The “most English” publisher Ralph Vaughan Williams
His lifelong inspiration was mainly old English music and the legacy of British folk songs.
Next Music according to the calendar reminds one of the English music composer of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century by Ralph Vaughan Williams. He was born on October 12, 1872, exactly 150 years ago. His most famous piece is probably The Lark Ascending; however, he also wrote nine symphonies, is the author of operas, film scores and was also a passionate collector of English folk songs. His most popular credits also include the four-minute Fantasia on Greensleeves, which originally appeared in his 1928 opera Sir John in Love. It contains a folk song called ‘Lovely Joan’ which Vaughan Williams came across in Sussex.
By my father by Ralph Vaughan Williams was vicar Arthur Vaughn Williams, mother Margaret was Charles Darwin’s great-niece. Young Ralph studied piano and violin and collected traditional folk songs from an early age, which later became the inspiration for many of his subsequent works. Vaughan Williams studied at Trinity College in Cambridge and at the Royal College of Music in London under the two main figures of the English music renaissance of the late 19th century, Sir Charles Stanford and Sir Hubert Parry. In 1897–98 he studied in Berlin with the important composer Max Bruch and in 1909 in Paris with Maurice Ravel.
Studies with Ravel had a major influence on Vaughan Williams and inspired one of his most prolific compositional periods. In 1910 he premiered his Symphony of the Sea and Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, in which Vaghan Williams varies the music of the 16th-century English composer Thomas Tallis. The orchestration of this work resulted in an unmistakably British sound and remains one of the author’s most popular compositions.
He will remind you of the other fates of this English composer Martina Klausová in the program, which will premiere in Friday, October 14 at 7 p.m. You can listen to the replays on Sunday 16.10. at 9:00 a.m. and Wednesday 19.10. at 10:00 p.m.
Photo: Profimedia