Ralph Vaughan Williams

Abstract Vaughan Williams tells us that “the first sketches for this work (namely, parts of the Scherzo and slow movement) were made in 1903, and it was gradually worked out during the next seven years.” Most of the concentrated writing was done in 1908–1909. While in gestation, A Sea Symphony had several other titles, the first of them Songs of the Sea, already used by Vaughan Williams’s teacher Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, and another being The Ocean Symphony. It was first performed at the Leeds Festival under the direction of the composer on his thirty-eighth birthday, 12 October 1910. The orchestra and chorus were those of the Leeds Festival, and the soloists were Cicely Gleeson-White and Campbell McInnes. Stanford, in his last year as the Festival’s principal conductor, led the rest of the program, which consisted of Strauss’s Don Juan and Rachmaninoff playing his own Piano Concerto No. 2. Among the violinists in the orchestra that year was the composer Frank Bridge. Several details of the Sea Symphony were revised in 1918. In the 1918 score, Vaughan Williams indicates that each movement may be performed on its own, though I cannot imagine that this would be effective except for the Scherzo. The dedication is to R. L. W., the composer’s cousin and close friend, Ralph Wedgwood.