Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending

The year was 1914 and King George V had just announced The United Kingdom’s entrance into WWI. It was at this time, on August 4th, that English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was on holiday at the seaside town of Margate in Kent, where he strolled along the cliffs near the English Channel to gaze at the skylarks there. Vaughan Williams had read English novelist and poet George Meredith’s 1881 poem The Lark Ascending, depicting the skylark’s soaring flight and joyful song, and wanted to write a piece incorporating its inspiring prose.

As he walked along the cliffs, with ships engaged in fleet exercises below him, Vaughan William began to compose a melody in his head, and sketched out in a notebook the beginnings of a romance for violin and piano honoring the skylark, as written about in Meredith’s poem.

Unbeknownst to the composer, he was being watched by a small boy who thought Vaughan Williams was a German spy, utilizing a secret code to write about the goings on with the fleet, while mapping the coastline. The boy notified the authorities about his suspicions, and the composer was quickly taken into custody, and just as quickly released, when they learned who he was and that the “secret code” was in fact musical notes.

Ralph Vaughan Willams completed his romance for violin and piano, naming it after the poem. Then, despite his age of forty-one, he volunteered for military service by joining the Royal Army Medical Corps as a stretcher bearer. Finally, in 1920, Vaughan Williams’ musical interpretation of The Lark Ascending received its premier, and the next year he reworked it for solo violin and orchestra, including some of the lines from Meredith’s poem at the top of the score:

For singing till his heaven fills,

‘Tis love of earth that he instils,

And ever winging up and up,

Our valley is his golden cup

And he the wine which overflows

to lift us with him as he goes…

Today, one hundred and twenty-five years later, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ beautiful musical recreation of The Lark Ascending for solo violin and orchestra continues to move and delight audiences around the world.