Vaughan Williams: Three Songs of Travel

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)

Three Songs of Travel (texts: Robert Louis Stevenson)

1. The Vagabond
2. Whither Must I Wander?
3. Bright is the Ring of Words

Vaughan Williams had a long apprenticeship: after leaving school he spent two years at the Royal College of Music, then three at Trinity College Cambridge where he gained degrees in music and history. After that he spent a further year back at the Royal College. As late as 1908 he still felt the need to seek instruction and took lessons with Ravel. The Songs of Travel, written mostly in 1904, are a product of the end of his studies. In these songs as well as the Sea Symphony that he began at the same time, the first signs of a distinctive voice emerge.


It was around this time what two events occurred that profoundly shaped his career. The first was in 1903 when he began to collect folk songs. The second came in 1904 when he was invited to edit the English Hymnal. Both of these influences are clearly to be heard in the songs.


Vaughan Williams intended Songs of Travel to be published as a single cycle. In the event, it was came out in two volumes, neither of which contained “Whither Must I Wander.” Only in the 1960s was the set published complete and in the order he intended, including a posthumously discovered song that acts as an epilogue and is intended only to be performed as part of the complete cycle.


Vaughan Williams orchestrated the three songs originally published as “Volume One” himself, including “The Vagabond” and “Bright is the Ring of Words”. The remainder were orchestrated posthumously by his assistant Roy Douglas. “The Vagabond” establishes the romanticism of the cycle, introducing the archetypal character of the wanderer. This reflects Vaughan Williams’ debt to the example of Schubert’s song cycles, in particular Die Winterreise; indeed, Stevenson, who often set his words to tunes of his own and others’ composition, had originally written the poem “to an air of Schubert.”


“Whither Must I Wander” was the first of the songs to be composed, and appeared in print in 1902 in issue two of the Voice, whose first issue had given a major boost to Vaughan Williams’ career by printing his song “Linden Lea” on the advice of his former teacher Stanford. This is another highly lyrical poem: Stevenson indicates that it was written to fit the folk tune “Wandering Willie”. Vaughan Williams’ setting is unaffected, direct and extraordinarily moving.

“Bright is the RIng of Words” has something of the feel of a hymn about it, which is entirely appropriate for a poem that meditates on the way that what we do lives on after us. Apppropriately, it nods towards the tune “Sine Nomine” that he wrote for the hymn “For All the Saints” in the New English Hymnal: a tune to which he repeatedly returned to throughout his career, and which is a legacy so widely known that it is often forgotten that it was he who created it.