The Lark Ascending

The Lark Ascending is a short, single-movement work by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, inspired by the 1881 poem of the same name by the English writer George Meredith. It was originally for violin and piano, completed in 1914, but not performed until 1920. The composer reworked it for solo violin and orchestra after the First World War. This version, in which the work is chiefly known, was first performed in 1921. It is subtitled "A Romance", a term that Vaughan Williams favoured for contemplative slow music. The work has gained considerable popularity in Britain and elsewhere and has been much recorded between 1928 and the present day. Background Among the enthusiasms of the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams were poetry and the violin. He had trained as a violinist as a boy, and greatly preferred the violin to the piano, for which he never had a great fondness. His literary tastes were wide-ranging, and among the English poets of the 19th and early 20th centuries whom he admired were Tennyson, Swinburne, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hardy, Housman, and George Meredith. Before the composition of The Lark Ascending, Vaughan Williams had inscribed a verse by Meredith above an early score, now lost. The composer's second wife, Ursula, herself a poet, wrote that in The Lark Ascending Vaughan Williams had "taken a literary idea on which to build his musical thought … and had made the violin become both the bird's song and its flight, being, rather than illustrating the poem from which the title was taken". At the head of the score, Vaughan Williams wrote out twelve lines from Meredith's 122-line poem: