Ralph Vaughan Williams was 67 years old in 1939 and, by all accounts, had already had an extremely active public life. He hated the Nazis and what they were doing to Germany and felt compelled to contribute to the war effort.[1] Believing that "the art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of the nation", the composer would go on to write the musical scores for wartime classic films, like The 49th Parallel, and was commissioned to write a celebration of the Allied Victory.[2]
Portrait of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1920s, by Herbert Lambert.
During the First World War, Williams had worked in the RAMC, serving in Salonika before being commissioned as a subaltern in the Royal Artillery in November 1917 and sent to Flanders.[3] Unsurprisingly, there were no such exploits for Williams in 1939, but he turned his home (The White Gates, Dorking) into a refuge for evacuees. In the first few months of the Second World War, he was also busy with collecting salvage, helping with the war savings campaign, cultivating allotments, and finding employment for refugees from Europe.[4] As the war progressed, Vaughan-Williams took an active part in the nation's cultural push for “serious music”. He served alongside Sir Henry Wood on the ENSA Advisory Music Council, joined the Committee for the Encouragement of Music & Arts (CEMA), and helped organise Dame Myra Hess’s famous lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery.[5]
Home Front: The concert pianist Dame Myra Hess performs during one of the series of lunchtime concerts which she gave at the National Gallery, London. The immensely popular concerts were organised to boost the morale of London workers as they struggled to cope with the effects of the Blitz. (Image: IWM (D 140))
Classical music was deliberately used during the war to present the ideals of democratic freedom and maintain public morale. As well as the English historical pastorals of Vaughan-Williams, Holst, and Butterworth, this extended to German composers. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with its "fate knocking at the door" opening, was launched in January 1941 as the theme for Radio London due to its connection to the "V for Victory" motif, becoming a symbol of the struggle in films such as Millions Like Us (1943).[6] All this long before D-Day! Politics were never far from Vaughan-Williams’s focus. In 1940 appointed chairman of a Home Office committee considering the release of interned alien musicians, many of whom, as Jews or anti-Nazis, had fled Germany before the war only to find themselves under suspicion now as fears of invasion and fifth columnists mounted. Driven by the principles of what biographer Simon Heffer described as a "bloody-minded English radical", Vaughan-Williams rejected a BBC commission after the broadcaster denied airtime to the communist musician Alan Bush.[7] To appreciate the role that “serious music” played during the war, I recommend watching this short documentary film on CEMA narrated by R. A. Butler from 1942.
Somehow during all of this war work, Vaughan Williams also found time to write music and his film scores would become some of his best-known works. He was actively engaged with wartime film propaganda by composing original scores for major productions including 49th Parallel (1941), Coastal Command (1942), and The Flemish Farm (1943).
These wartime compositions were not martial in tone (like his later work) but tended to be noble, calm, escapist, and hopeful. As conflict drew toward its close in September 1944, the BBC invited him to compose a piece anticipating Allied victory. Selecting lines from Shakespeare’s Henry V, he composed A Thanksgiving for Victory, which was recorded in November 1944 and broadcast across the nation on the first Sunday following Victory in Europe.
As Heffer wrote[8]
It is one of the paradoxes of Vaughan Williams’s art that this apparently escapist work should have been heard in wartime, while his most violent and martial should have marked the years of peace that followed it
No doubt Vaughan Williams knew what his audience wanted to hear, and he composed music during the Second World War that would represent “the expression of the soul of the nation".
Listen: Ralph Vaughan Williams WW2 Playlist
I’ve created a Spotify playlist of the composers work to accompany this article, focusing on the period 1939-45. Hope you enjoy!
[1] Simon Heffer, Vaughan Williams (Phoenix, 2001), p. 92.
[2] Anselm Heinrich, with Society for Theatre Research, Entertainment, Propaganda, Education: Regional Theatre in Germany and Britain between 1918 and 1945 (University of Hertfordshire Press ; Society for Theatre Research, 2007), p. 179.
[3] Heffer, Vaughan Williams, p. 49.
[4] Heffer, Vaughan Williams, p. 95.
[5] Heffer, Vaughan Williams, pp. 97–104.
[6] John Vincent Morris, ‘Battle for Music: Music and British Wartime Propaganda 1935-1945’ (unpublished Doctor of Philosophy in English, University of Exeter, 2011), p. 18.
[7] Heffer, Vaughan Williams, p. 185.
[8] Heffer, Vaughan Williams, p. 104.