The slow task of unlearning

Why, despite a precocious start, did it take Ralph Vaughan Williams so long to discover his own voice in his compositions? Bayan Northcott finds an explanation in the early chamber music, which has only recently been released

Scan a catalogue of all the music Ralph Vaughan Williams is known to have written, from such childhood attempts of the late 1870s as The Galoshes of Happienes (sic) to the incomplete cello concerto he left at his death in 1958, and two impressions stand out. The first is that, aside from a handful of obsessive note-spinners such as Milhaud and Martinu, he wrote as copious an output as any 20th-century composer – something approaching 400 works in all.

The second is that he withheld the majority of his earlier efforts from publication. And not just the rotten-with-promise teenage stuff, such as Benjamin Britten's executors have brought forth in such quantities since his death. In Vaughan Williams's case, items that had reached performance and undergone subsequent revision were still being withheld in his late thirties. At an age when Purcell, Mozart and Schubert were already dead, he was known for little more than a smattering of vocal works such as the Songs of Travel and as editor of The New English Hymnal.

A clear example of late development, then? After all, among English composers, Elgar before him and Tippett after were similarly belated in their arrivals – though in the instance of the provincially-based Elgar, this represented lack of opportunity rather than of technique or individuality. Tippett might seem more to the point. Aspiring young composers, he was fond of saying, "never have it all". In his case, he claimed, a feeling for line and rhythm had been innate from the start but his grasp of harmony and mastery of large-scale form had had to be struggled for. The result was almost 10 years' worth of suppressed pieces, including a symphony, before his personal voice began to emerge at 30 in his first published string quartet.

In his later years, Vaughan Williams certainly liked to claim in his self-deprecating way, that having taken most of his life to acquire an adequate technique he no longer felt he had anything new to say with it. But the matter is more complex. Unlike Tippett, who only heard his first symphony orchestra at 14, or Elgar, who was virtually self-taught, Vaughan Williams was lapped in encouragement and guidance by musically literate relatives from the cradle and began composing sedulously at six. In two periods at the Royal College of Music separated by undergraduate years at Trinity College, Cambridge, he studied under Parry and Stanford – the latter a notoriously exacting teacher – and benefited from the professional expertise of his fellow student Gustav Holst.

By the age of 29, he had not only mastered the academic disciplines of fugue, free counterpoint and so on completely enough to carry off a Doctorate of Music, but had undergone a cosmopolitan finishing year of instruction in Berlin with Max Bruch. True, he continued to feel that his music was "lumpy and stodgy... and that a little French polish would be of use" – resulting in a concentrated patch of study at 36(!) in Paris with Ravel.

But this was evidently no semi-musical amateur, however he may have continued to regard himself. So what was the problem? A fascinating CD release of Vaughan Williams's Early Chamber Music, wonderfully played by the Nash Ensemble on the Hyperion label and complemented by Faber Music's publication of the scores, suggests a rather surprising explanation.

Put on the new recording of the earliest work included here, his String Quartet in C minor (1898) composed at 26, and one is confronted not by gaucheness but by assurance. True, the style of the opening Allegro more resembles Dvorak than mature Vaughan Williams. But its well-contrasting materials are crisply articulated and convincingly worked out in a concise sonata design of real sweep, while the graceful Intermezzo third of its four movements features a theme that hints at the hymn he was later to write to the words "Come down, O love divine" and name after his birthplace Down Ampney. Most striking, however, is a handling of string quartet texture arguably more idiomatic than in either of his later published quartets – the somewhat Frenchified No 1 in G minor (1909) or the fiery but not entirely balanced No 2 in A minor (1944).

The Quintet in D major (also from 1898) for clarinet, horn, violin, cello and piano proves even more of a surprise – not to say, delight. Deriving, doubtless through Stanford, from an Austro-German serenade tradition running back to Beethoven's Septet, it sounds like nothing so much as a naughty cut-up and reassembly of the more bucolic and gemütlich moments of Brahms – if carried through with real affection and an incessant inventiveness. Yet that Vaughan Williams also grasped the serious implications of Brahms's technique is instantly apparent from the fine opening paragraph of the Piano Quintet in C minor (1903, revised 1904 and 1905), which convincingly emulates not only the master's full textures and chunky piano writing but his cogent thematic dialect and subtle ways with rhythmic side-slips.

What gradually emerges, as one gets to know these highly accomplished pieces, is the suspicion that he absorbed what his mentors had to offer almost too well; that he belongs to that fraught order of composers who, in order to discover their true voices, have first to painfully unlearn their initial fluency. In this respect, he might be compared with Janacek who, on the way to achieving his unmistakable originality, had to live down the rejection of a student violin sonata from the leavers' concert at the Vienna Conservatory as, of all things, "too academic"! Coming to feel that the Germanic influences he had absorbed through the Royal College had to go if a more independent English tradition were to be found, Vaughan Williams duly sought his liberation during the 1900s through such indigenous sources as folksong, hymnology and the study of Tudor polyphony.

Another substantial item on the Hyperion disc, the 10-minute "Nocturne and Scherzo" (1906) for string quintet, almost dramatises the transition. For while its first movement exploits quite an advanced vein of late-Romantic chromaticism of a kind that was to be squeezed out of his mature idiom by a more stable modality, its second evolves scudding open-air textures from snatches of the folksong "As I walked out". Meanwhile, the inclusion of such fugitive later pieces as the placid "Romance and Pastoral" (c1914) for violin and piano and the more edgily bi-modal "Suite de Ballet" (1913 –c1924) for flute and piano, reminds one of that though Vaughan Williams's coming might vary harmonically from the archaic to the astringent, it would tend to depend upon a comparably narrow range of melodic, textural and structural devices.

So it is difficult to avoid the question: did he, in achieving the unmistakable stylistic consistency of his later music, throw out too many of his initial skills, too much of his potential? Those many listeners who have found a musical homeland in an output ranging from a Victorian drawing-room song such as Linden Lea (1901) to the visionary remoteness of the Ninth Symphony (1958) will resent any such question. Those for whom the Vaughan Williams idiom has always somehow lacked a dimension of dialectical cut and thrust, or textural finesse, or whatever, will be newly emboldened to ask. It remains an index of his artistic stature, of course, that, a century after he discarded these early efforts, they still have power to provoke the issue.

Vaughan Williams: Early Chamber Music – Nash Ensemble (Hyperion CDA67381, two discs); Piano Trio in C Major, String Quartet in C Minor, Quintet in D Major, Quintet in C Minor, Nocturne and Scherzo, published by Faber Music