Ralph Vaughan Williams was intimately familiar with the horrors of war. When World War I broke out, the 42-year-old British composer immediately volunteered for service as an ambulance driver on the front lines, where he witnessed unspeakable carnage. He later served as an artillery officer, and the thundering of the big guns would ultimately destroy his hearing. Vaughan Williams’ wartime experiences affected him profoundly, shaping his view of human nature. After the war, he grappled with these experiences through his music, seeking to come to terms with all that he had seen and to rediscover his place in civil society.
During the 1930s, however, the tides of war threatened to overtake the world again. Vaughan Williams watched the rise of fascism with growing alarm. In 1936, the Huddersfield Choral Society commissioned Vaughan Williams to write a large-scale work in honor of its centennial year. The composer threw himself into the project, titled Dona Nobis Pacem—using the opportunity to create a work that would encapsulate his feelings on war, serve as a warning against violence, and implore us to recall the better angels of our nature. Like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Dona Nobis Pacem begins in darkness. It delivers an urgent cry for universal harmony in the face of looming horror, a call to take a stand for peace before it is too late. Today, with war raging in the Middle East and the Ukraine, this message is still – unfortunately – all too relevant.
The work opens with today’s anthem, a setting of the title of the work – “grant us peace.” This prayer becomes the emotional foundation of the entire work, reappearing throughout and linking its various sections together. The work begins with a plaintive soprano solo, with chorus soon taking up the soprano’s prayer, rising into a cry of desperation before sliding into a kind of stunned silence accompanied by drum-like thuds in the organ.