Ralph Vaughan Williams is, perhaps, one of my absolute favorite composers. His music has always spoken to my inner-most being, and I will always remember the first time I ever heard his “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”. It was in my hometown, Milwaukee, WI, and a performance at St. John’s Roman Catholic Cathedral. Not the current building, but the original, Italian Baroque-style interior. It was a dark, “traditional” interior, darker still because it was a night time performance. I was sitting toward the back of the dimly-lit cathedral, and as the first opening notes of Vaughan Williams’ music shimmered and floated down the length of the nave, all the hairs on my arms stood up, and I was totally in love with what I was hearing! It remains one of my earliest -and fondest – classical music experiences. So I was delighted to see this article in BBC Music magazine about Vaughan Williams’ piano, which he used extensively as he composed, and which has been put on public display…
Courtesy of Rebecca Franks and BBC Music magazine…
Vaughan Williams’s piano has gone on display for the first time in public.
The Broadwood upright (pictured above) from 1903 is now on view at Leith Hill Place (pictured below), the British composer’s childhood home. Bequeathed to the National Trust by the composer, Leith Hill opened as a museum in 2013.
Vaughan Williams bought the ‘Honeysuckle’ piano secondhand in 1905 when he was living in Chelsea and took it with him in his 1929 move to Dorking. Although he played both the piano and the organ, he felt most at home playing the violin and the viola. But he used the piano as a composing tool, and this Broadwood was kept in the family after his death.
‘We are thrilled that an instrument so key to Vaughan Williams’s life and work now has its permanent home at Leith Hill Place,’ says Gabrielle Gale, National Trust manager for Leith Hill Place. ‘It is quite an unassuming instrument, said to suit the character of the man and it sat in the composer’s study where he used it daily to try out musical ideas, so it is a “workhorse” rather than a concert piano.’
Picture credit: National Trust/Richard Mogridge