A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Vaughan Williams
I had decided not to include Ralph Vaughan Williams in my survey of the great vocal composers, until a chance encounter with a friend started me thinking that by omitting him, I was doing a very fine composer a disservice. Not only that, but in retrospect this quintessentially English musician has been an enormous influence on my life and career. From my first professional engagement to my first solo CD recording, Vaughan Williams has been there for me, as they say on ‘Friends’.
He was born in 1872 at Down Ampney in Gloucestershire, the son of a vicar, into a comfortable well-to-do family. His mother was the granddaughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the founder of the china company, and the niece of Charles Darwin, and young Ralph spent a comfortable childhood at various boarding schools. Despite his father being a vicar, his family’s ethos was liberal and questioning, and he grew into a healthy agnosticism, although retaining a lifelong love of the Authorised Bible. One of my favourite quotes refers to his great uncle: apparently, when he asked his mother about Darwin’s famous book, ’On the Origin of Species’, she replied, “The Bible says that God made the world in six days. Great Uncle Charles thinks it took longer, but we need not worry about it, for it is equally wonderful either way!” What a marvellous thing to say!
After Charterhouse School Vaughan Williams enrolled at the Royal College of Music, and for the next few years he alternated between the RCM and Trinity College, Cambridge, studying with among others Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford. He became great friends with another student, Gustav Holst, and the two composers remained firm friends.
Having graduated from both higher education institutions, Vaughan Williams, who had a modest private income, took the post of organist and choirmaster at St Barnabas’ Church in Lambeth, South London, a post he held from 1895 to 1899. During this time he married a family friend, Adeline Fisher, and the couple honeymooned in Berlin, where he took the opportunity to study with Max Bruch (of Violin Concerto fame). On their return, he passed the examinations for a Doctorate of Music at Cambridge, and began his lifelong study of English folk songs, trawling the highways and byways to discover long lost tunes and songs, at the same time pursuing his passion for Elizabethan and Stuart music. These two strands were to dominate his compositional style for the rest of his life, leading to a schism among critics of his work, between those who were charmed by his traditionalism and those who were bored by it. A decisive influence was Maurice Ravel, with whom Vaughan Williams studied in Paris in the winter of 1907/08. It wasn’t a clear-cut change, but many critics have noticed a lightness and clarity of his writing after working with Ravel. Vaughan Williams himself wrote that Ravel helped him to escape from the heavy Teutonic contrapuntal manner, perhaps slightly referencing Edward Elgar, his contemporary.
Between his return from Paris in 1908 and the start of the First World War, Vaughan Williams began to announce himself as a serious composer. His ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’, premiered in Gloucester Cathedral in 1910, and his ‘Sea Symphony’ later that year in Leeds, gave notice of a major new voice in British music.
The Sea Symphony is a wonderfully expressive work for Soprano, Baritone, Chorus and Orchestra, with a truly stunning first entry for the choir. This is now described as Vaughan Williams First Symphony and is the first of nine which he completed during his long life, the Ninth coming in 1958, the year he died at the age of 85.
It has been an interesting feature to me, during the writing of these articles about the great composers, how longevity or early death have sometimes influenced our appreciation of these composers. The short lifespans of Purcell, Mozart and Schubert, other than obviously depriving the world of many more wonderful compositions, were not as important as their music, whereas, for example, Verdi, Monteverdi and Vaughan Williams owe their lasting success to their artistic development over the many decades of their lives. This also applies to the music of Richard Strauss, although his style was largely settled by the early years of the 20th century, and simply matured as he grew older.
Vaughan Williams matured more quixotically, surprising his listeners frequently with nods and indeed sweeping bows to the modernity of the 20th century. His vocal music, however, varied little in style, and that is precisely why I adore it!
One of the most annoying aspects of my long career has been that, on the whole, most British composers were writing for a voice which is best described as the English Baritone, and that wasn’t me! Consequently, much of the music for lower voice written by Elgar, Finzi, Vaughan Williams and Britten is too high for me, and this has been a source of frustration. When I wrote about Britten’s ‘War Requiem’ that I only realised I could sing the baritone part after careful study, there are many scores that I can only listen to and admire. No amount of study will raise my voice a third of an octave. However, there are possibilities in Vaughan Williams’ music, both in terms of judicial use of some pieces and the disregarding of others, and in transposition. I have had the wonderful luxury in recent weeks of preparing some songs by the Edinburgh composer, Tom Cunningham, for a concert in August 2021 in Edinburgh. Unlike other composers I have worked with, Tom is not obsessed by key relevance, and so, if I want a song transposed by a semitone, or even a tone, he obliges immediately and I find that it fits my voice perfectly. This is a rare thrill for a singer, especially a bass, who already has a restricted range by nature. We can often go very low, but the harmonics involved mean that audibility is a problem, and so quite a lot of our lower range is never used.
This preamble is for a purpose. My first ever paid concert, with Cupar Choral Society in Fife, for which I was paid the princely sum of £15 (a lot of beer money in those days!), was Vaughan Williams’ ‘Fantasia on Christmas Carols’, a work written in 1912 for baritone, chorus and orchestra. Some of the baritone music was too high but I had learned a trick in my early days to allow me to croon a little on high notes, and I got away with it (and the £15). Later on, around this time, before I had any serious singing lessons, I sang some of Vaughan Williams beautiful ‘Mystical Songs’ for friends’ wedding in Helensburgh. Some were, and still are, too high, so we cut them!
I have mentioned in other articles about my appropriation of Vaughan Williams ‘Songs of Travel’ for bass, and how I got a transposition made for me for a performance in the Philippines many years ago. I am still using that transposition, and it can be heard on my CD ‘Songs of Stevenson’, released in 2020 and still available!
The ‘Songs of Travel’, first performed in 1904 in London, were originally just a group of eight songs written to the poetry of the Edinburgh author, Robert Louis Stevenson. The poet, after a life of travel himself, had finally settled in Vailima in Samoa in the Pacific Ocean, but had died there at the early age of 44. His nostalgic poems about his childhood homeland, Scotland, struck a chord with Vaughan Williams, and the resultant set of songs, plus the final song, ‘I have trod the Upward and the Downward Slope’, discovered by Vaughan Williams’ widow among her late husband’s papers, form a wonderful cycle of unrelated but interconnected songs, one of the greatest creations of the composer, young though he was at the time of writing. The first song, ‘The Vagabond’, a portrait of a typical sight in Victorian Scotland, the penniless tramp, who prefers the open road and his own company to human society, is a masterpiece, a marching song, but not a military one. The vagabond declares himself satisfied with his lot, and the forces of nature hold no terrors for him. “Not to Autumn will I yield, not to Winter even!”
By contrast, the second song, ‘Let Beauty awake’, is simply one of the most gorgeous songs in the repertoire, a paean to love and beauty, sung over wonderful swirling arpeggios.
Every song is a miniature masterpiece, and we must marvel at the young composer’s invention as he responds to the superb poetry of Stevenson, best known for his novels, ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Kidnapped’. You will be pleased to hear that there is no cry of “Arrr Jim Lad” in this cycle. Stevenson had always suffered from medical problems, but at the time of writing, he had no idea that his life was about to be cut short, and so his nostalgia and gentle melancholy is astonishing for a relatively young man. That it should also resonate with the 30-year old composer is remarkable, and I think that this cycle alone is enough to place Vaughan Williams in the pantheon of great composers for voice. Apart from my recording, and frankly why would you want to look further, my favourite recording is that of Benjamin Luxon with David Willison. Ben, singing in the original baritone key, brings a more lyrical quality to the singing, as he said himself to me in an email after I sent my version to him. Perhaps you might like to compare our readings?
The other major Vaughan Williams piece I have encountered in my career is his Falstaff opera ’Sir John in Love’, written in 1928, and based on Shakespeare’s ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’, with supplementary texts by various Elizabethan and Stuart poets. This opera, given a student performance in 1929, and its first professional performance in 1946 at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, has suffered from comparisons with Verdi’s masterpiece, but we must remember that Vaughan Williams was completely aware of Verdi’s opera, and has produced something completely different. I was cast as Falstaff’s aggressive and untrustworthy companion, Ancient Pistol, in a performance and recording of the opera, conducted by Richard Hickox in 2000/2001, with an all-star cast of British singers, and came to love the piece. It has magnificent lyrical moments, scenes of high comedy and dirty tricks, and the score is infused with a host of folk melodies and tunes. Throughout the opera, the famous Elizabethan song, ‘Greensleeves’, keeps recurring, and this nostalgic, Olde England feeling is what distinguishes the piece. It in no way competes with ‘Falstaff’, that glittering, mercurial creation of Verdi’s old age, but it is well worth a listen. It’s on the Chandos label, and features another fine Scottish singer, Donald Maxwell, as Falstaff himself.
Another vocal work with which I have been associated is Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G Minor, first performed in 1922. This work gave me my first proper solo part when it was performed at St Andrews University in 1974, conducted by Thomas Duncan with the Candlemas Choir, although unpaid. I had to wait a couple of years for my first paid gig, in Cupar (see above).
This work was dedicated to Vaughan Williams’ good friend, Gustav Holst, and is the first setting of the Latin Mass to be written in the traditional unaccompanied English style since the 16th century.
It was written for SATB Soli and double chorus and grasps the listener from the very beginning. Having first sung the mass nearly 50 years ago, it has remained with me in a deep glow of happy memories ever since, and when I heard the recording by the Holst Singers, a top class choir from London, many of whose members are good friends, conducted by Hilary Davan Wetton, a few years ago, I was delighted, and still play it often. Listen particularly to the ethereal tones of the soprano Isobel Collyer, and the easy lyricism of the tenor, Christopher Mercer. It’s a magical work.
There are numerous other vocal pieces by Vaughan Williams which you should look out for, including ‘Sancta Civitas’, and ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ (written in 1936, it’s an impassioned anti-war cantata). The song cycle ‘On Wenlock Edge’ is a lovely setting of six songs from A E Housman’s ‘A Shropshire Lad’, originally for tenor, piano and string quartet, and later orchestrated for full orchestra and tenor.
Finally, I must mention one of Vaughan Williams’ works which captured my imagination from a very early age, his ‘Serenade to Music’. It was composed as a tribute to Sir Henry Wood, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his first concert, and was premiered at the Albert Hall in October 1938, with sixteen of Britain’s finest singers, taking both solos and chorus. Names like Isobel Baillie, Eva Turner, Walter Widdop and Roy Henderson were among the original stars, and you can still find this original performance on CD. Vaughan Williams made various adaptations for other forces, and it was the version for soli, chorus and orchestra that was used for my first experience of the Serenade, while still at school. Later on, in the mid-80s, I was invited back to the Guildhall School in London for a special performance and recording to celebrate the City of London, with past alumni of this great music college, including Patricia Rosario, Jill Gomez, Ian Partridge and Benjamin Luxon (and me!). I don’t think it was released commercially, but I still have my old vinyl copy, which sounds remarkably good.
I hope you will enjoy this look at the vocal compositions of Ralph Vaughan Williams, an immense figure in British musical history.
