Biography

First, the name. In England, “Ralph” is pronounced “Rafe” (rhyming with “chafe”). And the only reason a composer this distinguished didn’t become “Sir Ralph” is that he turned down the knighthood when it was offered to him, saying that he always refused honors that “involved obligation to anyone in authority.”

Born with “a very small silver spoon” in his mouth, to use his own words, Vaughan Williams lived in Down Ampney, where his father was vicar, for only a few years. After his father’s death when he was 2, Vaughan Williams grew up in his mother’s family home, Leith Hill Place in Surrey. Both sides of the family were distinguished; his mother’s particularly so. Her father was Josiah Wedgwood III (of the famous pottery manufacturing family); her mother the sister of Charles Darwin. Vaughan Williams knew the famous scientist as a boy.

In nineteenth-century England, people of Vaughan Williams’s social class did not normally become professional musicians; moreover, his family did not think he had any talent for music (nor did his first composition teachers). Despite this unpromising background, Vaughan Williams knew early on that he wanted to compose, and trained at the recently-founded Royal College of Music (RCM)[1] as well as at Trinity College, Cambridge. At the latter he earned a Bachelor of Music degree (1894) along with a Bachelor of Arts in History (1895) and eventually a doctorate in music (1901).[2]

On his return to London in 1895 Vaughan Williams served as a church organist for two years (a job he loathed), founded both a choral society and an orchestral society, and sang in the chorus in an 1895 RCM performance of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, revived to celebrate the bicentennial of the composer’s death. In 1897 he quit his position as organist and married Adeline Fisher.[3] The couple immediately departed for Berlin, where Vaughan Williams studied composition for a short while with Max Bruch (1838–1920).[4]

In the period between his return to England and the composition of the Wassail Song (1913), Vaughan Williams lectured and wrote on music (including articles on “Conducting” and “Fugue” for the 1904 edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians), founded and served as principal conductor for the Leith Hill Music Festival,[5] conducted a Palestrina Society,[6] was music director of the Stratford-on-Avon Festival, and edited music, including two volumes of Welcome Songs for the Purcell Society edition (published 1905 and 1910). An especially important project for him was the editing of The English Hymnal (first published 1906). For this volume Vaughan Williams scoured the musical past to find the best possible tunes for the texts to be used, dumped outmoded Victorian settings, arranged more than forty folk song melodies, and added freshly written settings by leading British composers. The result was a spectacular artistic achievement for the world of hymnody.

And of course Vaughan Williams himself continued to compose, though not without many frustrations. When we look back at well-known nineteenth-century English composers we see Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900, of Gilbert & Sullivan fame), Sir Edward Elgar (1857–1934), and Frederick Delius (1862–1934), but none of these presented a path for Vaughan Williams to follow (Elgar declined his request to take him on as a pupil). It was up to Vaughan Williams to find his own way, and this he eventually did. One compositional sounding board was his close friend Gustav Holst, whom he had met at the RCM in 1895.[7] Another help was Ravel, with whom he studied for three months in 1908. But undoubtedly the most important impetus was his discovery of English folk song, intensified by his firsthand experience in collecting this material.

Antiquarian interest in English folk music dated back to the early nineteenth century, but the greatest period of collecting folk songs began around 1890, with the Folk Song Society founded in 1898. Vaughan Williams knew many of the foremost collectors, including Cecil Sharp, and in September 1903 he collected his first folk song. The next seven years saw intense activity; in the end he was to gather more than 800 songs and variant versions. He was eventually honored for his contribution by being elected President of the (renamed) English Folk Dance and Song Society in 1932.

In our over-connected world today it is difficult to imagine the people Vaughan Williams encountered and from whom he collected the songs, those who had spent their entire lives within a small geographical radius and who grew up singing songs that had been sung for generations before them. It is also hard for us to fathom a time when people sang as they walked to work, sang while about their work, and then sang again at home in the evening. Even we singers, whose lives in many cases center around music and who certainly sing far, far more than the average person today, have a different relationship to music. Vaughan Williams and his cohorts recognized that this tradition and these songs were in their death throes even then, and worked to capture these treasures before they vanished from the earth forever.

Toward the Unknown Region

Toward the Unknown Region evidently began as a challenge with Gustav Holst. Both composers being “stuck,” as Vaughan Williams claimed, they agreed to set the same text. Vaughan Williams completed his piece in 1906; no work by Holst on this text seems to survive. Regardless of origin, Toward the Unknown Region also apparently functioned as a memorial for Frederick Maitland (d. 19 December 1906), the famous legal historian who was married to Vaughan Williams’s sister-in-law Florence. The work was dedicated to her, though the dedication does not appear in the 1924 Stainer and Bell edition owned by Sibley; perhaps it was in the edition published in 1907 by Breitkopf & Härtel. Maitland’s widow later married Darwin’s son (yes, the world of the intelligentsia in imperial Britain was a small one).

Vaughan Williams’s former teacher Charles Villiers Stanford was the chief conductor at the important Leeds Festival and he arranged for Toward the Unknown Region to be performed during the 1907 season. Music festivals were major venues in contemporary musical life, and the critical and audience success of the work’s premiere, conducted by Vaughan Williams himself on October 10, was a significant milestone for the composer.

The work is set for large orchestra: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 Bb clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, 2 harps, organ, SATB chorus, and strings. In the score (or at least the 1924 edition), Vaughan Williams indicates that a much smaller orchestra may be used: 2 flutes, oboe, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, “harp” (played by piano), and strings, and he gives in small notes what the reduced orchestra should play. For example, the trombone and tuba parts of mm. 4 and 5 are given in small notes to the clarinets, bassoons, and horns.

Vaughan Williams takes as his text a poem by the iconoclastic American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Whitman is best known for his Leaves of Grass, a poetry collection that contained just twelve poems (including “Song of Myself”) in its first edition of 1855 but was continually revised, expanded, and reissued by Whitman throughout his life. Celebrated for its free verse and sometimes earthy tone (Whitman was fired from one job because of the collection’s supposed immorality), Leaves of Grass includes such well-known works as “I Hear America Singing,” “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” “I Sing the Body Electric,” “O Captain! My Captain” (on Lincoln’s death), and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (also on Lincoln’s death, and set by Hindemith and by Robert Sanders, the latter’s composition an evocative though little-known work). Whitman, to whose work Vaughan Williams was introduced in 1892 by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, was one of the composer’s favorite poets. He turned to his poetry for the Sea Symphony and for three separate sections of Dona Nobis Pacem, “Beat Beat Drums,” “Reconciliation,” and “Dirge for Two Veterans” (the last also set by Holst). Important predecessors for the use of Whitman include Stanford (Elegiac Ode, 1884) and Delius (Sea Drift, 1904).

You will look in vain in Leaves of Grass for a poem called “Toward the Unknown Region;” Vaughan Williams’s title is drawn from the second line of “Darest thou now O soul,” which appears in Leaves of Grass as the first poem in the subset “Whispers of Heavenly Death.” The five stanzas of the poem are as follows:

Darest thou now O soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?

No map there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.

I know it not O soul,
Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us,
All waits undream’d of in that region, that inaccessible land.

Till when the ties loosen,
All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.

Then we burst forth, we float,
In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,
Equal, equipt at last (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O soul.

Each stanza of the poem gets its own musical section, with the first four preceded by brief orchestral introductions. Vaughan Williams uses a vaguely rondo-ish structure here, with Stanza 3 sharing material with Stanza 1 (the opening) and Stanza 2 (the imitative rising figures of m. 30 [Letter C] and m. 68 [Letter F]). Stanza 1 goes by quickly in a mere nine measures, starting with voices in octaves and following a uniform homorhythmic texture throughout. Stanza 2 is three times as long (27 measures), and soon moves from its own opening octaves to a varied contrapuntal character. Stanza 3 is the longest yet, incorporating material from earlier stanzas as noted. Stanza 4 is again soon over, in thirteen measures, with the basses beginning Stanza 5 (“Then” in m. 112) while the top three voices are still finishing the text of Stanza 4. At m. 121 (Letter O), the full triumphal text bursts forth (while we sing, oddly enough, “Then we burst forth”). This theme, by the way, should remind the experienced chorister of Vaughan Williams’s resounding “Sine nomine” hymn, For all the Saints.

Stanza 5 takes up almost half of the piece in terms of measure numbers, but not nearly that in terms of actual time since the tempo indications move from the initial maestoso moderato of m. 117 to poco animando (m. 128), to poco animando again (m. 137, Letter P), to poco animando yet again (m. 150), and then sempre animando (m. 158, Letter R), just in case we had forgotten that things were speeding up. We slow down only as we approach the end. Various writers have suggested Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens as the structural model for Vaughan Williams in this work, and certainly the build towards the climax is similar.

This is not an especially difficult work to sing, assuming you’re paying attention (e.g., Db for alto and bass in m. 162; descending line for soprano and alto at m. 90). Vaughan Williams is generous with his octave doublings, and once you’ve got them in your ear, the melodies and chord choices seem inevitable (the mark of a good composer, of course). And since it’s not “that hard,” we can and should lavish our care and attention on making the text come alive (e.g., caressing the gentle dissonance of the alto 1 F against the soprano G on “region” in m. 15, fading away on the second syllable). The work is deliciously Vaughan Williams, and he returned to its aural world in later compositions; there are numerous similarities, for example, with the exquisite Serenade to Music written more than 20 years later. For me, at least, it is a joy to sing a piece I’ve read about for years but never heard, and to discover that it’s a hidden treasure.

Sea Symphony

Vaughan Williams began work on his Sea Symphony, his first, in 1903, working on it off and on until 1909 (with 1908/1909 being the period of greatest work; he revised it in the 1920s).  He dedicated the composition to his cousin (and friend) Ralph Wedgwood.  The work premiered at the 1910 Leeds Festival, the same festival where Toward the Unknown Region debuted in 1907.  The other works on the program were Rachmaninoff’s C Minor Piano Concerto (the second, performed by the composer) and Strauss’s Don Juan.  As with Toward the Unknown Region, the fact that Vaughan Williams’s former composition teacher Charles Villiers Stanford was the festival director paved the way for the performance.  Vaughan Williams himself conducted; the performance took place on his thirty-eighth birthday.  Ursula Vaughan Williams called it a “major ordeal” for the composer, who did not think the rendition was very good.  Nonetheless, the work’s quality was widely recognized, and it (with Toward the Unknown Region) helped establish him as a significant English composer.  Vaughan Williams himself thought it was the best work he had written up to that time.

The work was a first in many respects.  For Vaughan Williams it was his first symphony; it was his longest work to date; and it was the longest British symphony up to that time as well.  But it represents the logical outgrowth of earlier work as well.  The New Grove lists six orchestral works composed before the Sea Symphony was begun, as well as four choral works, numerous songs, and two choral/orchestral compositions (a youthful mass—not the famous one in G Minor from the 1920s—and The Garden of Prosperine to a text by Swinburne).  During the long gestation of the Sea Symphony Vaughan Williams continued to hone his craft through an additional series of one-movement orchestral works, including the lovely In the Fen Country and his three Norfolk Rhapsodies—the third now lost and the second unpublished, but the first alive, well, and quite attractive.  And of course Toward the Unknown Region was completed during the genesis of the Sea Symphony. 

The work’s genre is the sort of thing that scholars like to argue about.  During the work’s gestation Vaughan Williams referred to it variously as his “Walt Whitman Sea Songs,” “Songs of the Sea,” and “The Ocean,” and because the chorus sings almost non-stop in every movement, the composition fits awkwardly into normal expectations for a symphony.  Choral/orchestral works date back to the Baroque, of course, but multi-movement compositions are more frequently called cantatas or oratorios or something else.  Choral use in a symphony per se is more often restricted to a single movement, e.g. Beethoven Ninth, Mahler Second, Mahler Third.  Mahler’s Eighth, of course, is choral throughout, but the work had not been started when Vaughan Williams commenced the Sea Symphony, and it received its première after Sea Symphony was completed.  Rachmaninoff’s choral symphony The Bells postdates the Sea Symphony.  Berlioz called his L’Enfance du Christ a “trilogie sacrée” while La Damnation de Faust was a “légende dramatique.”  Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2, “Lobgesang” is also problematic in its genre (see the discussion elsewhere in The Choral Singer’s Companion).  And so on.  And although Vaughan Williams went on to write many, many, more choral/orchestral works (for which we singers are very grateful), voices appear only rarely in the other eight symponies he composed: a wordless soprano solo and female chorus in Symphony #7 (Sinfonia antartica) and a wordless soprano to open and close the final movement of Symphony #3 (Pastoral). 

The symphony is in the standard four movements (though the first draft had an extra movement between the current three and four), and, as with Toward the Unknown Region, Whitman is the poet.  Vaughan Williams’s poetic choices are given below; page numbers refer to the 1926 Leaves of Grass “Inclusive Edition” published by Doubleday. 

Movement One, titled by Vaughan Williams “A Song for All Seas, All Ships.”
Opening, from “Behold, the sea itself” through “See, dusky and undulating, the long pennants of smoke” taken from Stanza 8 of Song of the Exposition (p. 171).  Vaughan Williams (but not Whitman) then repeats the first two lines, “Behold, the sea itself / And on its limitless, heaving breast, the ships.” 

Remainder of the first movement, Song for All Seas, All Ships (pp. 221–221), though with the insertion of “Behold, the sea itself” close to the end.  This poem is part of the Sea-Drift section of Leaves of Grass.  Whitman’s Sea-Drift inspired the orchestral tone poem of the same name by American composer John Alden Carpenter (1933), possibly his finest orchestral work.  More famously, a portion of its poem Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking (pp. 211–214) was set by Delius in his own Sea Drift (1903–1904; premiered 1906), a substantial one-movement composition for baritone, chorus, and orchestra that many consider his very best work.  Inspiring words!

Movement Two, titled by Vaughan Williams “On the Beach at Night Alone”
The complete poem On the Beach at Night Alone, from Sea-Drift (pp. 220–221).  Whitman also wrote a different poem called On the Beach at Night. 

Movement Three, titled by Vaughan Williams “(Scherzo) The Waves.” 
The complete poem After the Sea-Ship, from Sea-Drift (p. 222). 

Movement Four, titled by Vaughan Williams “The Explorers.” 
The text consists of various excerpts from the Passage to India portion of Leaves of Grass. 

• Opening, from “O vast Rondure” through “Who speak the secret of impassive earth” = the beginning of Stanza 5 (pp. 344–345).
• From “Yet soul be sure” through “The true son of God singing his songs” = later in Stanza 5 (p. 345). 
• From “O we can wait no longer” through “Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration” = opening of Stanza 8 (p. 347).
• From “O Soul thou pleasest me” through “Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them” = later in Stanza 8 (p. 348). 
• From “Swiftly I shrivel” through “Bounding O Soul thou journeyest forth” = later in Stanza 8 (p. 348). 

The concluding text, beginning with “Away O Soul!” is the conclusion of Stanza 9 (the conclusion of the whole poem).  Three lines of Whitman’s poetry are cut between “shake out every sail” and “Sail forth.” 

Obviously, Vaughan Williams thought carefully about his text, sometimes picking and choosing only individual sections of poems.  And his interest in the sea was hardly unique for a composer: think of Debussy’s La Mer, the first movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Elgar’s Sea Pictures, Bantock’s Sea Wanderers, Stanford’s Songs of the Sea, and many others.  Think too, of the crucial role that ships and sailors played before the advent of air travel (Joseph Conrad is a wonderful guide here).  And think as well of what the sea meant to the island nation of Britain, dependent on its navy since the sixteenth century, and even more sea-dependent at the height of its empire.  But aside from the third movement, the texts of the Sea Symphony all have philosophical implications that clearly appealed to Vaughan Williams.  Rather than read all the blather that’s been written about them, though, go over them yourself and make up your own mind as to what they mean. 

The four movements of the Sea Symphony conform outwardly to those of a standard symphony: large scale first and last movements, with an interior slow movement and tri-partite scherzo.  The weight of the piece, as was normal by this time, is in the final movement, which is considerably longer than any of the other three.  But neither the first nor last movement is clearly in sonata form (expected for first movements, and common for last movements); they are perhaps more accurately described as “episodic.”  Nor does Vaughan Williams observe the standard practice in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century symphonies of ending either where one began tonally (e.g., a symphony in D Major would begin and end in that key) or in a closely related key (e.g., a symphony in D Minor could end up in D Major).  Instead, Vaughan Williams practices the “progressive tonality” we can observe as well in the symphonies of his contemporary Mahler, moving from D Major (Mvt. 1) to E Minor (Mvt. 2) to G Minor/G Major (Mvt. 3) to Eb Major (Mvt. 4).

This general harmonic description, however, doesn’t even come close to capturing what Vaughan Williams does close up, as it were, with his mix of tonal and modal elements and rapidly shifting harmonies.  Both the opening and the close of the work demonstrate his lack of interest in convention.  The key signature of the first movement is two sharps—thus, either D Major or B Minor.  The first chord, though (reiterated eight times by the horns and trumpets), is a Bb minor triad, none of whose pitches (Bb, Db, and F) are part of D Major or B Minor.  We then enter, alone, also on a reiterated Bb minor triad, to sing “Behold the.”  And then suddenly, unexpectedly, on that crucial, crucial word, “sea,” we sing a D Major triad—accompanied at first just by timpani and organ, with the full orchestra crashing like a wave against us only on the second beat of that measure.  And the closing of the piece, though a clear Eb major triad, undercuts a true sense of finality by presenting the sonority in first inversion.

Vaughan Williams’s harmonic language is one of the reasons his works are so much fun to sing.  They hit the intellectual sweet spot of material that is difficult enough to be challenging, but not so impossible as to be discouraging.  And his constant harmonic shifts always come home tonally (eventually), which is aurally satisfying.  Having said that, we still need to pay attention.  To cite just two tricky spots in the alto part:

1.  first movement, mm. 330–331, where the impulse is to leap from D up to A, rather than  to the correct G
and
2.  first movement, m. 346, where the instinct is to sing C sharp rather than the C natural the composer wrote.

One early critic called the work “exeedingly difficult” for both chorus and orchestra, and an early performance at Cambridge University omitted the Scherzo because of its challenges.  So altogether, we reasonably competent early twenty-first century choristers are doing fairly well. 

What else?  Well, one of the nice things about orchestras from this time (for those of us who love orchestral music) is that they tend to be quite large, and Vaughan Williams did not stint here.  Although he sanctions performances with smaller forces (and also says it’s okay to perform individual movements), what he really wanted was a piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English Horn, two clarinets in A and one in Bb, a bass clarinet, two bassoons and a contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and a tuba, timpani, triangle, side drum, bass drum, cymbals, two harps (yum!), organ, and strings (with first violins themselves divisi).  Oh, and chorus (semi-chorus for part of the last movement), and soprano and baritone soloists.

Vaughan Williams did not pull this piece out of thin air.  As Stephen Town has pointed out, it shares many features with Stanford’s Elegiac Ode (finished 1884): four movement choral/orchestral work with soprano and baritone soloists on a text by Whitman; first movement in D Major/Minor; second movement with solo baritone (like Vaughan Williams); third movement in G Major/Minor; fourth movement beginning in Eb.  Vaughan Williams admitted to stealing the ending of the third movement from the close of the Missa Solemnis Gloria, and he also noted the inspiration of the fourth movement’s stately opening from Elgar’s Enigma Variations and The Dream of Gerontius.  The allegro agitato section beginning in m. 459 of the last movement sounds like a total crib from Fauré, and he even scatters a few folk songs about.  But the work is still very much his, and some parts foreshadow later works very strongly, such as the use of baritone solo for especially gorgeous slow lyrical writing (e.g., the second movement here, the third movement of Dona nobis pacem, “The Oxen” from Hodie), the close of both the first and last movements (reminiscent of the conclusion of Serenade to Music), as well as the third movement, m. 140 forward (like the conclusion of Hodie), and fourth movement, m. 62 on (the walking bass recalling “Two Veterans” from Dona nobis pacem), and elsewhere.

A personal note (April 2016): Sea Symphony belongs to a group of choral works I purposely never studied or even listened to in the hope that I would one day have a chance to perform it, since my favorite way of learning a work is from the inside out.  So I was very pleased that the chance finally came (I don’t think it’s ever going to come for the Glagolitic Mass, I’m afraid).  Unlike Toward the Unknown Region, this work was slow to grow on me.  But grow it did, and I now wake up in the morning with various parts running through my head.  Some favorite spots include the section beginning at m. 272 in the first movement (what a melody—and those key changes that go with the rising alto line from m. 295 on!), the gorgeous gorgeous second movement, our hornpipe-y “away, away” section in the last movement, the quintessential Vaughan Williams “singing, singing” lines of that movement from m. 186 forward, the evocative passage at rehearsal letter Gg in the first movement, mm. 394–400 (transformed to a plaintive Eb–Cb in the altos in mm. 534–535 in the last movement), and so on.  The hard work, the effort, the skill that went into this composition—how fortunate we are that Vaughan Williams never gave up on himself but simply kept going, no matter what.

Fantasia on Christmas Carols

In 1910 Gustav Holst composed a choral/orchestral work titled Christmas Day: A Choral Fantasy on Old Carols.  The work, for SATB choir and SATB soloists, sets a series of carols that are mostly very well-known (The First Nowell, Good Christian Men Rejoice, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen) along with an obscure Breton melody set to the words “Come ye lofty, come ye lowly.”  The work lasts about seven minutes, and begins with an extremely straightforward (not to say dull) manner of presenting the melodies but gradually becomes far more interesting in its use of counterpoint and clever combinations of different melodies.  It is a pleasant work, it has been recorded, and it shows up in a variety of performances on YouTube.  Holst never published it. 

Given the close friendship between Holst and Vaughan Williams (based in part on their mutual interest in English folk music), it is extremely likely that Holst’s Fantasy on Old Carols was part of the inspiration behind Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on Christmas Carols that came along two years later.  Both works use SATB chorus and full orchestra, but Vaughan Williams uses baritone solo only.  His work is longer (about 12 minutes), the featured carols are much less well-known, and he created a work that has far surpassed Holst’s in its popularity.

Fantasia on Christmas Carols was the first work by Vaughan Williams to use material collected in his folk-song gatherings, and it was the first of a long series of works celebrating Christmas that culminated in his late masterpiece Hodie.  The composer dedicated the work to Cecil Sharp, a major figure in collecting folk songs and the founder of the English Folk Dance Society.  The premiere was on 12 September 1912 at the Three Choirs Festival at Hereford Cathedral; Vaughan Williams was the conductor.  In addition to the original version for full orchestra (including organ and bells at the conclusion), there is also a version for string orchestra and organ, a format to facilitate performance.  Choruses without access to an orchestra can (and do) perform the work with piano or organ accompaniment alone.

In contrast to Holst, Vaughan Williams purposely chose carols that were much less familiar to the average listener; he wanted these beautiful melodies to become better known, and, thanks to him, they have been.  The carols include This is the truth sent from above, Come all you worthy gentlemen, On Christmas night all Christians sing (all three of these appear with both text and tune) as well as melodies that appear in the orchestra only, including the Yorkshire Wassail Song, A Virgin Most Pure, There is a Fountain Filled with Blood, and The First Nowell, this last being the only one well-known.

The composition has four sub-sections; the transitions between each are clearly marked by changes in key, meter, and melody.

1.  The composition opens with an evocative cello solo.  The pitch center is A, but the melodic scale underpinning this first section of the work usually (but not always) has an F#, making this the equivalent of transposed Dorian mode—an excellent example of Vaughan Williams’s interest in modality prompted by both his folk-song collecting and the contemporary revival of interest in old music.  The text of the carol—This is the truth sent from above—lays out the long-range background to Christmas: the loss of paradise with redemption possible only through God’s son.  At first only the solo baritone tells this tale, while the choir provides a voiceless background.  Only with the last verse do we get to sing the text, but we return to our voiceless melodies at the end of the section.  When we do have text, the rapidly shifting meter with the occasional 5/8 measure thrown in keeps us on our toes.  The tune was collected by Vaughan Williams in Herefordshire, which makes a nice connection with the Fantasia’s premiere at Hereford Cathedral.

2.  A rapid transition moves the key to a bright E major for this chorus-only section.  The carol is Come all you worthy gentlemen, collected by Cecil Sharp in Somerset, and it is sung by men, then everyone, then women, and then everyone again. The orchestra sneaks in The First Nowell into the accompaniment towards the end.  The meter is a clear 2/2 throughout.

3.  A quick switch and we are now in G major and a gentle 6/4 meter that will change up every now and then.  The baritone solo is back to begin the carol On Christmas night all Christians sing, known as the Sussex Carol because Vaughan Williams collected it in Sussex.  Once again the chorus has both wordless music and the text of the carol.  We have a dramatic climax on the word “joy” and then fade away.

4.  The final section brings us back to E major and 2/2 meter.  The baritone solo leads again, now singing “God bless the ruler of this house,” the third verse of Come all you worthy gentlemen.  Almost immediately the choir joins in singing “From out of darkness we have light,” the final verse of the Sussex Carol.  After the combined carols, the baritone drops out while we take up “God bless the ruler of this house.”  The joyful wishes for a happy new year gradually fade away as the baritone solo returns.  As Michael Kennedy nicely puts it, “The wassailers’ voices vanish into the distance, across the snow-covered fields and away into the night”—a peaceful ending to this warm and charming work.

Wassail Song

The Wassail Song grew out of Vaughan Williams’s collecting efforts. He published his arrangement of the tune he had gathered as the last in a collection of folk song settings, the Five English Folk Songs of 1913. The other songs are The Dark-Eyed Sailor, The Springtime of the Year, Just as the Tide was Flowing, and The Lover’s Ghost. Although Vaughan Williams was to turn to folk song for inspiration through much of his life, the five arrangements here are often considered his best; certainly they are the most elaborate, with the material treated freely throughout.

The tune used is sometimes called “The Gloucestershire Wassail” to distinguish it from “The Somerset Wassail,” each title indicating the venue where the song was collected (the “Wassail” song most of us know today—“Here we come a wassailing among the leaves so green”—comes from Yorkshire). The Gloucestershire Wassail appears in both the original Oxford Book of Carols from 1928 (for which Vaughan Williams, who loved carols, was one of the editors) as well as the New Oxford Book of Carols (1992).[8] Vaughan Williams was not the first to encounter the Gloucester Wassail and it can be traced back at least as far as the eighteenth century, but certainly his setting is what has kept it alive. It is one of many songs celebrating the habit of “wassailing” from door to door, with its expectations of drink in exchange for song. Few today realize that well into the nineteenth century the Christmas season was a time of drunken revelry for many; only a concerted effort by the Victorians turned it into the family holiday it is today. In Deck the Halls, for example, the line “Don we now our gay apparel” was originally “Fill the mead cup, drain the barrel,” while “See the blazing Yule before us” was actually “See the flowing bowl before us,” and “sing we joyous all together” is really “Laughing, quaffing, all together.”

But back to the matter at hand. For his setting Vaughan Williams selected six of the eight verses known, leaving out most of the references to specific barnyard animals (the “ox” Vaughan Williams refers to is first a horse, Dobbin, and then two cows, Broad May and Colly, in the original). For “our bread it is white” it is worth remembering that at the time the song was created, white bread was not associated with negative nutritional value, blandness, and unappealing texture, but was rather a delicacy enjoyed by the well-to-do (see Les Misérables—the book—where the only reason Valjean will eat white bread is that otherwise his beloved Cosette will insist upon eating black to be like him).

Vaughan Williams begins the arrangement with a haunting introduction. Although the tune itself opens with a rising fourth (E–A), Vaughan Williams commences with a series of risings fifths and then fourths (A–E at first and only then E–A), generating the hollow, ancient sound of harmony without thirds. He creates rhythmic tension by first following the proper stress emphasis of the word “Wassail,” presenting it as expected on the upbeat, and then going against this by placing it on the downbeat—throwing choruses off in rehearsal though ideally not in performance. Only after all voices have entered do the tenors bring forth the tune itself, eventually handed about to other parts as well. Throughout the work dynamics are of special importance, for if properly followed (another choral challenge) the impression Vaughan Williams creates is that of singers approaching from afar, eventually singing full force when they are nearest to the listener, and then fading away as they head off into the distance, ending with the altos alone on a ppp rising fifth.

Dona nobis pacem

I first encountered Dona nobis pacem—or rather, part of it—in October 2002, when the Houston Symphony Chorus sang a “Voices of America” concert that included works by Randall Thompson, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, and that über-American, Ralph Vaughan Williams.  The American voice we were celebrating with that last, of course, was Whitman’s, as we sang the “Beat! Beat! Drums!” movement from Dona nobis pacem.  The movement blew me away with its insistent rhythms, sinuous chromatic lines, evocations of bugles, and adamant refusal to be an easy sing.  I had no idea that Vaughan Willams could write like that; I fell in love with the work and was ecstatic when I finally had the opportunity to sing the whole piece seven years later. 

Vaughan Williams wrote the cantata (his designation) in 1936, the year after the choral suite Five Tudor Portraits and two years before the exquisite Serenade to Music.  It premiered on 2 October of that year, in Huddersfield, as part of the celebration of the Huddersfield Choral Society’s centennial.  The performing forces are soprano and baritone soloists, SATB chorus (parts sometimes divided), and full orchestra including organ.  It’s a substantial piece in six movements that flow without pause from one to the next; the Oxford University Press vocal score gives “about 40 minutes” as the time of performance (works like this confirm that audiences do not have the attention span of gnats, as some claim).  The work is ahead of its time in using both Latin and English and in mixing sacred and secular texts; Britten of course was to adopt a similar procedure for the War Requiem. 

The words “Dona nobis pacem” conclude the Agnus section of the Latin mass (for a short history of the Catholic mass, see the discussion under the Bach B Minor Mass).  The Agnus is the last section of the mass typically set in polyphony by composers, which means that they often did something fancy for that movement.  The text of the Agnus is tripartite.  The first part (in English translation) is “Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.”  The second part repeats the text of the first.  The third part begins like the other two, but then veers off:  “Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant us peace” (dona nobis pacem).  There was nothing accidental about Vaughan Williams’s choice of text; in 1936 it was very clear that trouble was brewing across Europe because of the madman in Germany. 

Movement 1 (Lento)

The soprano soloist starts things off; she sings the full text of the third part of the Agnus dei (Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem) and we enter with the last part, pianissimo at first and then stormily, loudly, and we trade those two moods back and forth throughout the short movement.  The tender section beginning with our C major “pacem” (bottom of page 3 in the vocal score) is especially poignant, but it doesn’t last; after our last roar the soprano ends the movement quietly, slithering between E-flat and E-natural, with an immediate segue to

Movement 2 (Allegro moderato)

Whitman loved classical music, especially Italian opera, so it’s nice that classical music loved him back.  The “Beat! Beat! Drums!” text of this movement shows up eventually in Leaves of Grass but started as part of his collection of poems about the Civil War, Drum-Taps.  We can safely describe it as an anti-war poem in its depiction of the horrors that war brings, damaging pretty much everything.  Almost relentless in its pace, the constantly shifting chromatic lines (harmonic chaos mirroring war’s chaos) require serious attention on the part of singer and choir director.  Not a movement for sight-reading. 

Movement 3 (Andantino)

Completely different in mood, the third movement also sets a Whitman poem from Drum-Taps, “Reconciliation.” The solo baritone begins the movement, singing the first half of the poem; chorus enters and repeats that text in a varied setting.  The solo baritone returns to complete the poem, which switches to the first person: “For my enemy is dead...I...touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.”  When the chorus enters again, however, we do not repeat the baritone’s text but rather return to the first half of the poem with a varied reprise of our earlier music.  This is a brilliant move on Vaughan Williams’s part, and is a much more powerful way to conclude the movement than with the coffin kiss.  Whitman’s text is brilliant, and not only in the sentiment that the enemy is “a man divine as myself.”  Death and Night are “sisters”; they “incessantly wash again, and ever again.”  What do they wash?  “This soiled world.”  What a phrase!  And even thought the text is supposedly comforting (don’t worry; time will make all of this forgotten) the music that Vaughan Williams composed is heartbreaking in its beauty, a shimmering E minor clouded over with shifting rhythms.  The soprano solo returns just before the end with a descending melodic line on “dona nobis pacem” that then destabilizes the E major concluding chord of the chorus by introducing an F natural to lead to

Movement 4 (Moderato alla marcia)

Whitman again for this funeral march of a movement, with yet another poem from Drum-Taps, the famous “Dirge for Two Veterans.”  Interspersed among the crisp march rhythms are two sections that offer considerable contrast—one for the text from “Lo, the moon ascending” through “Immense and silent moon” and the other the stanza beginning “In the eastern sky up-buoying.”  These two stanzas are similar in their pianissimo dynamic, more lyrical melodic lines, use of longer note values, and especially the luminous orchestral accompaniment in triplets of alternating octaves; the first section provides a strong textural contrast as well through its avoidance of full chorus.  This incredibly effective movement was not created for Dona nobis pacem, however; Vaughan Williams composed it before World War I but left it unpublished.  And he was not the only composer to set this text.  Both his teacher Charles Wood and his friend Gustav Holst set it as well, and it’s thought that Vaughan Williams held his composition back in deference to those two.  If it was indeed a form of generosity that led him to suppress “Dirge for Two Veterans” when it was first written, he was rewarded by finding the perfect surrounding for it more than two decades later. 

Movement 5

This somber movement uses three different texts.  The first, sung by the solo baritone, has about the unlikeliest source one can imagine: it comes from a speech given by John Bright in the House of Commons immediately before the Crimean War.  The almost monotone setting gives way to C minor and a crashing return of the chorus with “dona nobis pacem,” joined by the soprano soloist, before we switch text again as well as tempo, drawing on the biblical book of Jeremiah (8: 15–22) to bewail the woes that have befallen us.

Movement 6

But in a typical Vaughan Williams move, sunshine breaks forth from the clouds as we approach the end of the work.  The text is an aggregate of biblical excerpts—Daniel, Haggai, Micah, Leviticus, the Psalms, Isaiah, and Luke—and the movement is an aggregate of keys.  The baritone solo begins in Db major; the key changes to Eb as he concludes and the chorus prepares to enter; we are briefly in C for “Open to me the gate of righteousness” before visiting D minor (“Let all the nations be gathered together”).  Then it’s Bb for “And they shall come and see my glory,” G major for “For as the new heavens and the new earth...,” and back to Eb (and now triple meter) for “Glory to God in the highest.”  We finally end up in C major (and duple meter again) for our final iterations of “good will toward men” as we wind down from the fortissimo that greeted our entry into this concluding key.  As our “good will toward men” gets softer and softer, the soprano solo returns with “dona nobis pacem” and we switch to that text too with a move to 3/2 meter while the orchestra drops out.  By the end, our dynamic is ppp, but still we do not close the piece.  That is left to the soloist whose gradually moves to “niente”—but not on the tonic, C, but rather the third, E.  So we’re left with a little bit of incompleteness there, almost as if Vaughan Williams knew that uncertainty lay ahead for England.  It is unbearably sad that this incredible work remains so relevant today.

Something to Watch

This semester (Spring 2024), as I was looking for a video of Dona nobis pacem for my students to watch, I came across the performance given below.  The English subtitles are what I was looking for, but the Arabic subtitles are a bonus—this is a piece whose message deserves to be heard everywhere.  In this performance, Yasmina Sabbah conducts the Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra and the Choeur de l’USJ.  Everyone in the choir (singing from memory!) is masked, as are many of the orchestra members, for the performance took place on 18 June 2021, with the pandemic still in force.  The venue is the Saint-Joseph Church in Beirut, Lebanon, and the performance made evocative use of the space; note the placement of the soprano soloist as some kind of angel floating above the world.  Although I’m not a big fan of video enhancements for concerts, the ones used here are extremely effective.  The conductor wears a flowing white dress that surely symbolizes the desire for peace.  Kudos to her, her impressive musicians, and the creative team that generated this complex and powerful performance to a live audience back then, and to anyone with an internet connection now. 

• On YouTube: Vaughan Williams, Dona Nobis Pacem, by Chœur USJ

Folk Songs of the Four Seasons

Vaughan Williams wrote his Folk Songs of the Four Seasons in 1949, the year he turned 77. One might think he had little left to say in the realm of folk song arrangement, a process he had first undertaken more than forty years previously, but Julian Onderdonk sees some of these new settings as “among the most interesting of his entire career” (Cambridge Companion, 145). The work, classified by Vaughan Williams as a cantata, is written for the not-so-common combination of women’s voices and orchestra. It was composed for the National Federation of Women’s Institutes and received its premiere on 15 June 1950 at the Royal Albert Hall. The concert was of the sort Vaughan Williams encouraged through his entire career, involving as many amateurs as possible. In this case the vocalists were the massed choirs of the National Federation, for the jaw-dropping total of 3,000 singers (a far cry from the performance I sang in May 2015, with the twenty voices of Concentus Women’s Chorus and a chamber component of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra). 

The cantata is organized in four sections, one for each season, with a Prologue at the very beginning. The structure is as follows:

Prologue 

To the Ploughboy (chorus, semi-chorus descant, orchestra)

Spring 

1. Early in the Spring (3v chorus only, introduced by solo clarinet) 

2. The Lark in the Morning (2v chorus, orchestra)

3. May Song  (chorus, semi-chorus descant, orchestra)

Summer 

1a. Summer is a-coming in (chorus, 4v semi-chorus, orchestra)

1b. The Cuckoo  (chorus, semi-chorus, orchestra)

1a. repeat of Summer is a-coming in

2. The Sprig of Thyme (chorus, descant, orchestra)

3. The Sheep Shearing (2v chorus only, introduced by solo oboe)

4. The Green Meadow (chorus, orchestra)

Autumn 

1. John Barleycorn (chorus, 2v semi-chorus, orchestra)

2. The Unquiet Grave (3v chorus only, with solo instrumental introduction)

3. An Acre of Land (chorus, orchestra)

Winter 

1. Children’s Christmas Song (2v chorus, orchestra)

2. Wassail Song (chorus, descant, orchestra)

3. In Bethlehem City (3v chorus only, with solo instrumental introduction) 

4. God Bless the Master (chorus, descant, orchestra)

It is impossible for this twenty-first century American writer to say just how well-known these folk songs would have been to a mid-twentieth-century English singer. The thirteenth-century Sumer Canon that forms the basis of Summer 1a is possibly the most famous piece of medieval music today, and the Wassail Song of Winter 2 is a version of the same tune used for the independent choral work discussed above. Winter 4, God Bless the Master, is a different tune than the one used in Vaughan Williams’s lovely Fantasia on Christmas Carols. The others were new to me, but the sentiments are familiar to anyone who knows English folk songs: happy or unhappy love set against a background of rural life and an abiding Christianity. One must embrace this ethos wholeheartedly to avoid laughing at lyrics such as “When we have a-sheared all our jolly, jolly sheep, what joy can be greater than to talk of their increase?” (Spring 3, The Sheep Shearing. I mean, really). 

Many songs are strophic or semi-strophic, and—I confess—not all were especially compelling as I was learning them (exception: text notwithstanding, Spring 3, The Sheep Shearing, with its funky alto melodic line, delicious hemiola that starts nine full bars from the end, and that unconventional ending with the altus a forbidden fourth below the soprano’s tonic. Very evocative). But all reservations I may have had about the songs vanished in our first orchestral rehearsal with the downbeat of the prologue. Vaughan Williams’s instrumental genius was everywhere in evidence, making the well-worn melodies sparkle and dance. To my delight, echoes (forerunners, really) of his late masterpiece Hodie were in evidence as well, e.g. the Prologue rhythms that will return with the opening to Hodie, the solo introduction to Spring I with its whisper of what we’ll hear a few years later in the introduction to the glorious baritone solo “The Oxen” in Hodie.

Vaughan Williams is currently undergoing a “revival,” or more precisely a correction to the inaccurate mid-century dismissal of his style. Musicians today are recognizing and appreciating his incredible inventiveness, his ability to wrap the familiar in the new, his creation of sounds of splendour and awe. We are all the richer for this new understanding.

For Further Reading

Prior to his death Vaughan Williams asked that his second wife (his first died in 1951) write his biography and that Michael Kennedy write about his works; these two books remain standard reference works today (Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams [Oxford University Press, 1964]; Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2^nd ed. [Oxford University Press, 1980]). Michael Kennedy has also compiled A Catalogue of theWorks of Ralph Vaughan Williams (2^nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1996), and the musicologically inclined may wish to consult Neil Butterworth, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Guide to Research (Garland, 1990); Alain Frogley, ed., Vaughan Williams Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Byron Adams and Robin Wells, eds., Vaughan Williams Essays (2003); and Alain Frogley and Aidan J Thomson, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (2013). Two iconographies exist; see John E. Lunn and Ursula Vaughan Williams, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Pictorial Biography (Oxford University Press, 1971) and Jerrold Northrop Moore, Vaughan Williams: A Life in Photographs (Oxford University Press, 1992). Vaughan Williams’s own writings may be found, among other places, in National Music Other Essays (Clarendon, 1996) as well as The Making of Music (Cornell University Press, 1955), a series of lectures given at Cornell and Yale in 1954. To date there exists no book on his choral music, a major lacuna considering how important he is as a choral writer.

For Listening

An excellent recording devoted to Vaughan Williams’s choral music that contains all of the Five English Folksongs is Over Hill, Over Dale, the Holst Singers with Ian Bostridge and Michael George, conducted by Stephen Layton (Hyperion CDA66777).

Other Pieces Worth Exploring (A Very Incomplete List)

It may surprise singers (who have never stopped performing his music) to learn that after Vaughan Williams’s death his music underwent a general decline in popularity. Fortunately for all musicians, the past few decades have seen a resurgence of interest in his compositions, and his music is again enjoying the appreciation it so richly deserves. Dates given below are dates of completion of the original versions.

The Wassail Song is by no means Vaughan Williams’s only venture into Christmas music. Among his many seasonal creations are the wonderful Fantasia on Christmas Carols (including the splendid On Christmas Night) for baritone, chorus, and orchestra from the year before Wassail Song, while one of the last major pieces he ever wrote was the spectacular Hodie for chorus, soloists, and orchestra, completed in his eighty-second year.

The period of his first maturity, of which the Wassail Song is part, includes many fine works: the songs Linden Lea (1901), Orpheus with his lute (1901?), and Silent Noon (1903); various hymns for The English Hymnal, including the beautiful Come down, O love divine (the tune itself Vaughan Williams named “Down Ampney,” after his birthplace) and the stirring For all the saints; the song cycles Songs of Travel (1904) and On Wenlock Edge (1910; for tenor, string quartet, and piano); Five Mystical Songs(1911, for baritone, chorus, and orchestra; church choristers may have encountered the rousing hymn setting of the last of these, Let all the world); and Four Hymns (1914, for tenor, viola, and strings).

Early orchestral works include In the Fen Country (1904; those who want a literary impression of the Fen Country should read the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery by Dorothy Sayers, The Nine Tailors), the first Norfolk Rhapsody (1906), the sparkling overture to Aristophanes’ comedy The Wasps, (1909; Vaughan Williams provided incidental music for the entire play); The Lark Ascending (1914, for violin and orchestra); as well as what is probably his most famous work, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, for double string orchestra (1910; Vaughan Williams encountered the theme while compiling The English Hymnal).

Later works include the Mass in g minor (1921), the excellent hymn At the name of Jesus (1925; he called the tune “King’s Weston”), Flos campi (1925; for viola, orchestra, and wordless chorus); the ballet Job (1930); the opera Riders to the Sea (1932); Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934, from his opera Sir John in Love); Dona nobis pacem (1936; remember “Beat, beat, drums”?) the beautiful Serenade to Music (1938, for sixteen singers and orchestra), Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus (1939); the String Quartet in a minor (1944); a triumphant arrangement of the “Old Hundredth” psalm tune for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (1953); and Ten Blake Songs for voice and oboe (1957).

Vaughan Williams also wrote nine symphonies, the first of which (A Sea Symphony, 1909), uses chorus.[9] He is also highly unusual (especially for a major composer) for having written a tuba concerto as well as a harmonica concerto.

December 2002. Revised April 2015, November 2015, April 2016, December 2017, December 2023, April 2024