Ralph Vaughan Williams iin 1956. Credit: Topical Press Agency / Hulton Archive / Getty
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When Daniel Barenboim used his appearance at the 2017 BBC Proms to lash out against Brexit, he subverted the common view of Sir Edward Elgar, composer of Pomp and Circumstance, as an arch patriot. “Elgar makes the best case against Brexit,” he said, “because he was a pan-European composer.”
This chimes with an all-too-familiar sneering attitude towards any art born in Britain – and England in particular. By praising Elgar for taking his lead from the Continent, Barenboim was drawing an implicit – and negative – contrast with those who found – and find – their inspiration closer to home.
Like, for example, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958). He was a composer who sought to forge a distinctive English or British music from the folk songs and popular tunes of ordinary people, from the modal harmonies of church music and early English composers such as Henry Purcell and Thomas Tallis.
Vaughan Williams himself heard enough of the Barenboim view in his own day, writing in 1941 of how “the attitude of foreign to English musicians is unsympathetic, self-opinionated and pedantic. They believe that their tradition is the only one (this is specially true of the Viennese) and that anything that is not in accordance with that tradition is ‘wrong’ and arises from insular ignorance.”
Nowadays, Vaughan Williams is still routinely dismissed as a parochial, nostalgic, backward-looking nationalist – a kind of musical Brexit. The Lark Ascending, his little song of freedom for violin and string orchestra, conjures particular sniffs of derision from those who see themselves on a higher plain.
In this way, Vaughan Williams serves as a sort of signpost in our culture wars, to declare which side we are on. For some he is a positive, someone rooted in his community and who saw this as a foundation of the good life and of great art. Others see in the same what they are most against.
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