The Lark Ascending

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) is an English composer, well known for his range of compositions – operas, ballets, secular and religious vocal pieces and many orchestral works.   Best known among these works are The Lark Ascending, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Dona Nobis Pacem and Fantasia on Greensleeves.

Starting with the centennial of the first performance of The Lark Ascending on January 25th 1921, (a work originally composed for violin and piano), a number of events have been planned for 2021 and 2022 to celebrate the life and work of Vaughan Williams. Amongst these is a ‘larkathon’ in 2022.

The January 25th 2021 anniversary event was cancelled but resulted in an interview by the organizer, Andrew Green, with me. In searching for art that pertained to the skylark, Andrew Green had found the Lark series of paintings on my website, ink on board works I had prepared to illustrate the piano piece, The Skylark, by Mili Balakirev. Green believed that the paintings were well suited to illustrate Vaughan Williams’ Lark Ascending. (At Green’s suggestion, the interview is available on my website.)

Indeed, in the many poems written about the Lark, a similar sequence is described as in the 7 illustrations I made for the Balakirev skylark – the terrestrial nesting lark, its helicopter rise into the sky, its winging up the spiral stair towards the sun, its ethereal singing high in the sky and, as darkness rises over villages, its measured descent to roost for the night in its hollowed nest in the fields.

In the well-known poem by George Meredith that Vaughan Williams drew upon when composing The Lark Ascending, we can find verses that speak to the human element in the life of the skylark, in particular the effects of his song on farmers, on dancing children and on industrial workers.

In the first painting, the lark ‘disperses endless notes of glee’ over the valley, his ‘golden cup’, showering his happy song over meadows and sheep and kine (cattle) - and a farmer feeding a lamb. In the second painting, we see ‘the starry voice ascending’ and ‘awakening the best in us that is akin to him’. Every face is raised to watch him as, ‘singing till he fills his heaven and ever winging up and up’, he puts on the light and dance of children. The third painting shows the ‘dreams of labor in the town’, of men whose lives are ‘defaced’ amongst ‘grinding wheels on flint’. Even though they do not sing, they are ‘sweet’ for song as the lark ‘soars into silence’ and as, ‘lost in his aerial rings,’ he ‘extends our world’ and makes our home ever more ‘spacious’.