Ralph Vaughan Williams

Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, in October 1872, into the Wedgwood-Darwin family on his mother’s side and an Anglican clerical family on his father’s. He read history at Trinity College, Cambridge, then studied at the Royal College of Music with Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, alongside his lifelong friend Gustav Holst. Two later study periods — with Max Bruch in Berlin in 1897 and with Maurice Ravel in Paris in 1908 — gave him technical equipment for what would become a distinctively English compositional voice.

His career took shape through three projects pursued in parallel. The systematic collection of English folk song from village singers across the 1900s gave his music its modal harmonic vocabulary. The editorship of *The English Hymnal* (1906) and *Songs of Praise* (1925) shaped twentieth-century Anglican congregational singing. And the body of works that followed — the nine symphonies (composed 1909–57), the *Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis* (1910), *The Lark Ascending* (1914), the operas *Hugh the Drover* and *Sir John in Love*, the *Job: A Masque for Dancing* (1930), the *Pastoral Symphony*, the *Serenade to Music*, and *Riders to the Sea* — established the English symphonic tradition of the twentieth century.

Vaughan Williams turned down a knighthood but accepted the Order of Merit in 1935. He died in London in August 1958. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his orchestral, operatic and choral work in twentieth-century British performance.