Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 5 And 9

Description

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)Symphony No.5 in D majorSymphony No.9 in E minorRalph Vaughan Williams was born in theGloucestershire village of Down Ampney in 1872, the son of a clergyman, His ancestry onboth his father' s and mother's side was of some intellectual distinction. His father wasdescended from a family eminent in the law, while his maternal grandfather was a Wedgwoodand his grandmother a Darwin. On the death of his father in 1875 the family moved to livewith his mother' s father at Leith Hill Place in Surrey. As a child Vaughan Williamslearned the piano and the violin and received a conventional upper middle class educationat Charterhouse, after which he delayed entry to Cambridge, preferring instead to study atThe Royal College of Music, where his teachers included Hubert Parry and Walter Parratt,later Master of The Queen's Musick, both soon to be knighted. In 1892 he took up his placeat Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read History, but took composition lessons fromCharles Wood. After graduation in both History and Music, he returned to The RoyalCollege, where he studied composition with Stanford, and, perhaps more significant, becamea friend of a fellow-student, Gustav Holst. The friendship with Holst was to prove ofgreat importance in frank exchanges of views on one another' s compositions in the yearsthat followed.In 1897 Vaughan Williams married andtook The opportunity to visit Berlin, where he had lessons from Max Bruch and widened hismusical experience. In England he turned his attention to the collection of folk-music invarious regions of the country , an interest that materially influenced The shape of hismusical language. In 1908 he went to Paris to take lessons, particularly in orchestration,from Ravel, and had by now begun to make a reputation for himself as a composer, not leastwith the first performance in 1910 of his first symphony, >A Sea Symphony, setting words by Walt Whittnan, andhis Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis in the same year. The even tenor of his life wasinterrupted by the war, when he enlisted at once in the Royal Army Medical Corps as aprivate. 1914 was also the year of the London Symphony and of his rhapsodic work forviolin and orchestra, The Lark Ascending. Three years later, after service in Salonicathat seemed to him ineffective, he took a commission in the Royal Garrison Artillery andwas posted to France. There he was also able to make some use of his abilities as amusician.After the war Vaughan Williamsreturned to the Royal College of Music, now as a professor of composition, a position heretained until 1938. In these years he came to occupy a commanding position in the musicallife of the country, with a series of compositions that seemed essentially English, theapparent successor of Elgar, although his musical language was markedly different. The warof 1939 brought the challenge of composition for the cinema, with notable scores for The49th Parallel in 1940 and a number of other films,