THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

The Composers’ Guild of Great Britain
7 Deanery Street
London, W.1

2nd October 1950.

Dear Miss Lemare Madam
Would you not like to go down to fame as having conducted the first performance of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished Symphony’ or ‘Tristan and Isolde’?
How many Schuberts and Wagners may not be waiting round the corner, waiting for your magic touch to give their work life?
Well, the only way to discover this is by trial and error, and as Sir A.P. Herbert’s Topsy¹ says about her amorous entanglements, “the more the trial the less the error”. So I beg for the spirit of adventure.
You will, of course, often draw a blank, but when you spot a winner will it not make up for it a thousandfold?

R Vaughan Williams

(R. Vaughan Williams)

1. The heroine of three novels based on a column in Punch by A.P. Herbert from 1928; the novels were combined and published in 1949 as The Topsy Omnibus.