A biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) was one of the most innovative and creative figures in twentieth-century music, whose symphonies stand alongside those of Sibelius, Nielsen, Shostakovich, and Roussel. After his death, shifting priorities in the music world led to a period of critical neglect. What could not have been foreseen is that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, a handful of Vaughan Williams’s scores would attain immense popularity worldwide. Yet the present renown of these pieces has led to misapprehension about the nature of Vaughan Williams’s cultural nationalism and a distorted view of his international cultural and musical significance.

Vaughan Williams and His World traces the composer’s stylistic and aesthetic development in a broadly chronological fashion, reappraising Vaughan Williams’s music composed during and after the Second World War and affirming his status as an artist whose leftist political convictions pervaded his life and music. This volume reclaims Vaughan Williams’s deeply held progressive ethical and democratic convictions while celebrating his achievements as a composer.

So many lives were cut short by the Holocaust, many with no trace to leave behind for future generations to remember. Vendulka tells the story of a single scrap of remembrance—a candid photograph taken in the midst of this unspeakable tragedy—and that artifact’s amazing aftermath.

Famed Czech photographer Jan Lukas snapped an offhand portrait of twelve-year-old Vendulka Vogl in March 1943. A friend of the Vogls, Lukas was saying goodbye to the family, who were soon to leave Prague for a concentration camp. The photograph almost didn’t see the light of day—Lukas knew that if the Nazis found it on him, he could wind up in the camps as well—but the image was eventually developed and came to symbolize the Holocaust and humanize its victims. Seventy years after this famous picture was taken, investigative journalist Ondřej Kundra discovered that, despite all odds, Vendulka Vogl had survived the camps of Terezín, Auschwitz, and Christianstadt, and was in fact still alive and living in the United States. Kundra persuaded her to tell the remarkable story surrounding the photograph: her survival, her later decision to flee the Communist regime for America, and how she later reconnected with Jan Lukas, maintaining a lifelong friendship.
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Vogl’s thrillingly moving story, Kundra’s sharp and engaging writing, and Lukas’s striking photography all combine to make Vendulka an inspiring investigation into the horrors of totalitarianism and the redemptive beauty of friendship.