Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending
1921 · Work
A solo violin spirals upward over a hushed orchestra, following George Meredith's poem about a skylark — sketched before the First World War and completed after it, which is why an idyll of the English countryside sounds so much like mourning. A century on it still tops listener polls as Britain's favourite piece of classical music.
On these timelines: Classical Music, Arts and Thoughts, Master, England, United Kingdom (combined)
More from Classical Music
- Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (Choral) (1824)
- Ludwig van Beethoven (1770)
- Handel's Messiah (1742)
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840)
- Giuseppe Verdi (1813)
- Claude Debussy (1862)
- Johannes Brahms (1833)
- Dvorak's New World Symphony (1893)
Around 1921
- Presidency of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1923)
- Spanish flu pandemic (1918)
- Great Depression (1929)
- Irish revolutionary period (1912)
- Russian Revolution (1917)
- World War I (1914)
- Founding of the Soviet Union (1922)
- Pop music: the 1920s (1920)
- Pop music: the 1930s (1930)
- Stalin's rule of the Soviet Union (1924)