At Queen’s Hall in London, on today’s date in 1920, the British conductor Albert Coates led the premiere of the revised version of the Second Symphony, the “London” Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

A longer version of this Symphony had premiered, also at Queen’s Hall, six years earlier, and Vaughan Williams would continue to tinker with this work, on and off, for decades.

“The London Symphony is past mending,” wrote Vaughan Williams in 1951, “though with all its faults I love it still; indeed, it is my favorite.”

Mention the name Vaughan Williams to most music lovers, and you’ll bring to mind English folk tunes or hymns woven into lush works for strings, or musical pictures of English countryside… But it was a city view that inspired his “London Symphony,” described by Vaughan Williams himself as “a good view of the river and a bridge and three great electric-light chimneys and a sunset.”

In fact, you could call the Vaughan Williams Second a “sunset” symphony. Its final pages were inspired by part of an H. G. Wells novel describing a night passage on the Thames to the open sea: “To run down the Thames so is to run one’s hand over the pages in the book of England from end to end... The river passes... London passes… England passes…“