THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

19 Second Avenue
Brighton

June 16 [1903]

My dear Herr Gatty

Will you kindly foward the enclosed to Mrs Oppenheim – I am sorry to hear such a sad account of her and I’d so like to be able to help in the smallest way.  I can get any information about Grand Canary.  My sister & her husband are going out again next winter.  They are so perfectly happy there.
I hope you will often go and see poor Mrs Oppenheim.  I am sure she prizes an English speaking friend.
I dined with Ivor the other night & met Nicholas – just returned from a delightful expedition in Belgium & looking all the better for it – Ivor’s dinner was a ‘creation’ & we drank claret cup of his own making.
This festivity was to celebrate his return to health after influenza.  I am much interested to think of you in the Potsdamerstrasse.  When you next write please describe exactly where No 29 is – I wonder if it’s near the Brücke.
I join Ralph again in London on Monday – I had the excitement of hearing one of his songs sung at a party the other day – a sort of folk song to the very breezy words of Barnes, the Dorsetshire poet.¹  It ‘took’ very well & there is a fair chance of its being published – did I tell you that he is editing  a vol of Purcell for the Purcell Society – this necessitates days at the British Museum copying rare manuscripts – he likes this work very much – unpaid though though it is!²
Will you come to England this summer?  it would be delightful – and surely the ‘Royal & Princely personages’ can lapse into privacy for a few weeks.
I will give your messages to Nicholas & Ivor.  Have you heard the latest occupation of the former? – giving lectures on the Ring to fashionable ladies.  The first cycle was such a success that a second has been demanded.
Yours very sincerely

Adeline Vaughan Williams

I address Mrs Oppenheim in the English manner for I don’t know what awful titles Herr Rudolph might have acquired by this time

1.  This must have been The Winter’s Willow, Catalogue of Works 1903/11, which was published later that year in The Vocalist.  The other two Barnes songs, Linden Lea and Blackmore by the Stour had already been published in 1902.
2.  VW edited vols XV (1905) and XVIII (1910) of the Purcell Society’s complete edition containing the Welcome Odes.