A tweedy purveyor of folklore; too many larks ascending and too much Linden Lea: no composer's work has ever been more cruelly stereotyped than that of Ralph Vaughan Williams. While Stravinsky and Schoenberg were turning the world of classical music upside down, he was content, so the cliche goes, to grind out a hundred and one bucolic variations on the 'National Songbook'.
The truth, Simon Heffer reveals, could hardly have been more different: Vaughan Williams was a receptive listener to jazz and blues. That folksy feel masked the highest sophistication, that countrified air the most audacious experimentation. If, unlike his Germanising contemporary, Elgar, Vaughan Williams did indeed open the way to a distinctively English music, his was an Englishness which owed nothing to narrow-mindedness or lack of artistic enterprise.
A work of illuminating analysis, this book will only lend weight to the increasingly compelling case for Vaughan Williams's recognition as the most important English composer of the twentieth century.
