Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895–1958 (review)

This long-anticipated volume more than meets the high expectations that greet it. For some twenty years, Hugh Cobbe, former head of music collections at the British Library, has been collecting, transcribing, and editing letters to and from Ralph Vaughan Williams. Enthusiasts of the composer’s music have been treated to tantalizing glimpses of the project in the form of progress reports, the occasional published article, and (for those bold enough to contact the editor privately) a generous sharing of information along the way. The letters’ publication after so long a span is therefore cause for much rejoicing—especially since the job has been so well done. The judicious selection of 757 letters, the admirable pacing of the book, and the wonderfully clarifying editorial commentary provide the reader with an unparalleled picture of the composer’s working life.

Cobbe’s spadework has to this point uncovered some 3,300 letters—a number that represents, in his estimation, about twenty percent of the total that the composer probably wrote or dictated over the course of his lifetime. (While more surely remain to be discovered, these are likely to be few in number for reasons Cobbe discusses in his introduction.) The 757 letters printed here represent between a quarter and a fifth of the known correspondence and include fascinating letters to a wide range of correspondents. Among these are music critics, amateur conductors and performers, artistic collaborators, folksong collecting colleagues, performers of Vaughan Williams’s music, composition students, old university friends, editors at Oxford University Press, scholars and musicologists, composer colleagues, family members, and of course close friends. In addition, there are letters to newspapers like The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Musical Times, as well as to functionaries and dignitaries at the BBC, the Leith Hill Music Festival, and various universities. Perhaps most charming are the letters to various amateur performers and enthusiastic music lovers, various school children, and at least one autograph hunter among them.

Most of the letters included in the volume are published here for the first time. But because Cobbe’s stated goal is to “provide as full a self-portrait of VW as possible” (p. xiii), he purposely interleaves many new discoveries with a sizable number of key letters previously printed in one of three standard reference books on the composer—R. V. W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams by his second wife Ursula (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), Michael Kennedy’s The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), and Heirs and Rebels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), the volume of correspondence between Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst edited by Ursula Vaughan Williams and Imogen Holst. The strategy pays off, not merely because the editor is thus able to fill in the gaps and contexts surrounding specific well-known letters—the composer’s notorious 1941 rebuke of the BBC for their banning of the music of the communist Alan Bush is a stellar example—but also because it is Cobbe’s editorial policy to present these, and indeed all, letters in unexpurgated and complete form. The results can sometimes be startling, as when we learn of Vaughan Williams’s withering opinion of Rutland Boughton’s Glastonbury Festival (p. 110), or overhear the otherwise sensitive and socially-minded composer employ a common racial epithet to describe black porters in 1920s New York (p. 133). (Both of these examples come from expurgated portions of letters printed previously.) Moreover, the reprinting of familiar letters allows for the chronological adjustment of previously misdated letters and for the filling in of crucial background information omitted by earlier editors. Vaughan Williams’s letter of 20 March 1932 to Holst (letter no. 211), reprinted from Heirs and Rebels but here given complete, is exemplary: Cobbe’s eight editorial footnotes clarify oblique references in the letter by identifying the individuals and musical works concerned, explaining the financial arrangements for Holst’s 1932 tour...