![]() ![]() The ambiguities are all the greater because, like most creative Britons of his time and class, Vaughan Williams felt it necessary to appear more amateurish than he was. What we do know is that he began writing it before the First World War and completed it only after his life-changing experiences as a stretcher-bearer at the front. It dreams its way along.’ Ursula Vaughan Williams maintained that her husband, a reluctant countryman, could never have identified an actual lark, and many stories (not least her own) about the work’s genesis have been shown to be apocryphal. As The Times noted after The Lark Ascending’s first orchestral outing, in June 1921, it ‘showed serene disregard of the fashions of today or yesterday. ![]() At the same time, his best music succeeds by seeming purer (more Sibelian?) than theirs. That he belongs in the left-leaning internationalist company of Copland and Shostakovich is attested by the conscientiously acquired earth-rootedness of his mature idiom and its determination to articulate shared feelings, particularly in time of war. Much of this is factually incorrect but can’t be comprehensively refuted here. Cynics and those in thrall to the Germanic model of what constitutes great music insist that the piece owes its ubiquity to the fact that it’s just the right length for a passive reverie between domestic chores, that nothing actually happens in it, that its sensibility is innately conservative and rural. And yet, critically speaking, The Lark Ascending isn’t taken seriously. The composer’s estate pours the proceeds into musical good works. Put crudely, they think it sounds Chinese. What the most celebrated record guide of the 1950s skewered as the aesthetic vulnerability of Vaughan Williams’s legacy (‘a steady trickle of pentatonic wish-wash’) looks set to win The Lark Ascending an army of new friends in the Far East. Play the piece to a Frenchman and he may tell you that it sounds like Ravel. In Australia, possibly helped by its deployment in Anzac-related ceremonials, it currently heads ABC Classic FM’s poll of music that ‘makes your world stand still’. In 2011, when New York’s public radio network asked listeners what they’d like to hear on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, The Lark Ascending came second behind Barber’s Adagio. The ‘quintessentially English’ tag applicable to the ornate Victorian verse seems increasingly inadequate to explain the music’s global appeal. There’s no evidence to suggest that the composer himself considered The Lark Ascending in any way exceptional so why has it morphed into the classical hit almost everyone knows? Whereas once this unassuming romance was heard as a direct evocation of the 12 non-consecutive lines by George Meredith which preface the score, today’s wider listenership is largely unaware of its poetic wellspring. ![]()
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