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. The work has gained considerable popularity in Britain and elsewhere and has been much recorded between 1928 and the present day.
Among the enthusiasms of the composer Ralph 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, Swinburne, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hardy, Housman, and George 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 out twelve lines from Meredith’s 122-line poem. It is not known when and where Vaughan Williams composed the piece. The original manuscript has been lost. The soloist for whom the work was written and to whom it is dedicated was Marie Hall, a leading British violinist of the time, a former pupil of Edward Elgar, and celebrated for her interpretation of that composer’s Violin Concerto. She worked with Vaughan Williams on the new piece before the premiere, and may have influenced some details of the score, though if so, the extent is unknown.
The premiere of the violin and piano version was given by Hall and the pianist Geoffrey Mendham (1899–1984) at the Shirehampton Public Hall on 15 December 1920. Hall was again the soloist in the first performance of the orchestral version, in the Queen’s Hall, London, on 14 June 1921, at a concert presented by the British Music Society. The British Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Adrian Boult. The music critic of The Times noted that The Lark Ascending was not the main item on the programme, which featured an early performance of Holst’s The Planets, but it made a favourable impression. He commented that it: stood apart from the rest as the only work in the programme which showed serene disregard of the fashions of to-day or of yesterday. It dreams its way along in “many links without a break”, and though it never rises to the energy of the lines “He is the dance of children, thanks Of sowers, shout for primrose banks,” the music is that of the clean countryside, not of the sophisticated concert-room. The critic A. H. Fox Strangways wrote in Music & Letters: The violin floats in a long rapture over some home grown tunes in the accompaniment, taking little bits of them into its song at intervals. Violin cadenzas are apt to have a family likeness, but these jubilations will hardly remind anybody of anything else. There is very little of the harmless necessary arpeggio or of ingeniously wonderful double stops. It is pure carolling.
The typical playing time of the piece is between 13 and 16 minutes. It begins with a two-bar introduction by woodwind and muted strings in 68 time, after which the soloist enters with an unaccompanied cadenza marked pianissimo and sur la touche (that is, placing the bow over the fingerboard, which reduces the higher harmonics and gives an ethereal tone). The cadenza is written “senza misura” – without bar-lines – which Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians defines as “freely”, “without strict regard for the metre”.
Towards the end of the cadenza Vaughan Williams introduces a melody with which the solo violin continues when the orchestra re-enters, in 24. A second, unaccompanied cadenza, shorter than the first, leads to a contrasting episode (Allegretto tranquillo quasi andante) with a new melody for flutes. A section marked Allegro tranquillo begins with solo violin trills, punctuated by off-beat triangle (the only percussion in the piece). The key, which has been a somewhat ambiguous G major up to this point, changes to F major, and the time switches to 68. The oboe enters after five bars with another new melody marked scherzando. The melody introduced by the flutes returns, (now marked Allegretto molto tranquillo) played by the violin soloist, and is followed by a reprise of the earlier 68 section. The work ends with the unaccompanied violin in a closing cadenza which reaches up to a D in altissimo (i.e. two octaves above the treble staff) and then drops again a minor third on to B. Christopher Mark has analysed The Lark Ascending in terms of the composer’s use of modes. He finds that the work begins in the Dorian mode, and switches between that and the Aeolian mode interspersed with extensive use of the Pentatonic scale.
The orchestral version is scored for solo violin with an orchestra of two flutes, one oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, triangle and strings. Vaughan Williams also provided a version for chamber orchestra, with one each of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn and triangle, with three or four first violins, the same of second violins, two violas, two cellos and one double bass. Paul Drayton arranged the work in 2019 for a mixed choir, singing wordlessly, and vocal soloists, alongside the solo violinist. The arrangement was commissioned by the Swedish Chamber Choir, who have recorded it under Simon Phipps; it has also been performed by the BBC Singers.
