No country outside Britain has embraced Vaughan Williams’s music more warmly and extensively than the USA. The composer first visited in 1922 (extended stays followed in 1932 and 1954), but he had earlier developed a sympathy for American democratic ideals through intense involvement with Walt Whitman’s poetry. Vaughan Williams’s stature in America grew steadily from around 1920, when major works, most notably A London Symphony, began to be performed regularly, and it reached a zenith in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was widely regarded as a major international figure in the same league as Stravinsky or Bartók. While his American reputation echoed the deepening Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ that developed during the alliances of the Second World War and the Cold War, advocacy from a wide range of European émigrés such as Serge Koussevitzky and Bruno Walter indicates a broad appeal reaching well beyond any narrow notion of Anglo-Saxon kinship. Vaughan Williams’s profound engagement with folk song, modality, Whitman, and the symphony aligned particularly closely with prevailing trends in American music c. 1930–60, and his impact can be felt in the work of composers like Samuel Barber and Roy Harris; more recently, the admiration of John Adams, among others, indicates continuing relevance.

As well as his many friends in music, Vaughan Williams had some distinguished ones outside it, five notably: all agnostic liberal intellectuals with upper-middle-class backgrounds. He loved and revered Frederic Maitland, historian of medieval law, who (like himself) married into the Fisher family and who seems to have strengthened his sense of the ‘feel’ of the English past. He was on good terms with another historian from the same family, H. A. L. Fisher, who as Britain’s minister for education (1916–22) opened up possibilities for a National Opera and for the inclusion of folk music in school curricula. He collaborated with Gilbert Murray (professor of Greek at Oxford) on finding ways of presenting Ancient Greek tragic choruses on the modern stage, and relished Murray’s ideas about the workings of tradition in the arts. And he had long friendships with two Cambridge notables whom he’d first met when he and they were undergraduates at that university and who later became professors there: the philosopher G. E. Moore and the historian G. M. Trevelyan. He appreciated Moore’s musicality and admired his Principia Ethica, while Trevelyan’s literary taste and concern for English continuities paralleled and arguably influenced his own.

Drawing upon their respective expertise in early twentieth-century literature and music, Matthew Ingleby and Ceri Owen explore the centrality of literature within Vaughan Williams’s work and career, demonstrating that his literariness was not simply an outgrowth of his personal artistic proclivities, but rather was mediated by several institutions that were key to the production of a new sense of English national identity during the first half of the twentieth century. By contextualizing Vaughan Williams’s literary tastes and choices for musical settings – including his interest in historically remote, non-contemporary, and Anglophone writers and texts – it is argued that such choices should be read less as evidence of the reactionary, conservative nationalism with which he has often been associated, and more as an indication of his participation in forward-looking currents within twentieth-century literary culture. Ingleby and Owen conclude by proposing that, while the nation may have been the frame through which Vaughan Williams often articulated a complex relation to modernity, his powerful interest in internationalist figures such as Walt Whitman and William Blake suggest that his cultural nationalism formed part of a broader humanitarian aspiration, one that was implicitly indebted to his literary imagination.

Vaughan Williams’s recorded music is a vast subject that has scarcely been studied. This chapter presents a first major step into this research area. It considers early recordings of his works from the 1920s and 1930s, addressing how they were shaped by the technical limitations and market forces of the British industry during this era. Brief playing times and poor sound quality for these recordings meant that art songs and folk-song arrangements dominate the composer’s early catalogue. Early recordings of larger works were often limited primarily to occasions of special advocacy and funding. Later, as demand, technology, and company resources allowed, the number and range of Vaughan Williams’s compositions on record increased. This chapter also shows how reviews of these early recordings reflected overall attitudes about his music, with reviewers expressing mixed reactions to perceived folk and modal aspects of the few works they were able to hear on record. Since a fuller catalogue of Vaughan Williams’s recorded music emerged only over decades, the vicissitudes of the industry cannot be separated from the development of his overall reception during this crucial time.

Though often noted by scholars, Vaughan Williams’s work with amateur musicians has generally been neglected by them, presented as a kind of social or aesthetic backdrop to his more prestigious compositional projects. Such neglect does the composer a disservice, not only because more than half of his catalogue was written with amateur performers in mind but also because he recognized that it was on ‘amateur music’ that the entire edifice of English music stood. This essay charts the ethical significance that working with amateur musicians had for the composer (who was a principled democrat) and examines the economic impact that such music-making had on the emergence of a viable English compositional style. In a country where laissez-faire economics reigned supreme, it was the rise of an enormous amateur music market in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that created the modern music profession – the professional performers, teachers, journalists, publishing houses, administrators, and promoters who fed and ultimately grew this market. It was a development that in turn helped ‘make’ the modern English composer.

This chapter argues that visual art played a generative role in the compositional processes of Vaughan Williams. His taste in painting was influenced by the art historians Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, who lauded the formal simplicity of works by fifteenth-century Italian artists like Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico, and Andrea Mantegna. The hymn tune ‘Mantegna’ was conceived as a ‘musical representation’ of that artist’s Agony in the Garden (c.1455–6, National Gallery, London). Reproductions of fifteenth-century paintings were displayed in the composer’s home, The White Gates, Dorking, from 1929.

English modernist painting developed rapidly after 1910. Among contemporary artists, Vaughan Williams particularly admired the work of the brothers Paul and John Nash. Their work has been described as ‘Neo-Romantic’, returning to the traditions of British landscape painting but with a modernist inflection. Vaughan Williams engaged directly with the visual legacies of the Romantic era in Job: A Masque for Dancing (1930), a musical response to William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826). Blake’s images were vividly translated into sets and costumes by wood engraver Gwendolen Raverat. The production represented a masterly fusion of visual and musical elements.

This chapter provides an introduction to how Vaughan Williams’s music was received in interwar continental Europe, particularly within music magazines and scholarly periodicals. It is in two sections. The first considers the different contexts in which it was heard: choral performances of the Mass and folk-song arrangements, pieces played at International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) festivals, and performances of large-scale works in ‘seasonal’ orchestral concerts and recitals. For the most part, Vaughan Williams’s music was well received, even at ISCM festivals, where he might have been overshadowed by more radical figures; and the increased number of European performances that he received during the period reflected a growing interest among leading continental performers. The chapter then examines some of the writing on Vaughan Williams by continental critics, primarily those from France and Germany. These reveal two contrasting but not necessarily mutually exclusive narratives: one in which Vaughan Williams is presented as the leader of a new English school of composition that is underpinned by the language of English folk song, and another in which Vaughan Williams is considered in a pan-European context, where the influence of French impressionism is more keenly felt. A table of selected performances is also included.

Throughout the Second World War, Vaughan Williams was not just the ‘grand old man’ of English music but in many ways its leading figure, often serving to represent what was worth protecting and preserving in English cultural life. He and his music were featured extensively on radio and film, and his major work of the period, the Fifth Symphony, was warmly received. The serenity of that work may seem to suggest a certain remove from wartime realities; indeed, his music generally in this period seems out of keeping with the turbulence of the war years. And yet, his vision of music as a source of spiritual sustenance and serenity seemed to find traction in wartime, in a newly powerful way. In the course of the war, he established himself as a cultural figure of national importance in a way that few musicians had before, both building on and reinforcing the growing importance of music itself in wartime life, and serving as a major representative of English and, in turn, British culture to the wider world.

Many thousands of historical pageants were held in twentieth-century Britain. These musical-dramatic re-enactments of history were especially popular in the interwar period, and in the 1930s Ralph Vaughan Williams collaborated with the novelist E. M. Forster to create two such pageants: The Abinger Pageant (1934) and England’s Pleasant Land (1938). Drawing on a range of published and archival sources, this chapter challenges readings of these and other pageants as expressions of a reactionary and conservative artistic (anti-) modernism. It sets them in the context of Vaughan Williams’s involvement with the Folk Revival, and his conception of folk culture as of vital relevance to contemporary society and its problems. It argues that these amateur performances of local history should be seen as realizations of Vaughan Williams’s ideals for a national culture which rested on the revival of local communities through art that was made by those selfsame communities. Vaughan Williams’s historical pageants were consistent with his left-leaning reading of English history, and with his belief in the radical potential of art – and specifically art that drew on an autochthonous vernacular musical tradition – to enrich human experience in the here and now, and on into the future.

As a boy, Adolf Busch was expected to make even more of an impact on the world as a composer than as a violinist: admirers used phrases such as ‘a young Mozart’ to describe his facility in composition. Although he stole every minute he could for what he called ‘note-writing’, circumstances dictated that for most of his life he would be a summer and Sunday composer; his only other free time would be a couple of weeks at Christmas. Nevertheless he wrote an astonishing amount of music, in virtually every genre (his one attempt at an opera was abandoned). Like other composer-performers – Robert Casadesus, say, or Artur Schnabel – he had to live with the knowledge that most people would rather hear him interpreting other men's music than his own. Undoubtedly his compositional skill made him a greater interpreter, yet he had a real, continuing urge to express himself through writing music; and his efforts won the praise of many contemporaries. In the 1920s Wilhelm Stenhammar declared him to be the best composer then writing; and Donald Tovey took his music very seriously. In 1929 Karl Straube wrote to his friend the conductor and composer Siegmund von Hausegger:

Rudolf Serkin, who had a Busch composition performed at the Marlboro School of Music each year, on or near the composer's birthdate, felt that his father-in-law's craftsmanship was ‘first class’, although he was too close to him to assess his achievement objectively.

The Harz holiday caused Busch to miss his elder brother's opening performances as General Music Director of the Saxon State Opera – the season started on 13 August 1922 with Fidelio; then came Der Rosenkavalier, Die Meistersinger and Tristan. On 26 August the Adolf Busches, Rudi Serkin and Otto Grüters attended the dress rehearsal of Die Zauberflöte. Fritz was in his element, having captured perhaps the most desirable operatic job in Germany, held previously by Weber and Wagner. A post in Berlin might carry more glamour, through association with the capital, but in Dresden the director had an orchestra as fine as any in the world (Fritz compared it to a Stradivarius) and a cohesive company full of fine singers:

Hans Gál concurred:

During his tenure, with the backing of the sympathetic Intendant Alfred Reucker, Fritz established an artistic policy which was the envy of the world and raised the State Opera to its artistic zenith, only to see lesser men such as Karl Böhm and Karl Elmendorff reap the benefit of his labours. Three Busch brothers forged strong links with the Saxon capital: Fritz as its leading resident musician, Adolf as visiting soloist and composer, Herman as principal cellist of the city's second orchestra, the Philharmonic. In his first season alone, Fritz gave (in addition to the operas already mentioned) Otello, Boris Godunov, Palestrina (with Pfitzner present) and Arlecchino (with Busoni in attendance). He also took over the twelve subscription concerts of the Sächsische Staatskapelle, with conspicuous success.

Busch was too busy to be a pedagogue in the mould of Leopold Auer, Carl Flesch, Ivan Galamian or D. C. Dounis, and he resigned his masterclass at the Berlin Hochschule too soon to make his mark there. Only Dea Gombrich and Blanche Honegger were long-term pupils but he gave lessons to such violinists as Helen Airoff, Gosta Andreasson, Georg Beerwald, Frances Brockman, Alphonse Brun, Hermann Diener, Ernest Drucker, Stefan Frenkel, Arlie Furman, Stefi Geyer, Frederick Grinke, Gerhard Kander, Otto Kirchenmaier, Willy Kleemann, Elisheva Kramer, Dolores Maass, Frances Magnes, Yehudi Menuhin, Erica Morini, David Nadien, Bjorn Olafsson, Anna Radnitz, Ulrich Strauss and Charles Treger. Flesch thought that Busch ‘must be considered more of a suggestive influence than a real teacher’; and Boris Schwarz wrote:

Grinke, who had lessons from Busch and Flesch, was left with strongly contrasting impressions:

Joseph Segal moved in his mid-teens straight from one of these masters to the other:

The two pillars of Adolf Busch's musical faith were Bach and Mozart: he never lost an opportunity to express his reverence for them. He identified closely with Beethoven – as with Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Dvořak, Reger and Busoni – but his feeling for these composers was almost instinctive, a product of his background and training, whereas Bach and Mozart satisfied him on all levels, from the intuitive to the intellectual. ‘With Mozart and Bach there is no bad writing, only beautiful and more beautiful’, he said, ‘but with Beethoven there are some weak things.’ He knew virtually every work of his preferred composers and performed many of them as concertmaster, soloist, chamber musician or orchestra director. Bach was a favourite for home music-making and any work which could be adapted to the violin would be taken down off the shelf – Adolf Spemann recalled going through the Flute Sonatas with his namesake; and Dea Gombrich said: ‘Busch loved to play the Organ Sonatas on two violins and I often played them with him. Serkin or my mother would be at the piano and perhaps someone would play the cello’. As for Mozart, Busch singled out the B minor Adagio for piano, k540, and the Adagio introduction to the Rondo of the G minor String Quintet, k516, as the composer's most beautiful creations, adding: ‘I wish I had known Mozart, so that I could have told him I understood him’. After he and Serkin had spent a morning playing Mozart to Otto Gruters, Busch said: ‘Mozart is altogether the most cunning swine that ever existed; he knew more than the Lord God knew’. Later he added: ‘After Bach, Mozart knew the most about counterpoint’. And again: ‘At the beginning of the Armed Men I always come over all cold’. Yet when it came to public performances or recordings, he knew his own strengths, as Robert Dressler attested: