Ralph Vaughan Williams
(1872 – 1958)
 

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 –1958) was an English composer whose works cover a wide range of genres.  Over the course of sixty years he wrote nine symphonies, include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions.

Vaughan Williams was born to a well-to-do family in the Costwold village of Down Ampney; his father was vicar. He volunteered for the army during the First World War, and served as a stretcher bearer/ambulance attendance in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

Vaughan Williams is among the best-known British symphonists, noted for his very wide range of moods, from stormy and impassioned to tranquil, from mysterious to exuberant. Among the most familiar of his other concert works are Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) and The Lark Ascending (1914). His vocal works include hymns, folk-song arrangements and large-scale choral pieces. He wrote eight works for stage performance between 1919 and 1951. Although none of his operas became popular repertoire pieces, his ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing (1930) was successful and has been frequently staged.

Two episodes made notably deep impressions in Vaughan Williams's personal life. The First World War, in which he served in the army, had a lasting emotional effect. Twenty years later, though in his sixties and devotedly married, he was energized by a love affair with a much younger woman, who later became his second wife.

He went on composing through his seventies and eighties, producing his last symphony months before his death at the age of eighty-five. His works have continued to be a staple of the British concert repertoire, and all his major compositions and many of the minor ones have been recorded