The music of Ralph Vaughan Williams is often regarded as quintessentially English. There are few composers who can claim to have embodied a truly English musical spirit with as much conviction and acclaim as Vaughan Williams. The composer’s symphonies and orchestral works like The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis exhibit a pastoral grandeur and paint vivid images of the English countryside without a word having to be sung. Echoes of his later film music for Scott of the Antarctic and 49th Parallel can be heard in orchestral film music to this day. His anti-war cantata, Dona Nobis Pacem, stands as a pillar of choral music.

Despite the success and impact of his larger forms, Vaughan Williams’ relationship with folk music and art song repertoire provides the most intriguing insight into his status as a “quintessentially English” composer. As a pivotal figure in the first English Folk Song revival, Vaughan Williams was one of many composers of the late nineteenth century who sought out, recorded, and published folk songs from the rural counties of England. This was a concerted effort in  response to the perceived endangerment of English folk music due to the industrialization and  urbanization of the time. Folk idioms and stylistic tendencies became so central to Vaughan  Williams’ compositional style that the line between folk song and original art music blurred. As a  composer, Vaughan Williams embodied a uniquely English style to the point that his original  compositions are often supposed to be folk songs. The first song in this program, “Linden Lea,” is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. 

The first two selections in this set of songs by Vaughan Williams are both settings of poems by  William Barnes, a Dorset poet and scholar. The first, “Linden Lea,” uses beautiful imagery to  depict a rustic home as the speaker asserts that a simple and free life in the country is preferred to a wealthier life constrained to a city. The second, “The Winter’s Willow,” describes a man’s  affection for a humble milkmaid and his desire to make her his wife. Both songs are often  mistaken to be arrangements of folk music. The third selection, “Youth and Love,” is excerpted  from the well-programmed song cycle, Songs of Travel, on the poetry of Robert Louis  Stevenson. The song depicts a young man who has decided to leave his home and beloved to  travel out into the world and pursue more worldly pleasures. The fourth song, “The Sky Above  the Roof,” is set to a translation of a poem by the renowned French poet Paul Verlaine. The  beginning of the poem parallels the serene idyllic imagery conveyed in the first two songs, but  the latter half of the song introduces elements of pain and regret. The final song of the set,  “Whither Must I Wander?” is also drawn from Songs of Travel. The speaker recalls happy days  of his youth and the beauty of his childhood home as he laments the simple truth that the past  cannot be restored.