The Passion of Vaughan Williams
May. 25th, 2008 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylI really rather enjoyed The Passion of Vaughan Williams on BBC4 yesterday. It featured various anecdotes from friends about RVW's various muses, his somewhat eccentric first marriage — during the Blitz Ralph and his first wife spent the night in their respective beds, with Ursula Wood, Ralph's mistress and eventual second wife, in the middle holding both their hands — and how his music fitted in with it all.
Well worth watching, if only for the evidence of what a charismatic guy Vaughan Williams obviously was. Even fifty years after his death, his friends were still clearly charmed by him, although there was an interesting male/female split, with all the women describing him as tall and gorgeous while the men compared him to a sack of potatoes! Robert Tear's description was particularly delightful: he looked like a sofa that was leaking its stuffing and when, after a performance, Tear had had to go up and introduce himself to the great man, he'd felt like he was meeting Beethoven...
Well worth watching, if only for the evidence of what a charismatic guy Vaughan Williams obviously was. Even fifty years after his death, his friends were still clearly charmed by him, although there was an interesting male/female split, with all the women describing him as tall and gorgeous while the men compared him to a sack of potatoes! Robert Tear's description was particularly delightful: he looked like a sofa that was leaking its stuffing and when, after a performance, Tear had had to go up and introduce himself to the great man, he'd felt like he was meeting Beethoven...
