I have only one simple goal for this piece. I want to persuade you to listen to, and fall in love with, a short musical piece by Ralph Vaughan Williams, entitled “The Lark Ascending.”
Legend has it that the theme of the “The Lark Ascending” came upon the composer as a still, soft voice — the lilting, lifting song of a skylark. The story is that he was standing on a hillside in 1914, gazing upon a fleet of troop carriers embarking from Dover for the Great War raging in France. The “bright young things” of England, an entire generation, were about to plunge into the shadowlands of a new bleak tidal age.
Williams is all over the English hymn tradition. In the 1982 Episcopal Hymnal, he is responsible for 24 hymn tunes (not counting his Christmas carols) — more than any other composer. In “The English Hymnal,” brought out in 1933, Williams raised hymnody to a higher, lovelier musicality, bringing into church music a winsome lyricism that had been, honestly, somewhat lacking.
Smarting from some negative feedback from fans of the stodgy 1861 “Hymns Ancient and Modern,” Williams added some of those moth-eaten tunes to the back pages of the second edition, a section he called “the chamber of horrors.”
Williams rejected the old Edwardian music that was often more befitting of a marching band. For him, the music of beauty needed to flow like the wind, varying from the kiss of a soft May breeze to the lapping of the spring rain wafting on a coruscating meadow to the westering gale of October. Music needed to be, at its beating heart, pastoral — that is, imbued with a profound sense of communion with nature. It needed to be wed intimately to Creation, to the earth and sky, to sunrise and starlight, wind and rain.
The composer was derided for his distinctive pastoralism. Many music critics, who preferred the older, Edwardian and more academically German music tradition, dismissed Williams as just another member of the “cowpat school.” Yes, you’re right, as in “cow patty.”
He didn’t mind, of course. Williams is rightly famous for his taking old English folk melodies and dressing them up in the sonorous garb of symphonic orchestration — all the while retaining, even amplifying, the ancient echoes of the fields and orchards, scything the hay, husbanding the herds and flocks, wending in time through the grand and mysterious succession of seasons in poignant remembrance that is both human and humane.
For this, Williams took constant inspiration from the pages of pastoral English poetry. He loved the poems of Tennyson, A.E. Housman, Thomas Hardy, Dante and Christina Rosetti (who wrote “In the Bleak Midwinter”), and George Meredith.
It was this last poet who wrote the poem “The Lark Ascending,” which gave the composer the title for his symphonic piece. At the head of the score, Vaughan Williams wrote out lines from Meredith’s 122-line poem:
For singing till his heaven fills,
‘Tis love of earth that he instills,
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.
In four distinct melodies, the composer follows the climbing, fluttering gyres of the skylark and echoes its song. There is no allusion to an older folk melody or Tudor music (like Thomas Tallis), as was Vaughan Williams’ wont. This melody was not from the echoes of human gardening in the earth, but rather from the sky, from the aerial expanse, a divine gaze upon the fraught human narrative of jejune naivetes that too often turn into marching hordes over the lemming cliff into an abyss of horror.
Like World War One. And Two. And every dark tidal wave of humans who sacrifice their humanity on the altar of a demagogue and deliberately forget to be humane.
Still, there is the lark ascending. Still, the Creation of the Creator waits for the human to return, like the prodigal coming home. Still, the fields and the forests, the innocent gaze of the small animals and beasts of the field, wait and welcome the soldier, the refugee, returning, war-weary, wounded, bruised and broken, yearning to be put back together again, lying still beside the cool waters.
Williams composed “The Lark Ascending” at the beginning of the First World War. Its delicate melancholy portended the tragedy to come, but its soaring resolutions inspire a transcending hope. The piece was not performed until well after the war was over, in December 1920. By then, only a relative few of England’s “bright young things” who had embarked from Dover had come home, leaving only the “Lost Generation.”
Still, there was that still, soft voice — the lilting, lifting song. Still, there is the lark ascending.
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