Early Works (1890–1901)

Vaughan Williams’s marginalization of his early compositions—and self-deprecating references to his abilities as a young composer—has led many biographers and researchers to do the same. Doing so has created the erroneous impression that, with a handful of exceptions, he spent most of a decade passively assimilating elements from post-Wagnerian tonality, English folk song, Anglican hymnody, Tudor church music, and French impressionism rather than actively composing, or deliberately limited himself only to small-scale genres like songs, chamber works, and hymn tunes. While solo and part songs dominated Vaughan Williams’s student compositions, and two significant chamber compositions resulted from his study with Bruch, about half of Vaughan Williams’s works written between 1897 and 1902 come from large-scale choral and instrumental genres (including the Serenade for Small Orchestra, A Cambridge Mass, The Garden of Proserpine, the Bucolic Suite, and the Heroic Elegy and Triumphal Epilogue) that demonstrate considerable technical facility and creative depth. While most compositions from this period are not especially reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’s mature idiom, they are competent and often engaging works that show the musical influences that were especially important to him, and reveal a composer whose wide-ranging study, conscientious work habits, and dogged persistence would serve him well in years to come.