Lessons in Harmony by Jonathan Coe review – what can music tell us about national identity?

The unlikely friendship between French and English composers Maurice Ravel and Ralph Vaughan Williams has inspired a tender and generous novel

In 1907, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams confided to the critic Edwin Evans that he was finding his own music “lumpy and stodgy”. His musical education at the Royal College of Music, and indeed classical music in England in general at that time, had tended towards the Teutonic – Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner – and their heavy contrapuntal style dominated his work. To free himself, he told Evans, he planned to spend some months studying under French composer Vincent d’Indy, who taught at the Paris Conservatoire. Evans’s colleague, Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, had other ideas. He proposed that, rather than the traditionalist d’Indy, Vaughan Williams should take lessons with his close friend Maurice Ravel, by then one of the most admired young composers in France.

The two men could hardly have been more different: Ravel petite, fastidious, intensely private, an avid collector of intricate mechanical toys; Vaughan Williams bulky, dishevelled, bluffly nonconformist, and possessed of a fascination for English folk music that Ravel found incomprehensible. But though they got off to a poor start (in their first lesson Ravel set Vaughan Williams to compose a little minuet in the style of Mozart, an exercise the Englishman refused in no uncertain terms to consider), the three months they spent together in Paris marked the start of a friendship that would profoundly touch both men and their music.