The genesis of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending can be traced back to a meeting between the composer and violinist-dedicatee Marie Hall. But, asks Andrew Green, who arranged this auspicious collision?
To mark the 100th anniversary of the first performance of The Lark Ascending (in Vaughan Williams’s violin/piano arrangement of the orchestral original), I recounted evidence in these pages for the work’s origins (See Dec 2020 issue). An episode in January 1914 seems pivotal – an occasion in Italy when Vaughan Williams heard the playing of the brilliant young British violinist Marie Hall (1884-1956). Hall was on a concert tour; Vaughan Williams was over wintering with wife Adeline at the Italian Riviera resort of Ospedaletti. Apparently, Hall played unaccompanied Bach on this occasion (echoed, perhaps, in The Lark Ascending’s violin cadenzas). The ever-popular work was subsequently written for Hall (just before the First World War) and is dedicated to her.
However, is there a wider narrative to uncover beyond this isolated incident? Curiosity is stirred by the longest of several mentions of this Italian encounter in the press, late in 1928. In reference to a London performance by Hall of The Lark Ascending, the Musical Standard journal stated that the work was ‘an inspiration following Mr Vaughan Williams’s appreciation of [Marie Hall’s] delicacy and brilliancy of playing during an evening spent with a friend in Italy.’
Someone in the know had let slip the story. So, who was this ‘friend in Italy’? What was the venue? Does it matter? This article doesn’t trawl through the life-stories of Vaughan Williams and Hall for possible candidates (certainly, no names leap out at you). Rather, the evidence below constitutes the persuasive argument in favour of composer-philanthropist Philip Napier Miles (1865-1935). If Miles was the ‘friend’, his role in The Lark Ascending story does indeed matter. It could even be suggested that without Miles, the now legendary work might never have come into existence.
Miles’s money is the thread running through this storyline. His family’s wealth stretched back across the generations (including, it has to be said, income associated with slavery). His father, Philip William Skynner Miles, was a major player in the development of Avonmouth docks, situated close by the Kings Weston Estate on the edge of Bristol, which Napier Miles inherited. Kings Weston House still stands. Here, as a youngster, Miles attended concerts staged by his paren
