, not least because of the atonalists who controlled the Third Programme and many of our concert halls. These were people who believed the British music-loving public should be fed on a diet of what Kathleen Ferrier called ‘three farts and a raspberry, orchestrated’. The eclipse resumed after 1972. For some years it remained the case that finding performances of his works, especially in London concert halls, was equivalent to a moment of rare ecstasy.

But then, from about the late 1980s, things changed. Eminent conductors started to record cycles of his nine symphonies, and works other than ‘The Lark Ascending’, ‘Greensleeves’ and the ‘Tallis Fantasia’ could be spotted on concert programmes. By 2008, the 50th anniversary of his death, he was back in business. Tony Palmer made a superb film about him. Under the rule of Roger Wright, Radio 3 and the Proms at last did something the BBC ought to have been constituted to do: they promoted British music, and not least that of Vaughan Williams.

Something of a turning point came in the 2012 Proms season, when the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, under the brilliant direction of Andrew Manze, performed in a quite scorching concert the three middle symphonies – Nos. 4, 5 and 6. Anyone present who had thought Vaughan Williams was simply a good composer would have come away realising he was actually an exceptionally great one. Now his place as one of the landmarks of English culture is beyond dispute, and the recognition of his towering position in our national life, and as a figure in international music, can only grow.

His sesquicentenary, too, has stimulated a wealth of tributes – he was composer of the week on Radio 3 for a month – and these two books are a part of that commemoration. Eric Saylor’s is in Oxford University Press’s ‘Master Musicians’ series, and is well worth its place in that distinguished company.

The author draws on two great developments in Vaughan Williams studies since the turn of the century. The first is Hugh Cobbe’s magnificent initiative to publish the composer’s letters, both as a substantial OUP volume and online. The second has been the unfailing commitment of Albion Records, the recording arm of the Vaughan Williams Society, to hunt down scores of many of the composer’s unperformed or unrecorded works and record them. Many of these date from the early years of the last century, when Vaughan Williams was cutting his teeth as a composer. Together with the letters, Saylor can draw on this resource to give a far fuller picture of the early years – that is to say, up to 1914 – than any other biography, even the standard one by his widow Ursula Vaughan Williams, and the extensive biographical notes in the catalogue by Michael Kennedy.

Also, there was much about Vaughan Williams’s private life that discretion prevented a biographer from publishing while Ursula was still alive (she died in 2007, aged 96). It was widely known that the two had conducted an affair while Adeline, the composer’s first wife, greatly disabled by rheumatoid arthritis, was still alive, and that Adeline not only turned a blind eye but did all she could to encourage and support Ursula. Saylor puts on the record that Ursula had an abortion in about 1941, possibly of the composer’s child, and that other of his and Adeline’s friends were positively hostile. And Saylor gives a comprehensive account of Vaughan Williams’s other activities, notably his life as a teacher, but also as a philanthropist (he bankrolled Gustav Holst from time to time, and put much of his own money into the Leith Hill Festival near his home at Dorking) and man of deep principle.

Yet the great value of the book is Saylor’s intelligent view of the music, notably his analyses and interpretations of the symphonies and other major works. His evaluation of the sixth symphony – so often, and understandably, seen as a depiction of the terrible war that was just finishing as the composer began to write it in 1944, and an absolutely crucial part of the canon – is particularly intelligent and persuasive, representing the work as a comment simply on the human condition.

Saylor is an American writing from America, albeit with considerable expertise in British music. Some would argue that the essential Englishness of Vaughan Williams’s music, the shared and atavistic cultural experience that he has with listeners in his own land, might be hard for an outsider to appreciate; indeed his belief that the ‘Holberg Suite’ was written by Holst and not Grieg is perplexing. Equally, there is something to be said for the objective view that must be taken instead, in which the music speaks for itself, and illustrates not an incremental step in cultural history but the whole development of a composer. This is a book that every admirer of Vaughan Williams and his music should have and keep.

Caroline Davison’s book is initially about the story behind ‘The Captain’s Apprentice’, a fine folk song Vaughan Williams collected in King’s Lynn in 1905. The song tells the tale of a boy taken out of the town’s workhouse to work on board a merchant ship, and who was so brutally treated by the captain that ‘the poor boy died’. Davison is to be commended on the detail she produces about the composer’s visit to Norfolk, the people he met there and the songs they sang to him. She correctly provides ample context about Vaughan Williams’s folk-song collecting generally, and the other people (such as Cecil Sharp, Maud Karpeles, George Butterworth and Holst) with whom he did it. But then the book diverts into a biography of the composer’s early years, much of which is familiar, and into ruminations on the effect on the author herself of the song that gives her book its title, and of the first ‘Norfolk Rhapsody’ in which, orchestrated, it plays so integral a part.

Davison appears to have benefited (if that is the word) from a ‘creative non-fiction’ course at a university. The effects of this are, I fear, seen in other diversions, where she amplifies contemporary reports of court cases about cruel sea captains with her own imagination of aspects of what else happened. There will be some who think this is a good idea. I am not one. At times I wondered whether her book had been edited at all; it would certainly have benefited from being shorter, more focused and better organised. It is a shame, for her intentions are honourable, and this was an important moment in Vaughan Williams’s creative life. I doubt we have seen the last researches into the composer, and the years when he hunted down folk songs still contain much to be uncovered and fitted into place.