Letter from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Fritz Hart
Letter No. VWL1806
Letter from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Fritz Hart
Letter No.: VWL1806
The White Gates,
Dorking.
Oct 2nd [1943]
Dear Fritz
I owe you 2 letters now so double this one and take away the number you first thought of and the answer is a lemon. (Forgive this incoherence – I am just in the last ½ hour of my fire watch).
Yes I have perpetrated a new Symphony – all very quiet and sedate (like Milton’s nun pensive chaste and demure (query can a woman be chaste and demure).1
I hope you will have a good holiday.
My love to Marvel
Yrs
RVW
P.S. I can never read those two mysterious letters on the end of your address – I read it as T.H. – but probably it will go to Eire or Alaska.
1. The Fifth symphony, Catalogue of Works 1943/2, which had been given its first performance the previous June. The Milton reference is to Il penseroso, ll.31-2:
Come, pensive nun, devout and pure,
Sober, steadfast, and demure.
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General Notes:
Presented to the National Libray of Australia by Emily Scott who added this note to the original: ‘This is an autograph letter from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Fritz Hart, who sent it to me, as a sample of writing worse than his own, and as “the autograph of a considerable man”’.
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Location Of Original:
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Shelfmark:MS 703/9/29
