Faber & Faber

Fifty years after his death in 1958, Ralph Vaughan Williams remains one of the most recognised of all English composers, his music having become part of England's cultural landscape. In his short study, Simon Heffer introduces the life and works of Vaughan Williams, and investigates the influence of world war on the lesser-considered darker side to the composer's music.

Writing a book about any composer, especially about one who lived so long and full a life as Ralph Vaughan Williams, is fraught with difficulty. The temptation to delve deeply into the works is hard to resist, but technical analysis can alienate the general reader.I set out to write a short book on Vaughan Williams that would serve to the intelligent but not necessarily musical reader as an introduction to his life and works, and which would seek to put those works in context.

Vaughan Williams has a reputation as a pastoral composer in whose music the English landscape is clearly visible. However, one feature about him that motivated me to write this book was how obviously troubled he was by less serene events in his lifetime - notably the two world wars - and how the influence these had had on his music had been insufficiently brought out in other appraisals of him.

So, instead of just being a short factual biography, my book about him also has a distinct thesis: that it is only when Vaughan Williams overcomes his worship of the past and of a world lost forever that his music becomes truly great and universal in its language. With particular reference to post-World War I works such as Sancta Civitas and Dona Nobis Pacem, and to the work that was the main fruit of the Second World War, the Sixth Symphony, the book shows how the composer became more and more stimulated by the world around him as he became older, and wrote music that articulated the profound, often angry, often despairing feelings provoked by them.

While it does not dissent from the view offered by the composer's widow Ursula in her 1964 life of him of his being a kind, decent and public-spirited man, it does seek to show that he was a more complicated figure than the bluff, tweedy English gent of his popular, posthumous image. The book seeks not just to illuminate him, but also the chapter in English culture in whch he played so prominent a part.