Ralph Vaughan Williams

Five Mystical Songs

The quintessentially English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) received extensive musical training at the Royal College of Music and at Cambridge, and he also studied privately with Max Bruch and Maurice Ravel. But it wasn’t until he began collecting English folksongs and studying hymnody that he developed the personal style that has made him arguably the most popular British composer since Henry Purcell (Benjamin Britten being his only real rival).

Although he was a “cheerful agnostic,” this didn’t stop Vaughan Williams from composing some of the most spiritually charged music in the English language, including these Five Mystical Songs (1911, four of which also have optional parts for chorus) on texts drawn from George Herbert’s The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (1633).

--Summer Serenade, July 25, 2007 (Lindsey Tuller & Clinton Weinberg)