[n 3] Arthur Vaughan Williams died suddenly in February 1875, and his widow took the children to live in her family home, Leith Hill Place, Wotton, Surrey.

His views on religion did not affect his love of the Authorised Version of the Bible, the beauty of which, in the words of his widow Ursula Vaughan Williams in her 1964 biography of the composer, remained "one of his essential companions through life.

[21] Beneath Stanford's severity lay a recognition of Vaughan Williams's talent and a desire to help the young man correct his opaque orchestration and extreme predilection for modal music.

Vaughan Williams later observed, "What one really learns from an Academy or College is not so much from one's official teachers as from one's fellow-students ... [we discussed] every subject under the sun from the lowest note of the double bassoon to the philosophy of Jude the Obscure".

He had always been interested in them, and now followed the example of a recent generation of enthusiasts such as Cecil Sharp and Lucy Broadwood in going into the English countryside noting down and transcribing songs traditionally sung in various locations.

[3] Over this period Vaughan Williams composed steadily, producing songs, choral music, chamber works and orchestral pieces, gradually finding the beginnings of his mature style.

[47] Frogley writes of this period that Vaughan Williams was considerably older than most of his comrades, and "the back-breaking labour of dangerous night-time journeys through mud and rain must have been more than usually punishing".

Kennedy lists forty works premiered during the decade, including the Mass in G minor (1922), the ballet Old King Cole (1923), the operas Hugh the Drover and Sir John in Love (1924 and 1928), the suite Flos Campi (1925) and the oratorio Sancta Civitas (1925).

[65] The music Vaughan Williams wrote for the BBC to celebrate the end of the war, Thanksgiving for Victory, was marked by what the critic Edward Lockspeiser called the composer's characteristic avoidance of "any suggestion of rhetorical pompousness".

[66] Any suspicion that the septuagenarian composer had settled into benign tranquillity was dispelled by his Sixth Symphony (1948), described by the critic Gwyn Parry-Jones as "one of the most disturbing musical statements of the 20th century", opening with a "primal scream, plunging the listener immediately into a world of aggression and impending chaos.

The seventh—officially unnumbered, and titled Sinfonia antartica—divided opinion; the score is a reworking of music Vaughan Williams had written for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic, and some critics thought it not truly symphonic.

[79] The Ninth, premiered at a Royal Philharmonic Society concert conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent in April 1958, puzzled critics with its sombre, questing tone, and did not immediately achieve the recognition it later gained.

[81][82] Michael Kennedy characterises Vaughan Williams's music as a strongly individual blending of the modal harmonies familiar from folk‐song with the French influence of Ravel and Debussy.

The first mood, generally predominant in the composer's output, was more popular, as audiences preferred "the stained-glass beauty of the Tallis Fantasia, the direct melodic appeal of the Serenade to Music, the pastoral poetry of The Lark Ascending, and the grave serenity of the Fifth Symphony".

[99] There are some references to the urban soundscape: brief impressions of street music, with the sound of the barrel organ mimicked by the orchestra; the characteristic chant of the lavender-seller; the jingle of hansom cabs; and the chimes of Big Ben played by harp and clarinet.

Despite the title the symphony draws little on the folk-songs beloved of the composer, and the pastoral landscape evoked is not a tranquil English scene, but the French countryside ravaged by war.

[104] Some English musicians who had not fought in the First World War misunderstood the work and heard only the slow tempi and quiet tone, failing to notice the character of a requiem in the music and mistaking the piece for a rustic idyll.

[106] The orchestral forces required are not large by the standards of the first half of the 20th century, although the Fourth calls for an augmented woodwind section and the Sixth includes a part for tenor saxophone.

Despite the internal tensions caused by the deliberate conflict of modality in places, the work is generally serene in character, and was particularly well received for the comfort it gave at a time of all-out war.

[127]In addition to his love of poetry, Vaughan Williams's vocal music is inspired by his lifelong belief that the voice "can be made the medium of the best and deepest human emotion.

Other church works include a Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis (1925), the Mass in G minor (1920–1921), a Te Deum (1928)[31] and the motets O Clap Your Hands (1920), Lord, Thou hast been our Refuge (1921) and O Taste and See (1953, first performed at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II).

[137] The Dona Nobis Pacem, an impassioned anti-war cantata (1936) is a combination of both, with words from Whitman and others juxtaposed with extracts from the Latin mass, anticipating a similar mixture of sacred and secular text in Britten's War Requiem twenty-five years later.

[138] Vaughan Williams was wary of conventional labels; his best known ballet is described on the title page as "a masque for dancing" and only one of his operatic works is categorised by the composer simply as an opera.

"[142] Hugh the Drover, or Love in the Stocks (completed 1919, premiere 1924) has a libretto, by the writer and theatre critic Harold Child, which was described by The Stage as "replete with folksy, Cotswold village archetypes".

[149] In 1931, with the Leith Hill Festival in mind, the composer recast some of the music as a five-section cantata, In Windsor Forest, giving the public "the plums and no cake", as he put it.

Vaughan Williams had written incidental music for an amateur dramatisation in 1906, and had returned to the theme in 1921 with the one-act The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains (finally incorporated, with amendments, into the 1951 opera).

The emancipation he achieved thereby was so complete that the composers of succeeding generations like Walton and Britten had no longer need of the conscious nationalism which was Vaughan Williams's own artistic creed.

The society, a registered charity,[182] has sponsored and encouraged performances of the composer's works including complete symphony cycles and a Vaughan Williams opera festival.

The popularity of his most accessible works, particularly the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending, increased,[n 22] but a wide public also became aware of what a reviewer of Bridcut's film called "a genius driven by emotion".

[187] Among the 21st-century musicians who have acknowledged Vaughan Williams's influence on their development are John Adams, PJ Harvey, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Anthony Payne, Wayne Shorter, Neil Tennant and Mark-Anthony Turnage.