An immensely distinguished composer whose music helped to form a distinctively English national style, Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in Gloucestershire of Welsh extraction. Trained at the Royal College of Music by Hubert Parry and Charles Stanford, two composers very active in the revival of late 19th century English music, Vaughan Williams went on to study in Berlin under the composer Max Bruch and in Paris under Maurice Ravel.In 1903, Vaughan Williams began his extensive collection of more than 800 English folk songs, which he was to incorporate into a very personal but deeply English style that was also influenced by English music of the Tudor period. This style is already apparent in his song cycle On Wenlock Edge (1909) which used poems by A E Housman, and the classic Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910). 1910 also saw the performance of his first symphony, The Sea, containing poems by Walt Whitman in a choral setting.
At the outbreak of World War I, Vaughan Williams had just completed his second symphony, known as A London Symphony, which remains very popular today. He enlisted in the Field Medical Corps and saw action in Greece and France, and at the end of the war was appointed Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music. In 1923, Vaughan Williams wrote his third symphony, The Pastoral (1922), which remains the finest example of the pastoral style that came to dominate English composers in the first half of the 20th century.
Vaughan Williams also wrote for single instruments, with works like his Flos Campi (1925), for solo viola, chorus and small orchestra, which set to music passages from the Bible's Song of Songs. Vaughan Williams's fourth symphony, written in 1935, the year after the death of his close friend the composer Gustav Holst, reveals a less serene aspect with its strong rhythms and assonances. In that year he was awarded the Order of Merit.
With the outbreak of World War 2, Vaughan Williams devoted himself to war work, taking in refugees and turning his land over to allotments, but he also found time to produce some of his best music: in 1943 he finished his acclaimed Fifth Symphony, followed by an oboe concerto in 1944. He also engaged in film music, writing the score for a Powell and Pressburger film, The 49th Parallel.
Vaughan Williams' work after the war included A Romance for Harmonica, written for Larry Adler in 1952, and the highly acclaimed seventh symphony, Antarctica, which used part of his film score for Scott of the Antarctic. In his last years, Vaughan Williams gave many lectures across the USA and wrote 2 further symphonies. Altogether, his 9 symphonies cover a huge expressive range.
A master of vocal as well as of orchestral music, Vaughan Williams broke with the continental European, and specifically the German, tradition that had dominated English music since the time of Handel.
His use of folk song as a foundation of national musical style parallels the nationalist music of other composers such as the Russian Mussorgsky, the Czech Smetana and the Spaniard de Falla. "Modernism and conservation are irrelevant," he declared near the end of his life. "What matters is to be true to oneself."
