Grace Williams... inspired by the sea
Grace Williams loved the sea. In later life, BBC television cameras captured one of her daily morning walks in Barry on the coast of Glamorgan – she strides purposefully along, looking out over the Bristol Channel to Somerset. She wasn’t heading for the popular sandy beach at Barry Island, so beloved of Gavin & Stacey TV fans, but to the isolated lonely seascape of Cold Knapp, a world away from ice creams and day-trippers and closer to the chilly North Sea in atmosphere. With its forbidding shelves of grey pebbles and the constant keening of gulls, this is where the composer came every day to measure her music and to ponder its proportions against the regular splash of waves. Essentially a loner, Grace Williams had a touch of steel in the soul to match her singing spirit. As a composer, she certainly needed it.
Grace Williams... the early years
Born in Barry in 1906, she grew up in a household where music was part of daily discourse. Her father conducted the celebrated Romilly Boys’ Choir, her mother sang and her brother played the violin. So it was natural that the young Grace quickly became a highly practical musician but, more unusually, she also developed an interest in composing. Barry was host in 1920 to the National Eisteddfod of Wales and, for an ambitious teenager, hearing the London Symphony Orchestra in Stravinsky’s The Firebird and encountering Dr Vaughan Williams as an adjudicator and composer were formative experiences. Winning a scholarship to nearby Cardiff University in 1923, Williams assumed the musical mantle of the supremely talented but ill-fated Morfydd Owen, who had tragically died aged 26 in 1918 – her loss was keenly felt throughout Wales and her example as a groundbreaking female composer provided both precedent and challenge.
Moving to London in 1926 to study at the Royal College of Music was both a dream come true and total transformation for Williams, who found there an inspiring and encouraging teacher in Vaughan Williams and sympathetic fellow students, notably Elizabeth Maconchy who became her closest friend. Another scholarship enabled Williams to spend 1930-31 in Vienna, studying with Egon Wellesz and opening her ears to wider European influences.
Back in London, she took teaching jobs at Camden Girls’ School and Southlands College but also forged her independent career. The newly founded concert series established by her colleagues Anne Macnaghten and Iris Lemare provided welcome support and she became a candid and valued friend to the young Benjamin Britten, while she also developed her close association with a budding BBC in Wales, which commissioned and broadcast her Elegy for string orchestra in 1936 with a London premiere soon to follow.
The war years... and growing success
All seemed set fair for a swelling career, even against the odds of a male-dominated profession, which she confronted with stubborn stoicism. However, at the outbreak of World War II in 1939, London life effectively stopped for Williams who, along with the rest of her school, was evacuated to Grantham in Lincolnshire.
Ironically, the isolation of these years in Lincolnshire may have proved a blessing in disguise. After the vivid Four Illustrations for the Legend of Rhiannon for orchestra in 1939, Williams unexpectedly hit the jackpot in 1940 with the loveable Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes, which soon enjoyed regular wartime broadcasts, performances and a recording by the LSO to follow in 1949. Hard on its heels came more ambitious scores, which included a Sinfonia Concertante for piano, her Symphony No. 1 (conjuring the medieval world of the Welsh revolutionary Owain Glyndwr) and, in 1944, Sea Sketches for strings – Williams dedicated this evocative suite to her parents ‘who had the good sense to set up home on the coast of Glamorganshire’ and the music at times suggests a painful pang of hiraeth (longing) for home.
Grace Williams... an offer from Britten and a return to Wales
With the war over, Williams felt increasingly unsettled in London, so by early 1947 she had taken the bold decision to return to Barry and embark on the lonelier life of a self-supporting independent composer. But within a few years, she received a challenging and prestigious offer: to become the full-time composition assistant to Britten in Aldeburgh. While his trust and confidence in her must have been heartwarming and a welcome boost, it was, nevertheless, another decisive crossroads in life. Realising that accepting would effectively mark the end of her own compositional career, Williams decided to decline, with the position then going to her old Royal College of Music friend Imogen Holst. Having embarked on a new life in Wales, Williams would now remain in Barry until her death in 1977.
The Violin Concerto, the orchestral suite Penillion and the Second Symphony
A work that embodies her new-found sense of mission and determination is the Violin Concerto, which the BBC premiered in 1950 – revealing a voice of lyrical individuality singing eloquently within a beautifully coloured orchestral canvas, it is clearly the work of a composer at the height of her powers. Composed for Granville Jones, the leader of the Delmé String Quartet, it enjoyed early broadcasts but soon disappeared from the repertoire, a fate that befell many of Williams’s works.
Her next palpable hit, written in 1955 for the National Youth Orchestra of Wales, was the orchestral suite Penillion, which makes ingeniously transformational use of a traditional Welsh form of combining words and music to haunting narrative effect. The powerfully poetic impulse behind this music went on to inflect the contours of the Second Symphony, which she composed in 1956 for the Hallé Orchestra to perform at the following year’s Swansea Festival. This symphony seems scarred by the anger of battle against numerous odds and rings out with the trumpet calls which were by now so characteristic of their composer.
Grace Williams... success in Wales with the Trumpet Concerto and Carillons for oboe
The 1960s saw the fulfillment of Grace Williams’s life as composer and public figure in Wales. She was the acknowledged doyenne of Welsh musicians and was held in enormous respect and affection for the rest of her career. Notable orchestral successes during these years were the Trumpet Concerto of 1963, the beautiful Carillons for oboe in 1965 and the four powerful Ballads of 1968. But the decade was also dominated by the two projects she held closest to her heart, and which cost her much pain.
Disappointing single productions of The Parlour and Missa Cambrensis
One was her only opera, the one-act The Parlour, which was commissioned by Welsh National Opera in the late 1950s, completed in 1961 (to her own libretto) and premiered in 1966… but enjoyed just one professional production which was never repeated. The recent commercial release of a BBC broadcast from this first run allows listeners today to experience a mid-20th-century score of musical exuberance and deft theatricality with a strong comic undercurrent. Taking a short story by Guy de Maupassant, En famille, the scenario presents a domestic drama dominated by the old Grandmama who governs her family tyrannically. Its vivid characterisation cries out now for a new production.
The other was the Missa Cambrensis. To mark Williams’s 65th birthday in 1971, the Llandaff Festival commissioned a large-scale choral and orchestral work, to which she responded with what can legitimately be considered the crowning achievement of her career.
In this setting of the full text of the Latin Mass in Ordinary for soloists, choirs and orchestra, the two interpolations which underline its Welshness are striking, strategically punctuating the extended Credo to amplify and celebrate Christ’s birth and teaching: boys’ voices innocently sing a Nativity carol to Welsh words by Saunders Lewis (Wales’s equivalent of TS Eliot); and, before the Crucifixion, the voice of a Welsh minister reads the Beatitudes from Bishop William Morgan’s great Bible of 1588 against a moving string background. The work is both ambitious in design and challenging to perform and, despite some splendid solo singing, the premiere was not a great success and the Missa was never heard again during its composer’s lifetime.
Later works and obscurity
A late harvest of smaller vocal works, notably Fairest of Stars for soprano and orchestra and Ave Maris Stella for the BBC Singers, set the seal on a life of single-minded dedication and solid achievement. Williams’s last project, characteristically, was a revision of the Second Symphony which the BBC recorded to mark her 70th birthday in 1976 – she remarked to Maconchy that she was ‘cutting out the dead wood’ and likened herself to the surgeon who had recently operated on her for cancer. The symphony was heard again within a year, but this time as part of her memorial concert at Cardiff City Hall in 1977.
After her death, much of Williams’s music passed into obscurity and, although she was never forgotten in Wales, her name soon faded in the wider world. The centenary of her birth in 2006 passed virtually unnoticed. A tiny handful of works – the Fantasia, Sea Sketches and Penillion (all, significantly, published during her lifetime) – kept her memory alive, though it was touch and go. In 2016, the Missa Cambrensis was given a second performance by BBC forces, but her masterpiece had to wait until 2025 for a studio recording (by the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales).
Nevertheless, a 2012 book by Rhiannon Mathias, which presents a scholarly reappraisal of her life and work, began to make waves, and as we approach the 120th anniversary of her birth, a full-scale revival is underway. Most of her major works have been newly published, performed, broadcast and recorded, and audiences and critics alike are discovering in her music one of the vital and rewarding voices of the 20th century now singing again.
Grace Williams's musical style
Singing lines The landscape of Williams’s music can generally be measured in terms of long lyrical lines which generate a natural flow of harmonic warmth and contrapuntal fluency. She sang all the parts of her scores as she composed them, whether for voices or instruments, and they often surge like the sea.
Welsh heritage Although not Welsh-speaking, Williams was immersed in the nation’s folksongs and literature. From her earliest orchestral work Hen Walia in 1930 to Castell Caernarfon (above) for the 1969 Investiture there, she instinctively uses the tunes, rhythms and rhetoric of her indigenous heritage to great effect.
The Trumpet Williams attributed her love of the trumpet to childhood memories of hearing bands playing during World War I. Her scores are suffused with its sounds in both lyrical and military guises, and this gives her orchestral voice a very distinctive character. Players in orchestras christened her ‘Williams the Trumpet’.
Self-criticism Always self-critical, Williams did herself a disservice by judging too harshly – when certain works were not instantly successful, she put them aside with the words ‘Not worth performing’. Reappraisal shows her to have been too severe.
