There can be few composers who have ridden such a reputational roller-coaster as Ralph Vaughan Williams. Lionized as a revered national figure, and across the English-speaking world in the latter part of his life, within a decade of his death in 1958 he seemed in danger of being consigned to little more than a historical footnote: a Spohr or Telemann, perhaps. His hymn tunes, songs, shorter orchestral pieces and some choral and band works did continue to be staples of the repertoire – Vaughan Williams has, in fact, always been one of those rare beasts, a popular twentieth-century composer. Yet such popularity soon became confined largely to the amateur realm, and while this would surely have offered some comfort to Vaughan Williams, a passionate advocate of the music-making of ordinary people, it was inevitably overshadowed by the precipitous decline of his standing in the world of elite performance and critical opinion. As for new research into his life or music, by the early 1980s musicological neglect was almost total. In 1996 one of the editors of the present volume introduced another book of scholarly essays on Vaughan Williams, the first of its kind, with the reflection that even a decade earlier such a project would have seemed ‘to belong strictly to the realms of futuristic fantasy’.¹ Though there may been a touch of rhetorical hyperbole in that judgement, it was only a touch.

But by the mid-1990s the tide was finally turning. As the introduction to that book went on to argue, a variety of forces helped propel this revival in Vaughan Williams’s fortunes. Perhaps most significant – and reaching well beyond this one composer – were the breakdown of a monolithic narrative of twentieth-century musical modernism, and a historical reassessment of the cultural politics of British nationalism and imperialism (the latter crucial for a figure who had become so associated with a particular version of national identity); in both cases, these concerns arose at least in part from the application of poststructuralist and postmodern approaches to a discipline, musicology, that had hitherto rejected them.² A new wave of interest in Vaughan Williams quickly gathered pace, and in the first decade of the new millennium continued to grow, spurred in part by the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death in 2008. A wealth of ground-breaking research has now appeared, including two further volumes of scholarly essays, several monographs, a number of important doctoral dissertations, and numerous periodical articles; this work has explored a wide variety of topics, including compositional processes, cultural contexts and reception history.³

In the perhaps more immediately influential realms of performance and recording, the Vaughan Williams revival has also borne very rich fruit, especially with performances of neglected or in some cases previously unknown works that have deepened and significantly changed our perceptions and understanding of the composer’s development. The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, founded in 1994, has been a vital agent of activism and fund-raising for a number of these projects, some of which have appeared on disc under its Albion Records imprint (the Society also publishes a lively journal). Vaughan Williams’s music for the stage, the most neglected part of his output, has fared particularly well, with the opera The Poisoned Kiss and the complete incidental music for Aristophanes’ The Wasps recorded for the first time ever, and even traditionally ephemeral genres such as film scores and incidental music for radio finding a home on disc. At the time of writing the Coliseum stage is still warm, as it were, from a historic production of the composer’s most ambitious stage work, The Pilgrim’s Progress, not given a full professional production since its premiere run at Covent Garden in 1951. Sir John in Love and Riders to the Sea, similarly neglected by professional companies, have also been produced by English National Opera in the last few years, in 2006 and 2008 respectively.⁴

The 2008 anniversary was celebrated in a number of ways, but the most significant landmark was arguably the appearance of a major collection of Vaughan Williams correspondence, edited by Hugh Cobbe, which has yielded innumerable new perspectives on the composer and his work. Also important, in part because of the extent of the press coverage they received, was the release of two highly contrasting documentary films, Tony Palmer’s O Thou Transcendent: The Life of Ralph Vaughan Williams and John Bridcut’s The Passions of Vaughan Williams. Particularly notable in the Palmer film is the inclusion of interviews with contemporary composers, including John Adams and Mark-Anthony Turnage, both of whom pay warm homage to Vaughan Williams; this reflects a broader reassessment of Vaughan Williams’s legacy as a living force in twenty-first-century music.

Palmer also interviewed pop musician Neil Tennant, reminding us that Vaughan Williams’s impact has always been felt well outside the realm of classical music. Frank Sinatra, for instance, who had a wide knowledge of classical music, revered Vaughan Williams and the composer’s Job in particular, and musicians as diverse as the progressive rock band Genesis, jazz-rock fusion pioneer Wayne Shorter, and, most recently, alternative rock singer PJ Harvey have all acknowledged his influence.⁵ And in the domain of film music, salient markers of Vaughan Williams’s style remain as reliable a point of reference, particularly for evocations of landscape, as the music of Copland. His continuing potency as a symbol of British national identity in the cinema was underlined in 2003 by the use of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis in the Oscar-nominated film Master and Commander. In this context it should be noted that Vaughan Williams has in recent years attracted attention from historians and other writers outside musicology, e.g. Peter Ackroyd, Jeffrey Richards, Robert Stradling and Meirion Hughes, as part of an increasing recognition of the crucial role played by music in broader constructions of British national identity.⁶

Yet some old attitudes die hard, as two recent and vexing inscriptions of them in the broader literature make clear. Richard Taruskin’s monumental The Oxford History of Western Music ignores most British twentieth-century music except Britten’s, and in a survey of almost 4,000 pages grants Vaughan Williams barely 6, as part of a chapter on nationalism and the nineteenth-century symphony.⁷ Alex Ross’s bestseller The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century likewise focuses on Britten and passes quickly over the rest of British music (though to be fair to Ross his book is a much more obviously personal view, which frees him in part from the responsibilities imposed by Taruskin’s title).⁸

Both because of, and to some extent despite, all these recent developments, a volume on Vaughan Williams in the Cambridge Companion series seemed extremely timely. No comprehensive study of the composer’s output has appeared since the 1998 revised version of James Day’s ‘Master Musicians’ volume, originally published in 1961; Michael Kennedy’s seminal 1964 study has not been significantly revised since 1980⁹ (we are on that account doubly pleased to include here his reflections on more recent developments in Chapter 13). This Companion thus represents the first opportunity to incorporate into a comprehensive assessment the major findings of the more specialized research of the last twenty years, along with consideration of recently rediscovered or revived works that have been published and recorded during the last decade or so.¹⁰ And while there has been a great deal of progress in our understanding of Vaughan Williams and his music, given the exceptionally long and rich life that he lived, and the sheer size and diversity of his oeuvre, it should come as no surprise that much work remains to be done.¹¹ To take just one example from the present volume, Julian Onderdonk’s chapter on Vaughan Williams’s hymn tunes, folksong arrangements and ‘functional’ church music is the first thoroughgoing survey of this part of the composer’s output – despite the fact that it includes some of his most widely performed pieces. We hope, therefore, that this book will both consolidate recent advances in our knowledge of Vaughan Williams and suggest new avenues of investigation. As with other volumes in the series, the intention has been to provide a comprehensive survey of the composer’s achievement that will be accessible and appealing to a broad non-specialist readership, but also to include new information and fresh perspectives, particularly in areas such as music analysis, cultural politics and reception history, that will be of value to students and more advanced scholars.

The book is divided into three main parts. The first part establishes the foundations of Vaughan Williams’s musical and broader cultural attitudes and his place in British music, by examining the emergence of his beliefs and values, musical style and critical reputation in the period up to c. 1925 (about the midpoint of his career as a composer). The second part addresses his musical output according to the major genres in which he worked. The third broadens the scope to explore Vaughan Williams’s wide-ranging role in British musical life, as an active writer and public figure (e.g. working for the release of interned Jewish refugees during World War II), his relationship with the BBC, and the vagaries of his critical reputation, both during his life and since (this section includes discussion of Vaughan Williams’s considerable and often overlooked impact outside Britain, especially in the United States). Finally, building on the kind of perspectives suggested only by sound-bites in the Palmer documentary, we conclude the volume by opening up the discussion to the world of contemporary music, engaging in sustained dialogue with four leading composers of our time.

A volume of this kind clearly requires the support of many individuals, and it is possible to mention here by name only a few. Vicki Cooper at Cambridge University Press encouraged and advised us in the initial stages of the project; Rebecca Taylor, Rachel Cox, Gill Cloke and Fleur Jones steered it through a rather protracted gestation, and we are extremely grateful for their patience and professionalism. The University of Connecticut Research Foundation provided travel funding and, most importantly, support for an editorial assistant: Heather de Savage transcribed audio recordings of the composer interviews, compiled the chronology and bibliography, copy-edited chapters, and assisted in numerous other ways with the preparation of the manuscript. We are enormously grateful to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Piers Hellawell, Nicola LeFanu and Anthony Payne for agreeing (and taking the time) to be interviewed for Chapter 14. Hugh Cobbe of the Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust and Nicolas Bell of the Department of Manuscripts at the British Library offered generous assistance in a number of matters. We are grateful to our colleagues and students at the University of Connecticut and Queen’s University Belfast, who supported and stimulated us in the preparation of the book, sometimes unwittingly.

Finally, all those who work on Ralph Vaughan Williams and cherish his music owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to Ursula Vaughan Williams, who died in October 2007 at the age of ninety-six. Ursula was the complete opposite of the kind of obstructive surviving relative who sometimes complicates – and on occasion outright blights – the legacy of a great artist in the years after their death. She was unfailingly generous, most obviously in the bequest of the composer’s manuscripts that she made to the British Library just a few years after her husband’s death, but also in countless other ways in the help, hospitality and friendship that she offered to so many who were interested in Vaughan Williams’s music. Her death just a few months before the beginning of the 2008 celebrations, albeit after a long and full life, inevitably cast something of a shadow over those events. No one could have known that before 2008 came to an end, a more shocking and quite unexpected death would rob British music, and Vaughan Williams in particular, of another one of their greatest champions: in late November the conductor Richard Hickox died suddenly, barely twenty-four hours after speaking to a joint meeting of the Elgar and Vaughan Williams Societies, and a few days before he was due to conduct the opening night of English National Opera’s production of Riders to the Sea. This volume is dedicated to the memory of Ursula Vaughan Williams and Richard Hickox.