Vaughan Williams work performed for first time

The score of what is now being called A Cambridge Mass was written by Vaughan Williams for his doctoral examination and has never been heard.

It had been in the safe-keeping of Cambridge University Library for more than 100 years, but was only identified as an unperformed example of the famous composer's early work when it was put on display to the public as part of a wider exhibition.

A Cambridge Mass - written for soloists, double chorus and orchestra - will be performed in full for the first time at Fairfield Hall, Croydon, on 3 March 2011.

The concert will be conducted by Alan Tongue, who has been responsible for bringing the early Vaughan Williams work into the limelight.

The original score for the work, which Vaughan Williams wrote when he was 26, was deposited in the Library's Manuscripts Room. It was written by the composer in 1899 for his Doctor of Music examination at Cambridge University and has pencil markings made by the examiners.

The work lasts about 45 minutes, and is for concert hall performance rather than liturgical use.

Tongue, who studied music at Jesus College, Cambridge, and lives in the city, has spent much of his career taking English music around the world. He spotted the Vaughan Williams score in an exhibition of music manuscripts.

"Gazing at a page of the score displayed in a glass case, I knew immediately that here was a significant work. I thought to myself: I want to hear this played and I want to be the one to conduct it. It was a moment of revelation," said Tongue.

"After the exhibition closed, I visited the Manuscripts Room and asked to see the mass. I sat enthralled turning over the pages in the hushed atmosphere and trying to imagine the sounds. Here was clearly a work from a great composer."

With permission from the Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust, Tongue obtained a facsimile of the original score and spent last winter working intensively to transcribe it onto his computer to make a modern performing edition.

Tongue described the process of transcribing the work, sitting in his study often until late at night, as extraordinarily exciting. "It soon became clear that no performance had ever taken place as there were too many uncorrected mistakes," he said. "As my computer played the synthesised sounds, just imagine, I was privileged to be the first person to hear the work."

The score was written to quite a strict brief which required students to write partly in fugue and canon, but plenty of the composer's own personality comes through.

Music experts say that the score shows many touches of the composer's genius, including his characteristic use of juxtaposed chords. "It really is amazingly good," said Michael Kennedy, chairman of the Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust. "And there are many signs of the great composer who was to emerge."

At Trinity College, Cambridge, where Vaughan Williams studied for his undergraduate degree in history and music, at least one of his teachers thought he had no hope of becoming a composer. Undeterred he went back to the Royal College of Music in London, where he had studied earlier, before returning to Cambridge to submit the mass composed for his Doctor of Music examination in October 1899.

Though no enfant terrible, the young composer's disregard for musical conventions meant that his tutors at Cambridge and the Royal College of Music - who included the composer Charles Stanford - were sometimes disapproving of his submitted compositions. Writing about his days as a student he recalled: "… the lesson usually started with a conversation on these lines: "Damnably ugly, my boy, why do you write such things?"

Shortly before composing his examination piece, Vaughan Williams heard Verdi's Requiem for the first time. As he wrote: "In a few minutes the music possessed me. I realised that here was a composer who could do all the things which I with my youthful pedantry thought wrong." Verdi's influence can be heard in the solo parts of A Cambridge Mass which are often declamatory in an operatic way.

Preserved along with the original score at Cambridge University library is a letter from Vaughan Williams verifying that the score was entirely his own unaided work.

The piece would have taken him about 18 months to write. In a letter to his cousin and Cambridge contemporary, Ralph Wedgwood in 1898, he spoke of his search for a quiet country place to concentrate on his work and listed his requirements - including good bicycling roads, good food, good drains, a bathing place and shops where one can mend bicycles.