Vaughan Williams’s genius is now beyond dispute

Classical music plays hell with people’s posthumous reputations, as any admirer of the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams will tell you. In 1972, on the centenary of his birth, ample respects were shown. Not only were there special concerts of his music but the Post Office, which is now more focused on commemorating gay pride, issued a stamp. Since the composer’s death in 1958 he and his works had gone into an eclipse, not least because of the atonalists who controlled the Third Programme and many of our concert halls. These were people who believed the British music-loving public should be fed on a diet of what Kathleen Ferrier called ‘three farts and a raspberry, orchestrated’. The eclipse resumed after 1972. For some years it remained the case that finding performances of his works, especially in London concert halls, was equivalent to a moment of rare ecstasy.

But then, from about the late 1980s, things changed.