Saturday 15 October 2022

Discovering Ralph Vaughan Williams – 1970’s style Part 1

A few days ago (sometime in 2010) a friend of mine mentioned to me that her introduction to Ralph Vaughan Williams was a performance of his Fifth Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall back in 1975. I agreed with her that this was one of the composer’s finest works and was a terrific way to begin to explore his music. Hardly surprisingly, she inquired as to how I had discovered his music: I confessed that my path to RVW’s corpus of works was somewhat convoluted and involved a few backwaters. 

It must have been about 1971. I had just landed a part in the Coatbridge High School production of The Pirates of Penzance. I was one of the tenors (struggling to reach the top Gs) and cast to play a Pirate. My local Church of Scotland choirmaster and organist heard that I was a now ‘singer’ and press ganged me into the back row of the choir. One day, a friend and I were invited to a special Women’s Guild (Scottish equivalent of the Mother’s Union) meeting, despite the fact we were both young men. It turned out to be a cine film show about famous hymns and their stories. The president of the Guild felt that as aspiring musicians we would be (or ought to be) interested. Although I was a wee bit embarrassed being in the presence of some three dozen matronly ladies, I did enjoy the evening and the cup of tea and biscuits. One scene in the film captured my attention: a visit to the church at Down Ampney. The commentator pointed out that Ralph Vaughan Williams was born there in 1872 and although he did not live there for long, thirty four years later he wrote a hymn tune and called it after his birthplace. Come down, O love divine was duly given an airing accompanied by fine colour film of this idyllic village. I was bowled over. After the film show I rummaged through my father’s LP collection. Amongst the Vera Lynn’s, Handel’s Messiah and Paul Robeson I found the Fantasia on Greensleeves. It was part of an old Reader’s Digest ‘classical’ collection. I played this piece repeatedly. To me it seemed to epitomise the English landscape as shown in the cine film.

Coatbridge in Lanarkshire then had an excellent public library with a comprehensive collection of sheet music. It was near to my school. I was browsing amongst the piano music when I discovered The Lake in the Mountains by RVW. I did not then know that it was derived from the film score 49th Parallel – I thought it was another piece of English pastoral dreamt up in the Gloucestershire countryside. I borrowed the score, but to say I played my way through the music on my piano is an understatement. It was a challenge, but it reminded me how much I had enjoyed the Fantasia. There was something strangely haunting about the parallel chords, juxtaposed perfect fourths and fifths and the music’s slow paced development. I remember that I was disappointed when I discovered that this music was an evocation of the Canadian landscape and not that of the Home Counties! For the curious, The Lake in the Mountain was published as a piano piece in London by the Oxford University Press in 1947. It is dedicated to Phyllis Sellick.

To be continued…

This essay was first published in the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal in Issue 49, October 2010. I have made a few minor changes to the text.

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