The Lark Ascending is a short, single-movement work by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, inspired by the 1881 poem of the same name by the English writer George Meredith. It was originally for violin and piano, completed in 1914 but not performed until 1920. The composer reworked it for solo violin and orchestra after the First World War. This version, in which the work is chiefly known, was first performed in 1921. It is subtitled “A Romance”, a term that Vaughan Williams favoured for contemplative slow music.
Among the enthusiasms of Vaughan Williams were poetry and the violin. He had trained as a violinist as a boy, and greatly preferred the violin to the piano, for which he never had a great fondness. His literary tastes were wide-ranging, and among the English poets of the 19th and early 20th centuries whom he admired were Tennyson, Hardy, Housman, and Meredith. Before the composition of The Lark Ascending Vaughan Williams had inscribed a verse by Meredith above an early score, now lost. The composer’s second wife, Ursula, herself a poet, wrote that in The Lark Ascending Vaughan Williams had “taken a literary idea on which to build his musical thought … and had made the violin become both the bird’s song and its flight, being, rather than illustrating the poem from which the title was taken”. At the head of the score Vaughan Williams wrote twelve lines from Meredith’s 122-line poem:
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.
For singing till his heaven fills,
‘Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes.
Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings
In a 2011 poll of BBC listeners to choose Britain’s Desert Island Discs, the work was the chosen favourite. From 2007 to 2010, the piece was voted number one in the Classic FM annual “Hall of Fame” poll. In 2011–2013 it was supplanted by the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 but was placed first in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, and took third place in 2018.
