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Vaughan Williams
A new biography of which paints the most well-rounded and factually accurate portrait of the composer to date
Ralph Vaughan Williams ranks among the most versatile, influential, and enduringly popular British musicians of his era. Throughout his wide-ranging career-as composer, conductor, editor, scholar, folksong collector, teacher, author, administrator, and philanthropist-Vaughan Williams worked tirelessly to improve the standards and quality of British musical life. His dedicated work ethic and fastidious attention to musical detail helped him forge a compelling and original expressive idiom grounded in a profound understanding of musical history and tradition, popularized in concert staples like the Tallis Fantasia , The Lark Ascending , A London Symphony , the Songs of Travel , and the Serenade to Music .
Drawing upon both recent scholarship and newly accessible scores and correspondence, author Eric Saylor interweaves in Vaughan Williams an exploration of the composer's life - including new insights about his early career, military service in the Great War, and relationships with the women he loved and married - with chapters surveying his enormous body of music, spanning hymn tunes to operas, keyboard etudes to solo concerti, wind band music for amateurs to perhaps the finest symphonic cycle of the twentieth century. The resulting portrait reveals Vaughan Williams's complex artistry and dynamic personality, a portrayal often at odds with the avuncular persona of "Uncle Ralph" familiar to the public. This contemporary reassessment of the composer's life and works provides a concise and engaging overview of both, positioning Vaughan Williams as an artist of rare skill, sensitivity, and human insight.
Ralph Vaughan Williams ranks among the most versatile, influential, and enduringly popular British musicians of his era. Throughout his wide-ranging career-as composer, conductor, editor, scholar, folksong collector, teacher, author, administrator, and philanthropist-Vaughan Williams worked tirelessly to improve the standards and quality of British musical life. His dedicated work ethic and fastidious attention to musical detail helped him forge a compelling and original expressive idiom grounded in a profound understanding of musical history and tradition, popularized in concert staples like the Tallis Fantasia , The Lark Ascending , A London Symphony , the Songs of Travel , and the Serenade to Music .
Drawing upon both recent scholarship and newly accessible scores and correspondence, author Eric Saylor interweaves in Vaughan Williams an exploration of the composer's life - including new insights about his early career, military service in the Great War, and relationships with the women he loved and married - with chapters surveying his enormous body of music, spanning hymn tunes to operas, keyboard etudes to solo concerti, wind band music for amateurs to perhaps the finest symphonic cycle of the twentieth century. The resulting portrait reveals Vaughan Williams's complex artistry and dynamic personality, a portrayal often at odds with the avuncular persona of "Uncle Ralph" familiar to the public. This contemporary reassessment of the composer's life and works provides a concise and engaging overview of both, positioning Vaughan Williams as an artist of rare skill, sensitivity, and human insight.
- GenresBiography
360 pages, Hardcover
Published July 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 16, 2023
Saylor has written a very readable little book on Vaughan Williams -- possibly too little, because the actual content of the book counts only 240 pages, with the inevitable result that both the discussions of Vaughan Williams' life and his music feel too slight. In his foreword, Saylor defers to Ursula Vaughan Williams' book on the composer's life, and Michael Kennedy's book on his music, while adding that he wanted to write an approachable modern book on Williams incorporating recent scholarship and also discussing at length a number of pieces too rarely heard. Those discussions are indeed often illuminating, and his brief analyses of the symphonies are also excellent. I wouldn't hesitate to supplement this book with others, though, if you are truly interested in Vaughan Williams, so a definitive modern biography it really isn't.
What stands out to me in this telling of Vaughan Williams' life is that his story is very aromantic. He came from a relatively wealthy but not at all glamorous or aristocratic family, and pursued music dilligently although for a long time with little success. It is determination, discipline and above all a great work ethic that allowed him to mature (at a very late age) into a great composer, but that would not have been possible without his wealth and the support of a wide group of friends and a devoted wife. An early teacher, Charles Villiers Stanford, would dismiss his work as "all rot" or "damnably ugly", another (Charles Wood) said "he had no hope for him as a composer", and even his family dismissed his efforts. But Vaughan Williams loved music -- once he attended a performance of Wagner's Tristan that impressed him so much he could not sleep after. So he plodded on, with great support from his wife, whose family made it clear that "In the Fisher tradition women were dark stars, reflecting the glory of their men […] They grew up to feel that they must provide support to their husbands. That was their job which they did with great efficiency". It is rather sad that his wife became very sick very quickly, and Vaughan Williams was often too busy, both with music and with philandering, to provide the continuous loving support that she might have preferred, although he remained emotionally devoted. When she died, he soon married a Ursula Wood, with whom he was already having an affair, one of many that he freely pursued with younger women. She was 40 years younger than the now elderly composer, and compensated for his deficiencies by having a tacitly acknowledged, ongoing affair of her own. No, a romantic life his isn't.
If there is something moving in his story, it is that he remained deferrent to others, studying under Ravel in France, who was actually younger than him, and remembering the importance of the encouragement he received from him and especially from Bruch all his life. He was similarly considerate to his many students himself, including, sadly rare for the time, the women. He wrote: “I always try to remember the value of encouragement. Sometimes a callow youth appears who may be a fool or may be a genius, and I would rather be guilty of encouraging a fool than of discouraging a genius.” Also inspiring is his continuing dedication to his art, his discipline, his hard work, his refusal to be satiated. Up until his old age he was harshly self-critical; to Grace Williams, he wrote he never satisfied himself. Well, he satisfies me, often, and his compositions have stood the test of time better than that of any other British contemporary, and many modernists he dismissed ("Why should music be original?", he asked: "It does not matter if this word has been said a thousand times before as long as it is the right thing to say at that moment."). His ongoing work ethic meant that he wrote great music from his first artistic maturity to the end of his life in an almost unceasing stream, much of which is still little known outside of Britain. His choral music, for instance, contains many masterpieces hidden from the symphony-obsessed foreigners that are more and more discovering his music. Let us hope he will be played, recorded, and written about for many years to come, because he is a great composer, and a flawed but interesting man.
What stands out to me in this telling of Vaughan Williams' life is that his story is very aromantic. He came from a relatively wealthy but not at all glamorous or aristocratic family, and pursued music dilligently although for a long time with little success. It is determination, discipline and above all a great work ethic that allowed him to mature (at a very late age) into a great composer, but that would not have been possible without his wealth and the support of a wide group of friends and a devoted wife. An early teacher, Charles Villiers Stanford, would dismiss his work as "all rot" or "damnably ugly", another (Charles Wood) said "he had no hope for him as a composer", and even his family dismissed his efforts. But Vaughan Williams loved music -- once he attended a performance of Wagner's Tristan that impressed him so much he could not sleep after. So he plodded on, with great support from his wife, whose family made it clear that "In the Fisher tradition women were dark stars, reflecting the glory of their men […] They grew up to feel that they must provide support to their husbands. That was their job which they did with great efficiency". It is rather sad that his wife became very sick very quickly, and Vaughan Williams was often too busy, both with music and with philandering, to provide the continuous loving support that she might have preferred, although he remained emotionally devoted. When she died, he soon married a Ursula Wood, with whom he was already having an affair, one of many that he freely pursued with younger women. She was 40 years younger than the now elderly composer, and compensated for his deficiencies by having a tacitly acknowledged, ongoing affair of her own. No, a romantic life his isn't.
If there is something moving in his story, it is that he remained deferrent to others, studying under Ravel in France, who was actually younger than him, and remembering the importance of the encouragement he received from him and especially from Bruch all his life. He was similarly considerate to his many students himself, including, sadly rare for the time, the women. He wrote: “I always try to remember the value of encouragement. Sometimes a callow youth appears who may be a fool or may be a genius, and I would rather be guilty of encouraging a fool than of discouraging a genius.” Also inspiring is his continuing dedication to his art, his discipline, his hard work, his refusal to be satiated. Up until his old age he was harshly self-critical; to Grace Williams, he wrote he never satisfied himself. Well, he satisfies me, often, and his compositions have stood the test of time better than that of any other British contemporary, and many modernists he dismissed ("Why should music be original?", he asked: "It does not matter if this word has been said a thousand times before as long as it is the right thing to say at that moment."). His ongoing work ethic meant that he wrote great music from his first artistic maturity to the end of his life in an almost unceasing stream, much of which is still little known outside of Britain. His choral music, for instance, contains many masterpieces hidden from the symphony-obsessed foreigners that are more and more discovering his music. Let us hope he will be played, recorded, and written about for many years to come, because he is a great composer, and a flawed but interesting man.
January 23, 2023
Writing about music is hard. I’ve recently singled out in a different context Richard Taruskin’s 'Oxford History of Western Music' but in this work, as in his other writings, Taruskin showed himself a critical genius. It’s not enough to know a lot or even to be able to write well, it’s the understanding of what within that body of knowledge is most illuminating, most interesting and how much (or little) detail is needed to convey understanding.
The very longstanding 'Master Musicians' series, these days published by OUP has an established (and as far as OUP and its predecessors are concerned, proven) method. Some hefty dollops of biography delivered as a series of chronological facts followed by an overview of the composer’s works for the relevant period. It all apparently has to be delivered in as workmanlike a fashion as possible and digestibility, although desirable, is by no means essential (see for example Laurenz Lütteken’s virtually unreadable volume on Richard Strauss).
Eric Saylor in his new volume on Vaughan Williams has adopted this formula with gusto, applied a good deal of earnestness and scholarly pomposity and has had his text minutely examined to remove any tendency towards stylistic flair. It’s the second really disappointing book on VW I have read this month: neither a reference work nor an engaging narrative and despite Saylor’s mention in his Introduction of the book being informed by the increasing wealth of recent scholarship on VW, any potential interest here has been sieved out drop by drop.
The very longstanding 'Master Musicians' series, these days published by OUP has an established (and as far as OUP and its predecessors are concerned, proven) method. Some hefty dollops of biography delivered as a series of chronological facts followed by an overview of the composer’s works for the relevant period. It all apparently has to be delivered in as workmanlike a fashion as possible and digestibility, although desirable, is by no means essential (see for example Laurenz Lütteken’s virtually unreadable volume on Richard Strauss).
Eric Saylor in his new volume on Vaughan Williams has adopted this formula with gusto, applied a good deal of earnestness and scholarly pomposity and has had his text minutely examined to remove any tendency towards stylistic flair. It’s the second really disappointing book on VW I have read this month: neither a reference work nor an engaging narrative and despite Saylor’s mention in his Introduction of the book being informed by the increasing wealth of recent scholarship on VW, any potential interest here has been sieved out drop by drop.
January 2, 2023
Loved this book almost as much I have loved this composer my whole life! I learned so much about his life and his art, had Amazon Music Unlimited at my side listening to so many pieces I was unfamiliar with while reading about his amazing life. Enough musical analysis to maintain interest, but not too much that you lose track of the story of his life.
September 20, 2023
Interesting. Enjoyable start to my explorations of Vaughan Williams. So far, Symphony No. 5 in D major has entered the list of works I really enjoy and respect.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews