An English Institution

This superb compilation of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s letters, long overdue, was published to commemorate the half-century of his death. It contains more than 700 representative examples from the 3,300 the editor has traced, transcribed, and organized into an electronic database at the British Library, where for many years he was head of music collections; an additional forty or so are by other correspondents. By my reckoning over a hundred of these letters, perhaps the most important ones, have been previously published in the four or five standard works on the composer’s life and music; all are here published complete, however, and provide “as vivid a cumulative picture of the man as we are likely to be able to achieve.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in 1872 “with a very small silver spoon in my mouth,” as he wryly put it in a letter to Lord Kennet in 1941. His father’s family, of Welsh origin, were for generations distinguished (and prosperous) jurists. His maternal grandmother, a sister of Charles Darwin, married a direct descendant of Josiah Wedgwood, and it was largely through that inheritance Vaughn Williams was able “to pursue composition with an unwavering determination” for most of his long life. But it also afforded him countless opportunities to lend a helping hand not only to less fortunate fellow musicians (most notably Gustav Holst) but to many others as well. At Cambridge, where he earned both his baccalaureate and doctoral degrees, his closest friends among contemporaries were his cousin Ralph Wedgwood, the historian George Trevelyan, and the eminent philosopher G. E. Moore, all of whom became correspondents. In 1891 Vaughan Williams proposed to the woman who became his first wife, Adeline Fisher, at the home of Sir Leslie Stephen, whose daughters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf were her friends.

Family circumstances and connections notwithstanding, Vaughan Williams reveals himself in these letters as someone utterly unpreoccupied with his own interests, but also uncertain, even in old age, of his talent and never shy about seeking the opinion of others, including former students whose abilities he rated above his own. His self-deprecating manner was, however, I think, a form of modesty very much of his generation and class. Vaughan Williams was a very private man not given to personal confession—nor, it is sad to say, to revelations into the creative process, elements that combine to make Edward Elgar’s published correspondence remarkable and compelling (and often unsettling).

This is not to say cuddly “Uncle Ralph,” as he affectionately signed himself to favorites (invariably female and young), could not, if riled, write with the inexhaustible capacity for indignation that properly belongs to a retired colonel in the Home Counties. But such letters were typically public rather than private expressions. In 1948, for example, he condemned an article published in the Musical Times about C. Hubert Parry, his composition teacher at the Royal College of Music over fifty years earlier, as “inept, inaccurate and impertinent.” “If your contributor’s object was merely to insult Parry’s memory, which according to him is already non-existent,” he continued, then “why write about him at all?” (It was Parry who admonished the young Vaughan Williams to “write choral music as befits an Englishman and a democrat.”)

A. E. Housman was reportedly (and understandably) furious when he learned that Vaughan Williams had dropped several lines from one of the Shropshire Lad poems in his song-cycle, “On Wenlock Edge” (1909). Reflecting on this many years later, Vaughan Williams wrote Hubert Foss, his music editor at the Oxford University Press, that he felt “a composer has a perfect right artistically to set any portion of a poem he chooses provided he does not actually alter the sense” of it. “I also feel,” he cheekily adds, “that a poet should be grateful to anyone who fails to perpetuate such lines as: “‘The goal stands up, the Keeper / Stands up to keep the Goal.’” (Vaughan Williams returned to Housman’s poetry for...