He was of his time

Vaughan Williams, who was born 150 years ago, is largely seen as a pastoral composer, but there was far more to him than that

- Andrew Green

SQUATTING on my desk is a chunky box set crammed with recordings of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s music. A 2008 EMI release, it embraces 30 CDs featuring many genres and a host of varied inspirations, but what representative image was chosen to adorn the packaging? Through the camera lens, we find ourselves standing close by a tall oak in leaf, looking over a rustic wooden fence into rolling meadowland.

That ‘England’s Pastoral Composer’ tag has been affirmed and re-affirmed in myriad sleeve designs for Vaughan Williams recordings. It’s fair enough. He wrote copious amounts of music reflective of the English countryside, of which the ubiquitous The Lark Ascending is but one example. However, says Eric Saylor, author of a forthcoming biography of the composer, ‘thinking of Vaughan Williams in this way runs the risk of ignoring the truly astonishing accomplishments across a long life that took his music far beyond The Lark Ascending and the like’.

He adds: ‘Think what happened in his lifespan of 85 years… some of the most transformational events and developments in human history. Vaughan Williams was notoriously unwilling to talk about what inspired his music, but any notion that it doesn’t reflect the times in which he lived is absurd.’