The man who set England to music

In the Thirties and Forties, the people of Dorking, Surrey, were used to the sight of a large, shambling, absent-minded and untidily dressed figure wandering through town. He was apt to put his purchases down and forget where he had left them. That did not matter: shopkeepers would parcel them up, scribble the address "R Vaughan Williams - White Gates", and have them delivered to the house on the lower slopes of Ranmore Common.

During his lifetime, Ralph Vaughan Williams shrugged off formal recognition, preferring to live the life of an ordinary member of the English rural middle class. True, he accepted an Order of Merit in the 1930s, and when he died almost half a century ago, his ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey, near to those of Henry Purcell.

But he never allowed the King to make him "Sir Ralph". Even in 1935 when a choir sang a madrigal in honour of his OM, he listened rather grumpily, removed his jacket and the garland they had hung around his neck, and announced that he was taking the choir through the piece so that they could sing it properly in future.

One could therefore imagine him looking down the list of Classic FM's "Hall of Fame"' - the favourite 300 classical works nominated by listeners - and being more irritated at the poor taste of a listening public that overlooked Bach's St Matthew Passion than flattered that first and tenth places had been awarded to his own works, The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

But there is no composer more English than "RVW". He, rather than Gustav Holst or Benjamin Britten, is the father of 20th century English classical music. When the young Vaughan Williams enrolled at the Royal College of Music in 1890, composing meant writing for "the organ loft and the festival platform". Opera was an activity best left to foreigners. Gilbert and Sullivan's works were an entertaining freak show. Serious English music was either played on a church organ or by an orchestra that sounded a like a church organ writ large.

The young student arrived with all the advantages of a privileged birth.

His was a well-connected family. The surname is double barrelled but not hyphenated. Like Ralph Fiennes, he pronounced his first name "Rafe". He did not like to be called Ralf. His father was a minister in the Church of England, and several members of the family were eminent lawyers. His mother was a granddaughter of Josiah Wedgwood and Caroline Darwin, elder sister of Charles Darwin.

He had an aunt who was famous in her day, but is now largely forgotten; the feminist writer, Julia "Snow" Wedgwood, a friend of Robert Browning. Aunt Julia's judgement was not infallible. Distantly related to the young E M Forster, she did not think he would ever make a good writer. As for her nephew, Ralph, she complained that he was "a foolish young man" who continued working at music even though "he was so hopelessly bad at it".

Born in 1872 in Down Ampney, a Cotswold village in Gloucestershire, he was encouraged by his parents to take up music, and learnt the piano, organ and viola. He went through one of Britain's leading public schools, Charterhouse, in Godalming, where he was an exact contemporary of the satirist, Max Beerbohm. Most of the products of this school went on to be business leaders, military officers, or civil servants. Vaughan Williams went on to the recently founded Royal College of Music, to study under Hubert Parry, whom we now remember as the man who wrote the music for William Blake's Jerusalem.

Afterwards, he enrolled at Trinity College Cambridge, where he struck up two important friendships. He met Bertrand Russell, an exact contemporary who introduced him to the poetry of Walt Whitman, and the slightly younger Gustav Holst. Despite the German name, Holst was an Englishman, a fellow native of Gloucestershire. He and Vaughan Williams became lifelong friends, sharing ideas on composition.

Even with this confidence-instilling background, RVW still did not feel he knew enough to compose. So he set off around the English countryside, gathering up folk music and carols, doing the same job for English folk music that John and Alan Lomax later did for black American blues, by compiling and writing some 810 folk songs before they vanished from the collective memory. On 4 December 1903, he was overwhelmed by the experience of hearing Charles Potiphar, a 74-year-old labourer, singing "Bushes and Briars". Vaughan Williams said afterwards that he felt he had known the song all his life.

(Cinema-goers may remember Richard Rodney Bennett's arrangement of the same song for the film version of Thomas Hardy's novel, Far From The Madding Crowd, starring Julie Christie and Terence Stamp.)

He also delved into Elizabethan and Jacobean music, and in 1904-06, became musical editor of The English Hymnal. He wrote some of the hymns himself, including familiar items such as "For All the Saints" and "Come Down O Love Divine".

Later, he also edited The Oxford Books of Carols. And in 1905, he conducted the first Leith Hill Music Festival, with which he was to be associated for decades.

Still feeling the need for more musical education, he went to Berlin to study with Max Bruch, whose violin concerto made seventh place in the Classic FM poll; and then to Paris to learn from Maurice Ravel. He does not seem to have let himself be overwhelmed. Allegedly, at his first session with Ravel, he was asked: "Voulez-vous écrire un petit menuet dans le style de Mozart?" [Would you like to write a little minuet in the style of Mozart?"] - to which Vaughan Williams is said to have answered: "Non."

Finally, in his thirties, he found his own musical voice, and very quickly emerged as England's finest composer. Having once begun, he continued without let up for nearly 50 years.

Interestingly, both the pieces in the Classic FM top 10 are among his first works. The Lark Ascending can be regarded as one of the last pieces of English music to be written in the world that disappeared with the onset of the First World War, or as one of the first post-war works of art. The early version was finished in 1914, but it was revised after the war and first performed in December 1920.

Between starting and revising it, Vaughan Williams had been at the front in Flanders. Men of his background were usually officer class, but he chose to enter the Ambulance Field Service as a private. Of Vaughan Williams' politics we know very little. We know that his former tutor, Hubert Parry was a radical who believed that the House of Lords could be improved by ennobling a few criminals. His best friend, Holst, was a member of the Hammersmith Socialist Club, and conducted the Hammersmith Socialist Choir at the home of the libertarian socialist, William Morris. Vaughan Williams certainly shared his friend's love of Morris's poetry.

Whatever his political beliefs, however, we know he was horrified by the Flanders carnage. The constant gunfire damaged his hearing, causing him deafness in old age. But the most shocking event of the war, for him, was a single shot fired by a sniper during a relative lull in the slaughter on the Somme, in August 1916. One of Williams' protegés was a wealthy Oxford undergraduate named George Butterworth, who had a similar public school background, but did not share Williams' rural roots (his father was head of the North Eastern Railway, at York). Inspired by Williams and others he had dedicated his short life to music, to become one of England's finest Morris dancers, a composer best known for setting A E Housman's "A Shropshire Lad" to music, and the collector of around 300 folk songs to add to Vaughan Williams' repertoire of over 800.

Butterworth was one of the young officers who led a raid into Munster Alley, on the Somme, which succeeded in its immediate objective but cost him his life.

One of Vaughan Williams' best known works, his Third Symphony, the "Pastoral", is assumed to be a requiem for the war dead. Twelve years after the Armistice, he began his Fourth Symphony which was first performed in April 1935. Its grinding dissonance shocked everyone who thought they knew and understood his music. Several tales have grown up around this work. Rehearsals were reputedly a tense business. At one point, a clarinettist queried the score. Vaughan Williams leaned down and studied it, and said: "No, it's a B-flat. I know it looks wrong, and I know it sounds wrong, but it's right."

Though he could write clearly and simply, Vaughan Williams never explained his own music. When asked what the Fourth was about, he is reputed to have replied: "It is about F-minor." A couple of years after the first performance, he asserted, in a letter he wrote to a friend, that "I wrote it not as a definite picture of anything external - eg, the state of Europe - but simply because it occurred to me like this." He added: "I don't think that sitting down and thinking about great things ever produces a great work of art (at least I hope not, because I never do so.)" Others, however, were in no doubt that the Fourth was about the rise of Hitler and the threat of war. Writing in the year when Vaughan Williams died, Sir Adrian Boult claimed that the composer "foresaw the whole thing".

Vaughan Williams' first wife, Adeline Fisher, died in 1951, after suffering for years from arthritis. In 1953,at the age of 80, he married the poet Ursula Wood, who was nearly 40 years his junior. She wrote the definitive biography of him, RVW, published in 1964, and an autobiography, Paradise Remembered.

Sir Adrian Boult conducted Vaughan Williams' Ninth Symphony, written when he was 86 years old and scheduled for recording on 26 August 1958. "I was going down to breakfast that morning when the telephone rang," Sir Adrian recalled. "It was Ursula. 'I'm sorry', she said, 'we're not coming to the recording; Ralph died at 3 o'clock this morning." It was a typically modest departure for a man whose grandeur was all in his music.

The Classic FM top 10

1 The Lark Ascending, Vaughan Williams

Inspired by George Meredith's poem: "He rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound..."

2 Cello Concerto, Elgar

The first theme came to Elgar when he was under anaesthetic for a tonsillectomy in 1918.

3 Piano Concerto No 2, Rachmaninov

Marilyn Monroe, in The Seven Year Itch, said of it: "It makes me feel goose-pimply all over."

4 Clarinet Concerto, Mozart

First performed in October 1791. By December Mozart was dead, at 35.

5 Piano Concerto No 5, Beethoven

Nicknamed the "Emperor" though not by Beethoven.

6 Enigma Variations, Elgar

The inspiration for the theme is still an enigma.

7 Violin Concerto No 1, Bruch

Most people have heard it even if they cannot identify it.

8 Symphony No 6, Beethoven

Known as the "Pastoral", it bombed at its first performance.

9 Symphony No 9, Beethoven

Beethoven's last symphony, written when he was completely deaf.

10 Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Vaughan Williams

An early success, based on a hymn.

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