The work
After the success of his at the 1910 Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester, Vaughan Williams was asked to write a work for the following year’s festival in Worcester Cathedral. He returned to a song cycle he’d been working on sporadically since 1906, with verses taken from 17th-century Anglican priest George Herbert’s collection of sacred poems, . He had encountered Herbert’s poetry when he was musical editor of from 1904-6 and was attracted to the visionary quality of his religious verse – both poet and composer shared a belief in music as‘a divine voice’. Though the son of an Anglican vicar, Vaughan Williams was a self-declared atheist who mellowed into what his second wife Ursula described as a ‘cheerful agnosticism’.
