Vaughan Williams

You are about to hear the greatest symphony since Beethoven.
( Walton, on Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony )

I don’t know if I like it; but it is what I meant.
( Vaughan Williams, on his own Fourth Symphony )

It’s a Bb. It looks wrong and it sounds wrong, but it’s right.
( Vaughan Williams, during the first rehearsals of his own Fourth Symphony, to a musician who had asked the pitch of a note that was indiscernible in his part )

Gentleman, if this is modern music, you can keep it!
( Vaughan Williams, during a rehearsal of his own Fourth Symphony )

It’s about F minor.
( Vaughan Williams, when asked what his Fourth Symphony was about )

It’s like staring at a cow for a long time.
( Stravinsky, on Vaughan Williams’s Third Symphony )

It reminds me of a cow looking over a gate.
( Constant Lambert, on Vaughan Williams’s Third Symphony )

I see it as a pantheistic requiem for the dead of World War One.
( Michael Kennedy, on Vaughan Williams’s Third Symphony )

Young man, if perchance a tune should occur to you,
please, don’t hesitate to write it down.
( Vaughan Williams, after reading a student’s “very modern” score )

You will never become a great composer
until you first become a great English composer.
( Ravel’s advice to a young Vaughan Williams )

RALPH
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
born: Down Ampney, Gloucestshire, 12 October 1872
died: London, 26 August 1958, aged eighty-five