Ralph Vaughan Williams (the Vaughan was part of his surname, not a given name) was born in Gloucestershire in 1872 and lived the life of the idle rich (he was a descendant of the Wedgwood and Darwin families) until suddenly in his mid-twenties he decided to go to Paris to study under Maurice Ravel. This was an unusual decision to make for a number of reasons, not least of which was that Ravel was
twenty-two years old and thus wouldn't normally have been in a position to teach anyone anything. It was Vaughan Williams who saw potential in Ravel as a teacher, not Ravel who saw potential in Vaughan Williams as a student! Classical music at this point (1897 to 1899) was dominated by the legacy of the recently-deceased Tchaikovsky, who Ravel and Vaughan Williams hero-worshipped. The two of them basically inaugurated an outgrowth of the Romantics called the Pastorals that went back into the furthest reaches of Renaissance music--figures like the troubadours of France, minnesingers of Germany, and Tallis and Dowland of England--and created something that combined their favourite aspects of the Romantic period, the Middle Ages, contemporary rural life and song, European folk music, and the last five minutes of Haydn's Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra in E-Flat Major.
Vaughan Williams returned to England and began composing on his own, first producing
incidental music for a Cambridge production of Aristophenes's
The Wasps in 1909. This was more controversial than most incidental music for plays, to say the least, for the following reasons:
