This afternoon on Radio 4:

Vaughan Williams: Late Love, Late Life

13:30-14:00 (Radio 4 FM)

Repeated: Saturday 19 July 2008 15:30-16:00 (Radio 4 FM)

Julian Lloyd Webber examines the impact of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams's affair with Ursula Wood on his life and music. The affair began in March 1938, when he was 66 and Ursula 25, and lasted until 1951, when they were able to marry following the death of his wife Adeline.

Well, Mr Grew, there is an interesting theory doing the rounds at the moment suggesting that the anger and bitterness so apparent in that Symphony in F minor may have drawn its emotional impetus not so much from the contemporary political atmosphere, but rather more from the composer's pain and frustration as Adeline became increasingly disabled by the debilitating disease which rendered her physically helpless, thus altering their relationship radically.

After 1938, his output certainly didn't decrease: more than half of the symphonic cycle appeared: his work on The Pilgrim's Progress, which had been a project cursed with several false starts, finally found fruition in the 'Morality'. A tranche of film scores, many of the choral works and the majority of his concerti also date from this final period.

In passing, one must ask why the date 1908 might have been chosen (other than for your habitual reason) bearing in mind that with the exception of the song Linden Lea, written circa 1900, the first major group of his works to achieve success (including the incidental music to The Wasps, The Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, On Wenlock Edge and the Sea Symphony) all appeared just after your annus terribilis?

Well we were thinking principally of "Toward the Unknown Region," but certainly also "On Wenlock Edge," the "Songs of Travel," the First String Quartet, and even the Phantasy Quintet of 1912! (Perhaps it was begun earlier and shelved.)

Of course in this we are at somewhat at odds with Sydney Grew the Elder, who asserted that "the pure essence of Dr. Williams is not in his early orchestral works" and that it was only with the Pastoral Symphony of 1922 that "the composer seems to arrive at the kingdom of himself and of his art." He goes on to describe that work as "music that seems to meditate as Nature seems to meditate, observing the thing done while in the act of doing it. . . . It is 'realism' of the metaphysical kind, the pure mysticism of the spirit, a 'pulse in the eternal mind, no less.'"

We may suppose then that Ursula understood all that too at the age of twenty-five may not we!

It was a nice programme. Not extremely exciting, but it was nice.