The music of Ralph Vaughan Williams — for many the quintessence of Englishness — dominates the BBC Proms this year: 2022 is the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth.
Vaughan Williams is often associated with flag-waving jingoism; English folk melody powerfully influenced his work. His 15-minute fantasia for violin and piano, “The Lark Ascending”, which premiered in 1921 and is today a popular favourite, conjures a prelapsarian England sweetened by larksong.
In the politically troubled 1930s, music of this sort conceivably appealed to a strain of British crypto-blackshirt who championed national resurgence through fireside singalongs and other völkisch recreations. A century on, Vaughan Williams may still attract listeners who see Britain as a divided nation in search of a story and a national music.
But Vaughan Williams himself was anything but insular-minded. As a life-long socialist and internationalist, he rejected the politics of blood and belonging. From 1939 at least, writes Caroline Davison, he supported the idea of a federal union of Europe and flinched from mention of “Merrie England” with its sepia-tinged connotations of maypoles and Morris dancing.
Davison’s is emphatically not a book in praise of bucolic England and English folk; The Captain’s Apprentice explores a more profound and complex seam of folk discovery, and concentrates on a single life-changing episode in Vaughan Williams’ life.
In January 1905, the 33-year-old composer, not yet famous, took himself to the Norfolk port of King’s Lynn in search of folk material. Cambridge-educated (and born in the Cotswolds to minor aristocracy), Vaughan Williams seems to have felt ill at ease among the hop-pickers and farm labourers of East Anglia, but in a rough part of King’s Lynn he met and was transfixed by an old fisherman, James “Duggie” Carter, who sang to him a shanty-like narrative about a teenage cabin boy’s torture and death at the hands of a ship captain somewhere on the high seas.
Vaughan Williams had already collected more than 250 vernacular songs but “The Captain’s Apprentice”, with its flavour of an archaic East Anglian murder ballad, stuck him so forcefully that he incorporated its haunting melody into his 1906 Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1. In modern parlance, Vaughan Williams had “sampled” the song (he had few qualms about lifting folk material that had come down through the oral tradition: he regarded it as the British people’s patrimony).
In crisply written pages, Davison explores the bearing of Edwardian folk music generally on Vaughan Williams, and finds in “The Captain’s Apprentice” a story of sexual abuse and unimaginable cruelty. She considers the song’s possible origin in the real-life case of Robert Eastick, a cabin boy apprenticed from a King’s Lynn workhouse who died at sea in murky circumstances in 1856 en route to Ceylon (Sri Lanka). In the song a boy is tortured by means of a “garling-spikk” (marlin-spike). Was this Eastick? Davison does not rule out the possibility. Eastick’s tormentor, one captain Johnson Doyle, was later tried (and acquitted) of the boy’s murder.
The song’s sickening violence would have been familiar to the Edwardian folk-song researchers who worked under the likes of the composer-collector Cecil Sharp, Percy Grainger and Gustav Holst. With scholarly rigour, they gathered thousands of doom-laden tunes from rural England (and, later, from the Southern Appalachians in the US). Sharp and his assistants were “essentially amateurs”, says Davison, who often treated their local contacts and singers with a condescending regality, if not at times outright contempt.
Vaughan Williams’ week-long stay in King’s Lynn changed the course of his life. The fisherman’s song “finally opened the door to an entirely new world of melody, harmony and feeling”, the composer recalled in old age. Two years later, in the winter of 1907-08, Vaughan Williams travelled to Paris to study composition under Maurice Ravel. Some of his subsequent music radiated a Ravel-like dreaminess and hushed intensity of emotion.
For all its apparent “Englishness”, Vaughan Williams’s was an idiom in constant flux. His Fourth Symphony, composed in the mid-1930s during the rise of European Fascism, recalls Béla Bartók in its harsh, angular asperities.
Along the way, Davison chronicles the development of her own interest in British folk music and her ancestral roots in the folk-rich Outer Hebrides of Scotland. She undertakes journeys in Vaughan Williams’ footsteps, and considers the many women who influenced the composer’s early life, from his “ice cold” (as Virginia Woolf saw her) first wife Adeline Fisher to the folk song collector Lucy Broadwood, who in effect introduced the composer to demotic English song.
The Captain’s Apprentice, well written and researched, opens a window on to the life of a visionary: for all its occasional rose-tinted pastoralism and grating jauntiness, Vaughan Williams’ is a music that transcends all nationalisms.
The Captain’s Apprentice: Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Story of a Folk Song by Caroline Davison, Chatto & Windus £20, 400 pages
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