The Lark Ascending

The Lark Ascending, for violin and small orchestra, is based on a 1881 poem by George Meredith; this describes how the flying bird’s song seems to float skyward until it drifts beyond hearing. Vaughan Williams composed the music in a violin-and-piano version in 1914, before his army service in the First World War; this was not performed until 1920, and the premiere of the orchestral score took place in London’s Queen’s Hall a year later. On both occasions the solo violinist was the work’s dedicatee, Marie Hall. Her musicianship drew from Vaughan Williams a genuinely unique work. Although he designated it simply a “Romance”, the music’s inner magnitude is much greater than the score’s quiet lyricism and 15-minute duration suggests. The virtuosity of the solo violin part has no connection with spectacular 19th-century tradition; instead it relates back to the purity of line in Bach’s concertos, and it wonderfully suggests both the lark’s flight and its song. There are three solo cadenzas, with the one that closes the work soaring ever higher in unaccompanied solitude. Elsewhere the orchestral material seems to represent ongoing human activity in the landscape below. Neither of the work’s two main themes is in fact a folk song, but each sounds as if it might be; and neither could have been written without Vaughan Williams’ experience as a collector of English folk music.