THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

From R. Vaughan Williams,
The White Gates,
Westcott Road,
Dorking.

August 3 [1937]

Dear Foss

(1) I don’t remember having promised to go to Bristol for the P.K.¹ If I go to anything I would rather go to a rehearsal to try to prevent him taking all the tempi twice too slow.
(2) Many thanks about choral parts of ‘Riders’. Would you mind writing to Cambridge & RCM² yourself. Isn’t it rather expensive? I think I had better have the full score of ‘Riders’ down here before sending to the copyists.³
(3) I have had a request from Peterkin for material for a life of myself in some dictionary. I think if you sent her Dickenson’s book⁴ & the list of my works that appeared in the Dominant I think it might satisfy her.
Please send to—
 Miss R. Housman
 115 East Ninety^th Street
 New York City

Could you kindly do this for me?⁵
Yrs

R. Vaughan Williams⁵

P.S. I cannot remember if you received the Gurney songs safely—I suppose I had an acknowledgement but cannot find it.⁶

RVW

1.  The Poisoned Kiss (Collected Works 1936/4).
2. Royal College of Music
3.  A performance of Riders to the Sea (Collected Works 1936/6) was to be given at the RCM in December conducted by Malcolm Sargent – see RVW: a biography, p.215.
4.  An Introduction to the Music of R. Vaughan Williams (1928), by A. E. F. Dickinson.
5.  OUP had been asked to supply material for a revised edition of Baker’s Dictionary of Music published by Schirmer & Co in New York.
6.  VW and Gerald Finzi had been preparing a selected edition of the songs Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) – Twenty Songs, OUP 1938 (in two volumes – a 3rd volume followed in 1953 and a 4th in 1959, each with 10 songs). On 25th July he had told Finzi that he was posting the songs to OUP the following day – see VWL1190.