THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

Järvenpää

June 18, 1946

Dear Dr. Vaughan-Williams,

Through the British Council I have these days received a full-score edition of your Symphony in D-major which you kindly have dedicated to me. Please accept my most cordial thanks for your great kindness which I consider a great honour to me. I am very happy that this honour has been shown me by an English composer as my music has many friends in Great Britain.
I have heard your Symphony in the Radio and now it has been a great pleasure to study it more closely. It is a well-rounded, harmonious and vivid work. Moreover I have seldom heard anything that is more English. I do not mean that you were influenced by British folk songs but the symphonic grip seems to me to be English.
Thanking you once more, I remain, with admiration and friendship,
Yours sincerely,

Jean Sibelius.¹

1.  Writing to her sister Cordelia on 2nd July, AVW said “[Ralph] had a letter from Sibelius, type written in English – R w^d so much have preferred a scrawl in Finnish in his own hand [-] not that the letter wasn’t a very cordial one but Sib doesn’t know enough English to write it – when R met him he spoke French”.