THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

Grand Hotel
Birmingham

[4 October 1900]

My dear Herr Gatty
Ralph & I have been very pleased & touched by yr letters to us. The best news to us will be to hear you are quite well again & I am much reassured now that I know you are in the hands of a good doctor. You will treat us like friends won’t you & let us know when we can send you anything more – I know how much gets swallowed up in illness.¹
Yr letter caused me to have a heated argumnet with Ralph on the appropriateness of the word ‘vanish’d’. I proved it was a perfcetly becoming epithet for a butterfly – he will perhaps tell you something different! – but I’m very glad you have had yr poems read & criticised by someone who is intelligent & not unsympathetic. […]

As you see I am writing from Birmingham where we have come for the Festival. We are being ‘treated’ & were hearing music all day for nothing – I wish Nicholas² could have come here – Barclay Squire is in this hotel instead doing the work for the Globe³ – he talked with Ralph yesterday & said he had heard that Nicholas ‘was doing his work very well’ – I am sure he is – As to the music we have heard here, we had ‘de Profundis’ last night wh was rather a catastrophe, the sopranos coming in a bar early; some say Parry⁴ made the mistake, anyhow he was powerless to put things right. Yesterday – this must get finished up in pencil or it will never go – we heard Hiawatha⁵ last night & the best of antidotes for it this morning, St Matthew Passion⁶
Yrs always
A. Vaughan Williams

1. The VWs had sent money to Gatty to pay doctor’s fees; see VWL
2. Nicholas Gatty, a composer and brother of René Gatty.
3. The Globe newspaper; Barclay Squire was a music critic for the paper.
4. Charles H.H. Parry, composer of De Profundis.
5. Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, by Coleridge-Taylor.
5. Bach, St Matthew Passion