THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

c/o Brigadier Robert C. Bristow,
“Lilla Vran”,
Seaville Drive, Pevensey Bay.

Oct 31, 1948

Dear Sir Ralph,
My wife and I have been in England for a month or so, hearing a great mass of beautiful and significant music – most of it for the first time. I must say that I think the choice of music heard today in Britain – whether on the air or “in the flesh” – is thoroughly satisfying.
But the greatest of all our impressions has been in hearing a wider range of your music than ever before. The works heard, some in concert and some broadcast, include: The Wasps, 4th 5th and 6th Symphonies, Job, Serenade to Music, Greensleeves, A Sea Symphony, An Acre of Land, Ca’ the Yowes, On Wenlock Edge.
While all the works heard are perfections of one kind and another, and all witness to the transcendental scope of your genius and humanity, it has been the 4th, 5th and 6th Symphonies that have thrilled me the most, and, I must, say, OVERWHELMED ME. It is a long time since I was so overwhelmed. It seems to me I was very much overwhelmed when I heard Bach, a boy of 10 in Australia. And again when I heard the larger works of Bach (Passions etc.), and Wagner and Brahms in Frankfort (around 1896). After that I heard many new geniuses who delighted me – Debussy, Ravel, Albeniz, Faure, Skryabin, Arthur Fickenscher, Arnold Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Elgar, Holst, etc – but I cannot say I felt overwhelmed by them; perhaps by the 3 last Chorals of Cesar Franck.
In my case, I think it is a combination of an impression of the forces of nature with the expression of the feelings of man that awakens that sense of overwhelming awe, rapture and immanence that I feel in Bach, Wagner, Brahms and in your music. The first time I felt it very strongly  was in your Pastoral Symphony, which did not seem to me (as so many nature-poems do) a mere looking-on (almost “touristically”) at nature, but as if the curving, twining, evoluting stirs and urges of nature itself were speaking thru the music. This quality of nature itself speaking (or being tallied) I feel again in your sixth Symphony, only much more so; for now (in the 6th) it sounds not only as if the forces and stirs of our own globe were speaking musically, but as if the stirs of space, the voices of the spheres were singing to us. The 5th Symphony seemed to me a paragon of lyrical beauty and angelic moods. But it is to the 4th Symphony that I most naturally give myself – no doubt because of my personal experiences in my teens in Germany, when I was not only terrified by the hostility of the German mind to our English-speaking peoples, but also unable to refute their claims to superiority over us and their belittling of us as musically pale, small-sized and amateurish – for at that time I had never been to England, being in Germany from my 12th to my 18th year (1895-1901). When I did come to England I did sense a lack of grasp and drasticness in the methods of  such English music as I met. If at that time I could have heard your 4th Symphony all my distress would have faded away, for what I hear in that work is the MASTERY OF EVIL BY THE BRITISH MIND. The British mind (itself so mild and dreamy) has been able to bring itself to UNDERSTAND, and therefore master, forces of evil (or shall we say, just urgency?) so foreign to its original self. This mastery is not only human, philosophical, imaginative; it is especially manifest in the MUSICAL MASTERY. I ask myself: Is there in Bach, Wagner, Brahms, C. Franck a musical mastery (in form, in characterisation, in orchestration) comparable to that in your 4th Symphony? And I can only answer that there is not. That work seems to me the “farthest north” in musical technic – the technic of expressiveness (not merely that of display). The joy of listening to your 4th Symphony – the joy of witnessing the SUPREMACY of the British soul and mind in music – is for me a transcending experience. I dare say I would get no less a thrill from the 6th Symphony if I could hear it in a hall, as I did the 4th under Sir Adrian Boult (whereas the 6th I only heard over the air, from Edinburgh). As it is, I had not heard the 4th. I would have said of the 6th that it is the most lovely and super-human cosmic music I have ever heard. It is a marvel that you, who have written such a mass of gloriously-mooded and exquisite music all your life, have in your old age intensified and deepened your powers to such an extent that, to many of us, your latest works seem your very greatest and loveliest! It is an exhibition of what TRUE GREATNESS is like.
My wife and I are going to be in London from Nov 8th to Nov 22, staying at Hotel Regina, 110 Gloucester Road, London S.W.7 (Western 5151). We wonder if you will happen to be in London during that time and whether you would have time to take lunch or dinner with us some day – say at the Hyde Park Hotel Grill Room, or at Bailey’s Hotel, opposite Gloucester Road Underground – or anywhere else more convenient to you? It would be such a joy to us if you could.
And there is another great favor I would like to ask of you, if you could grant it. For my museum in Melbourne I want to have color photographs of those composers of our era that I revere most. I have made arrangements with Tunbridge, Ltd., Photographers, Axtell House, Warwick Street, Regent Street, W.1 (GERrard 7422) to take such color photographs for my museum. I feel that the luminousness (the absence of blackness) of the color photograph is a very valuable gain over the black-and-white photo and I am anxious to have the appearance of our greatest composers preserved in this better way, if I can.
Would you permit Tunbridges to take such a photo for me? If you would, they will accommodate you at any time, if you will give them a day’s notice.  (I would be glad to take you there, so you have no bother finding the place.) Or if it should be inconvenient to you to be photographed in London, Tunbridges would send a man to Dorking, or anywhere else, if you would prefer that.
I shall be at the above Pevensey Bay address until Nov 7th.
Hoping very much that my wife and I may have the pleasure of seeing you before we leave England, and thanking you for all the joys your music has given us this time (the pinnacle of musical experiences)
Yours every
Percy Grainger