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Great British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams
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Various programmes
Throughout the week on BBC RADIO 3
www.bbc.co.uk/radio3
 Programme copy
Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of the finest British composers of the 20th century, died on 26 August 1958 aged 85. His work featured everything from choral works to symphonies, from concerti to opera. His searching and visionary imagination, combined with flexibility in writing for all levels of music-making, has meant that his music is as popular today as it ever has been.
BBC Radio 3 pays tribute to this hugely influential figure with a major live concert from the Proms on Tuesday; a Sunday Feature and Twenty Minutes which cast new light on his life and work; revealing archive talks from the great man himself in The Essay; a new series of Composer Of The Week examining his operatic works; and an in-depth exploration in Discovering Music of one of his best-loved and most unabashedly sensual and lushly orchestrated works, Flos Campi.
Up to a point, Vaughan Williams's background and upbringing were typical for an upper-middle-class English boy: birth in a grand country rectory (12 October 1872), followed by education at Charterhouse and a degree at Cambridge. But the family had strong intellectual inclinations – his ancestors included Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood.
Young Ralph began to compose aged six and spent two years at the Royal College of Music before going to university, also studying composition with Stanford at the RCM, and then with Bruch in Berlin. It was while he was at the Royal College that Vaughan Williams met Gustav Holst. The two formed a lasting friendship and shared many enthusiasms, including collecting folk songs. Vaughan Williams's folk-song researches convinced him that traditional folk tunes could reach heights comparable with the greatest "art" music, and that they provided a pathway to a truly national style.
Vaughan Williams's response in his own work went way beyond the picturesque or nostalgic, drawing praise from Ravel (with whom he had lessons in 1908) and later from the folk-inspired modernist Bartók. Vaughan Williams took time to reach his first maturity: the two breakthrough pieces were the choral-orchestral A Sea Symphony (1903-9) and the Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas Tallis (1910) – though some found the latter too "modern" at its first performance.
Despite his age and privileged background, he volunteered as a private in the First World War and experienced some of its most notorious horrors at first hand: musical echoes can be detected in several later works, including the strangely ambiguous Pastoral Symphony (1922), the impassioned cantata Dona nobis pacem (1936) and the turbulent Sixth Symphony (1944-7). After the Armistice in 1918, Vaughan Williams joined the staff of the RCM and became conductor of the Bach Choir.
Sunday 24 August
Discovering Music On Flos Campi
Sunday Feature – Ralph Vaughan Williams: Valiant For Truth
Monday 25 August
Composer Of The Week – Vaughan Williams
The Essay – Vaughan Williams (archive talk)
Tuesday 26 August
Composer Of The Week – Vaughan Williams
BBC Proms 2008 –
Sir Andrew Davis conducts an all-Vaughan Williams concert
Twenty Minutes –
Vaughan Williams At The Royal College Of Music
The Essay – Vaughan Williams (archive talk)
Wednesday 27 August
Composer Of The Week – Vaughan Williams
Thursday 28 August
Composer Of The Week – Vaughan Williams
The Essay – Vaughan Williams (archive talk)
Friday 29 August
Composer Of The Week – Vaughan Williams
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