Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Sonata for three: How composer Vaughan Williams shared his bedroom with a mistress 40 years his junior... and his wife


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Anonymous said...

Vaughan Williams was, by all accounts, a red-blooded male. He was jokingly called Uncle Ralph by the dozens of female singers who lined up to give him admiring kisses after choral concerts which he had conducted.

There are stories of him lumbering up the stairs to the top floor of the Royal College of
Music, where a beautiful young music student was practising the violin, just to snatch a glance at her through the window.

On one occasion, the beautiful 1920s pianist Harriet Cohen asked him to write her a piano concerto. He agreed to the commission - in return for 10,000 kisses. She accepted the deal and paid off her 'debt' over a series of meetings.

Such flirtations were always half in jest. For as a handsome but unknown 24-year-old, Vaughan Williams had married a cousin of Virginia Woolf, the coolly elegant Adeline Fisher.

Theirs was not a passionate marriage. There were to be no children, and from the start, he had been frustrated by his wife's obsessive devotion to her extensive family. Adeline had been deeply affected when her brother was killed in World War I, and wore mourning black for the rest of her life.

She also developed rheumatoid arthritis which left her increasingly immobile, meaning that the couple were obliged to move out of London to a bungalow in Dorking.

For Vaughan Williams, who had relished life in the capital, it was a frustrating period, reflected in his violently discordant 4th Symphony.

Then, just as he was resigning himself to old age, into his life stepped the flattering and youthful presence of Ursula Wood. As a young drama student at the Old Vic in London, Ursula had been captivated by Vaughan Williams's music after seeing his ballet Job. She wrote to him persistently, and eventually persuaded the brilliant composer to take her out to lunch.

In the forthcoming documentary, she describes for the first time what happened when he came to collect her by taxi for that first meeting in March 1938.


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Second marriage: Williams, 84, and Ursula boarding a Swissair liner at London Airport for a three week Austrian holiday in 1957


He was 65, she was 27. But the age difference was no barrier to the spark of desire. She describes how she had found herself looking at 'a beautiful man. Voice, eyes and hands were somehow familiar, so that I felt that I was meeting again someone I had known before.'

She thought composers were always strapped for cash, so for that first date she suggested going to a Lyons Corner House. But Vaughan Williams, eager to impress, took her to a gourmet restaurant. She recalled how, in the taxi afterwards: 'Ralph clutched me in his arms and gave me a terrific kiss.


I said: "Well, I'm not used to this!" He said: "Well, you will be soon!" '

Ursula found that she could not get the composer out of her thoughts - 'You see, I fell in love absolutely fully, and that was very, very difficult, frightful and complicated. Oh! But it happened.'

So, early next morning, she rang him up and asked him to come and see her again. Ralph dropped everything and arrived with only one half of his face shaved. Their affair began shortly afterwards.

Vaughan Williams was captivated by Ursula's beauty and vitality, and the romantic glow was soon reflected in his music of the time - in particular, his uplifting Serenade To Music.

But to complicate matters further, Ursula was herself married - to Army officer Michael Wood.

Indeed, on one occasion, Ralph and his wife and Ursula and her husband all met up at the opera for what must have been a most uncomfortable evening, particularly as the opera (Vaughan Williams's own Hugh The Drover) was a romantic story of rivals in love.

'My arms are open,' sang the young soprano. 'Hold me fast. You are mine at last!'

Ralph and Ursula's affair flourished during the early years of the war, though it remained frustrated by the presence of their respective spouses. Ursula even confided in one or two friends that she'd had an abortion. (Whether the child was Ralph's or Michael's was never made clear, though she told both of them about it.)

Then one afternoon, while Ursula was entertaining Ralph in her London flat, a telegram arrived with the news that her husband had died on Army duty.

Ralph's response was as swift as it was surprising: he took Ursula home to Dorking, where he and Adeline decreed that they would look after the grieving widow.

If Adeline objected to this intrusion into her marital home, then she was smart enough to play her cards carefully.

Though arthritis had confined her to a wheelchair, she was a shrewd woman, and when Ursula began to accompany Ralph to rehearsals as his 'assistant', she can't have been fooled. She must have suspected that Ursula gave Ralph a physical expression of love which she could not, and perhaps she even gave them her blessing.

At home Ralph dutifully went on nursing his wife, and Adeline knew that she had to avoid forcing him to choose between her and Ursula. So she befriended Ursula (who found her 'alarming'), and would invite her to stay with them in Dorking for weeks on end.


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Rejuvenated: Williams arrives with Ursula for a concert in honour of his 85th birthday at the Royal Festival Hall in 1957


Outwardly, the pretence was maintained. Family and most friends thought Ursula was simply a young acquaintance of the couple who helped care for them both. In reality, it was an unusual but mutually agreeable menage a trois, whose intimacy is reflected in that extraordinary scene of the three of them, side by side in bed, sheltering from Hitler's aerial bombardment.

Ursula was, in her own words, 'fathoms deep in love', but Vaughan Williams told her he would never leave Adeline. So she could only be the 'icing on whatever cake he had, and not a disruptive influence'.

And so life continued until Adeline's death in 1951, when Vaughan Williams was finally free to wed his long-term 'assistant'.

Released from his role as carer, and rejuvenated by marriage to his younger wife - Ralph was 80, Ursula 41 when they wed - he spent five years in frenzied activity, travelling all over Britain and Europe, and visiting America.

With Ursula he held parties, studied the latest women's fashions, supported struggling young composers and read the complete works of Shakespeare out loud. And even in his ninth decade he kept on writing music of vigour, vision and passion.

He died in 1958, aged 86, from a coronary thrombosis, and while Ursula survived him by almost 50 years, she remained guarded about discussing publicly those years when she had lived side by side with Adeline. But shortly before her own death last October at the age of 96, she left instructions that nothing in the story be held back.

Vaughan Williams's friends still alive today speak of him with love and respect as a man of deep and abiding principle. But I believe the the tensions and passion of his private life bring a whole new understanding to his extraordinary talent.

His music, so often restless and unsettled yet somehow at the same time serene, perhaps holds the clue to his personal struggle between honour, loyalty and love.

•John Bridcut's film The Passions Of Vaughan Williams is on BBC4 on Friday at 8pm.

2:32 PM
Vest said...

We had a gay music teacher Mr Phillips at the naval college I attended when I was in my early teens. Mr Phillips was very informative and was most taken by the composer(Englands Greatest) Ralph Vaughan-Williams, particularly his 'Fantasia of Green Sleeves 1935'. Prior to Mr P arriving as a concientious objecter in 1939 our music studies were nil unless you belonged to the Band division(Brass band stuff) to enable them to become military bandsmen.
Vest plays Keyboard, however my arthritic left hand is of little use, even on this W P keyboard, my right thumb is giving me lots, when it extends to my fingers I'll be totally stuffed.
BTW. A great story about R V W.

9:05 PM

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