Ralph Vaughan Williams, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Ralph Vaughan Williams

English composer

Date of Birth: 12-Oct-1872

Place of Birth: Down Ampney, England, United Kingdom

Date of Death: 26-Aug-1958

Profession: composer, conductor, musician, organist, pedagogue, film score composer, choreographer, musicologist

Nationality: United Kingdom

Zodiac Sign: Libra


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About Ralph Vaughan Williams

  • Ralph Vaughan Williams ( (listen); 12 October 1872 – 26 August 1958) was an English composer.
  • His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years.
  • Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century. Vaughan Williams was born to a well-to-do family with strong moral views and a progressive social outlook.
  • Throughout his life he sought to be of service to his fellow citizens, and believed in making music as available as possible to everybody.
  • He wrote many works for amateur and student performance.
  • He was musically a late developer, not finding his true voice until his late thirties; his studies in 1907–1908 with the French composer Maurice Ravel helped him clarify the textures of his music and free it from Teutonic influences. Vaughan Williams is among the best-known British symphonists, noted for his very wide range of moods, from stormy and impassioned to tranquil, from mysterious to exuberant.
  • Among the most familiar of his other concert works are Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) and The Lark Ascending (1914).
  • His vocal works include hymns, folk-song arrangements and large-scale choral pieces.
  • He wrote eight works for stage performance between 1919 and 1951.
  • Although none of his operas became popular repertoire pieces, his ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing (1930) was successful and has been frequently staged. Two episodes made notably deep impressions in Vaughan Williams's personal life.
  • The First World War, in which he served in the army, had a lasting emotional effect.
  • Twenty years later, though in his sixties and devotedly married, he was reinvigorated by a love affair with a much younger woman, who later became his second wife.
  • He went on composing through his seventies and eighties, producing his last symphony months before his death at the age of eighty-five.
  • His works have continued to be a staple of the British concert repertoire, and all his major compositions and many of the minor ones have been recorded.

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