Vaughan Williams completed the Five Mystical Songs, together with the Sea Symphony, in 1911. He was by then almost forty years of age and had but a few years earlier (1908) studied with Maurice Ravel in Paris. Despite their disparate personalities the two musicians became firm friends and, although Vaughan Williams was later to make characteristically flippant remarks about catching ‘French fever’, in truth he learned much of value from the elegant Frenchman, a fact that he was only too ready to acknowledge. That he chose to study with a French master rather than follow the Teutonic studies favoured in his day shows a remarkable degree of discernment on the part of the evolving composer. He was rewarded with much good Gallic advice: to be ‘complex but not complicated’ apropos contrapuntal textures; he was taught to orchestrate in points of colour rather than in lines; also that formal development should be undertaken only to arrive at something better, never just for its own sake. Ravel was revealingly horrified to hear that Vaughan Williams had no access to a piano in the modest Paris hotel in which he stayed. Only with a piano, the French master explained, could one invent new harmonies. Such advice Vaughan Williams accepted with gratitude and he summed up his three months in Paris as a ‘new and invigorating experience’.