Incidental music to Electra (Preview)

Vaughan Williams Biography
Ralph Vaughan Williams, a descendant of the Darwins and Wedgwoods, was born in Down
Ampney, Gloucestershire, on 12 October 1872. He was educated at Charterhouse, the
Royal College of Music and Trinity College, Cambridge. His composition teachers included
Hubert Parry, Charles Wood and Charles Villiers Stanford. He also studied with Max Bruch
and Maurice Ravel, and enjoyed inspirational musical friendships with Gustav Holst and
George Butterworth. He married Adeline Fisher in 1897 and, after her death, married Ursula
Wood in 1953. Vaughan Williams began his career as a folk song collector, music editor
of The English Hymnal (1906) and founding conductor of the Leith Hill Festival—a post he
maintained for over fifty years. His reputation as a composer was established in 1910 with
performances of A Sea Symphony (1909) and the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910).
After the premiere of A London Symphony (1913), Vaughan Williams enlisted with the Royal
Army Medical Corps, serving in France as a wagon orderly. In 1919 he was appointed to the
staff of the Royal College of Music and in 1921 became conductor of the Bach Choir. He was
awarded the Order of Merit in 1935 and was recognized, even revered, as the major musical
figure of his time. He died on 26 August 1958. His ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey.
Vaughan Williams’ vast musical output includes song settings of Housman, Stevenson and
Whitman; The Lark Ascending (1920), an iridescent orchestral miniature where the solo
violin evokes a trilling lark rising above flat fields of ripening corn; Sancta Civitas (1923-25),
an oratorio remarkable for the visionary precision of its expression; the opera, The Pilgrim’s
Progress (1951), the last of several Bunyan-based settings (the first of which is published
as PME14); and Riders to the Sea (1925-32), an operatic rendition of J.M. Synge’s play set
against the unforgiving landscape of the Aran Islands. At the heart of his creativity lies a
sequence of nine symphonies that move from the meditative pastoralism of the Third (1921)
and Fifth (1938-43) to the louring existential dramas of the Fourth (1931-34), Sixth (1944-47)
and Seventh (1949-52); the Ninth (1956-57) is played against the tragic backdrop of Hardy’s
Tess of the d’Urbervilles. At the centre of all Vaughan Williams’ work is a robust delight in
expressing his country, past and present, as a means of perpetually renewing himself and
of discovering his own potential humanity.
In a valedictory broadcast (27 August 1958) following the news of Vaughan Williams’ death,
the New Zealand composer Douglas Lilburn (a former student of RVW) spoke of his music
as sown in soil and reaped in wisdom:
It speaks honestly and directly, and is not afraid sometimes to speak with affirmation.
It draws into itself the whole rediscovered heritage of English sixteenth-century music,
folk song and hymn tune, love of countryside and traditional ways. It always seems
right for its purpose, for the particular truth that it wants to convey, and it seems to
me one of the things we best learn from him—that greatness in art springs finally from
conviction.
Robert Hoskins, Founding Series Editor
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