Chapter Eight

Maconchy

It is 1923 and Prokofiev is being premiered in Paris; Bartók in Berlin; Janáček and Martinů in Prague; and Bessie Smith is making her first recordings in New York. Meanwhile, in London, audiences enjoy a diet of Elgar, Holst and Vaughan Williams or, for those with a taste for new music, not to mention an entrée into the Bloomsbury set, perhaps a performance of William Walton’s controversial Façade, with Edith Sitwell reciting her own poetry through a megaphone, and Walton, her young protégé, conducting the band.

In the same year, a shy sixteen-year-old girl, newly arrived from Dublin, begins her studies at the Royal College of Music (RCM), South Kensington. Only nine months earlier, her father had died of tuberculosis, and now her mother has brought the girl, with her two sisters, to London. The girl will later call her mother ‘very brave’ in her willingness to pull herself up and make the move to England but, in fact, Violet had done the same thing some six years earlier, moving in the other direction, from Hertfordshire to Ireland, in the desperate hope that the sea breezes of Howth, in Dublin Bay, would keep her husband alive. The journey across the Irish Sea was at least a familiar one for the bereaved girl, because, although born and raised in Hertfordshire, long, happy childhood summers had been spent roaming the Santry Court estate near Dublin, where Violet’s father was agent.

Ambitious fathers and talented mothers; prodigy brothers and trailblazing sisters; courts, cities or nations in need of a soundtrack, even if, and sometimes because, it is composed by a woman – these have been the ingredients for success for composers from Francesca Caccini to Lili Boulanger. And then there is Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Maconchy, with her solicitor father and home-maker mother, growing up in the Home Counties of England and the suburbs of Dublin with no piano-teacher father to provide lessons, no sibling composer with whom to collaborate, no concert halls, no soirees or salons, just an urgent inner compulsion and a lifelong commitment to expressing herself in music.

That commitment would be tested by war, by life-threatening illness, and by the more everyday but nevertheless powerful demands of motherhood. That her music is less well-known and less performed than that of her close contemporary Benjamin Britten does not mean Maconchy failed those tests, or that her commitment faltered. Her passionate determination to pursue her art, the ‘rigid self-discipline’ she argued was necessary for any composer, was never in doubt. In the event, vast reservoirs of that ‘rigid self-discipline’ were needed by a woman who set herself the highest of musical standards, and faced a series of challenges that would have led many to abandon the often thankless career of composer. Over the years, there would be what Maconchy called ‘moments of silence’, but through each ‘blank patch’ the ‘underlying emotion’ remained and demanded expression in music, sometimes even if there was no one to hear.

 

It was in Hertfordshire that Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Maconchy’s parents realized their six-year-old daughter had a special talent, as she picked out the sound of church bells on the family’s little-played piano. By the time of the move to Howth, the nature of that talent was becoming clearer. The adolescent Betty was sent to study not only with the best piano teacher in Dublin, one Mrs Boxhill, but for lessons in harmony and counterpoint with a Dr John Larchet.

Betty Maconchy soon outpaced Mrs Boxhill and Dr Larchet. Was it her teachers who recommended the move to London, or was it her newly widowed mother who saw a future for Betty, but only away from Dublin? In Ireland, Betty had never seen a string quartet, only once heard an orchestra perform. In London, she could go to music college, hear as much music as she could wish. But it may not have been only the prospect of a musical education for Betty that made London attractive. The family had only arrived in Howth a year after the Easter Rising of 1916. The 1919–21 armed struggle for Irish independence was followed by a brutal civil war.

Whether pushed from Ireland, or pulled to England, the shy Irish girl with her provincial music education and little or no formal schooling, just a series of good and not-so-good governesses, gained a place at the RCM. Her first year in London was a challenging one, but, once she settled in, Elizabeth Maconchy took the place by storm. The rest should be history. That it is not is one of the driving forces behind this book.

The RCM was a relatively new institution, founded as recently as 1894. By the time of Maconchy’s arrival in 1923, it had already improved musical standards in Britain, and was helping to counter the nation’s ‘unenviable image (both at home and abroad) as das Land ohne Musik’ (the land without music). For many, however, further steps needed to be taken if British or, more specifically, English music were to emerge as the triumphant successor to the still-dominant German tradition (Brahms, Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and the rest) or if London were to knock Paris off its pedestal as the city of culture. In the words of one commentator, it was exasperating beyond anything that ‘a town like Paris with one tenth of the musical activity of London still looks upon itself as the superior musical centre by right of tradition’.

For some, a nationalist turn to English folk song signalled the way forward. Not everyone agreed. The young composer Elisabeth Lutyens, for example, would come actively to dislike what she saw as the fabrication of a reactionary English folk tradition. For her, the Continent remained the only place where composers could embrace their own nationality and still be modern: ‘Stravinsky was so Russian, Bartók so Hungarian, Hindemith so German’, whilst England seemed to be ‘rustically resuscitating songs no one had heard of’. But, as Lutyens recognized ruefully, ‘there was no getting away from the fact that I wasn’t Russian, Hungarian or German. I was English.’

The English tradition in music had, it was believed, reached its high point during the Elizabethan or Restoration periods, depending on whether you were a champion of Byrd or Purcell. The problem was that these men had come ‘too early . . . to take much place in the general repertoire’, as the composer Constant Lambert complained in 1935:

 

We still devote about 99 percent of our programmes to the 19th and 18th centuries (a ludicrous proportion), and the period in which English music really shines still remains in practical obscurity, in spite of all the work of scholars and editors. Purcell has his followers in Germany, and I once met a Frenchman who had heard of Byrd. But that is about as far as knowledge of the English classics goes.

 

Which direction would the sixteen-year-old Irish/English Elizabeth Maconchy, arriving with the sketchiest of musical educations and a vast amount of talent, take? At first sight, her enrolment as a student of Ralph Vaughan Williams in the winter of 1925 suggests that she would become one of the ‘rustic resuscitators’ so despised by Lutyens. After all, Vaughan Williams had been collecting English folk songs since 1902, was the composer of a commanding Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis, and had only recently revised his ever-popular, and profoundly pastoral, romance for violin and orchestra, The Lark Ascending. Maconchy certainly valued Vaughan Williams’s teaching: ‘Everything suddenly opened out to me’; it was ‘a whole new world when I became a pupil of his’; it was ‘like turning on a light’. Did that mean she would follow his musical lead? Absolutely not. To Vaughan Williams’s credit, he not only let his student go her own way, he insisted that she do so, because all of his students were expected to think for themselves, ‘in their own musical language’, however different that language might be to his own. Always independent, Maconchy wanted to, and needed to, find her own path. Unmoved by the German tradition, whether Wagner or Schoenberg, uninterested in English folk song, hardly glancing at Byrd and Tallis, Maconchy instead discovered the music of Bartók. (She and her friends rushed to hear the composer play in London on 4 March 1929. BBC listeners would hear the first half of the concert but it was only the live audience who heard Bartók’s Piano Sonata, kept for the second half because deemed too difficult for radio listeners.) What appealed to Maconchy was not so much the Hungarian’s nationalist fascination with the authentic gypsy music of his own country and his unwillingness to bowdlerize it in the manner of earlier composers such as Brahms and Liszt, but Bartók’s ability as a composer to work transformations upon a few basic themes, together with his trademark use of strong motor rhythms.

The world opened up by Bartók and Vaughan Williams was further expanded by the friends Maconchy made at the RCM. Vaughan Williams believed that a composer learned far more from his or her fellow students than from tutors or the ‘academy’. His belief would be borne out by Maconchy’s experience. A group of aspiring composers, which included Imogen Holst and Grace Williams, would meet each week to debate and criticize each other’s work. Williams became one of Elizabeth Maconchy’s closest and most significant friends, their college years providing the foundation for what Maconchy later called ‘the life-long habit between Grace and me of mutual consultation and criticism’. No matter that Grace was a zealous Wagnerite. As with the man these young women called ‘Uncle Ralph’, it was the ‘mutual consultation and criticism’ that mattered, rather than the sharing of a musical language.

Above all, however, for any young composer, the RCM provided a vital opportunity to have one’s music played, for, as Grace Williams put it, remembering her first few months in South Kensington, the ‘atmosphere of the place really bowled me over. Here at last was what I had been aching for – real live musical activity.’ Maconchy was soon at the forefront of that ‘real live musical activity’ and, by 1926, not one, but two of her compositions had been chosen for performance by the prestigious Patron’s Fund, meaning that for the first time the still only nineteen-year-old composer heard professional musicians perform her music.

That same year, Vaughan Williams was attempting to find a way for his talented student to further her education outside England, and sent off a letter of enquiry:

 

Miss Maconchy is just 19 – plays the piano quite well and has had a thorough grounding at the hands of Kitson and Charles Wood [two of the composition tutors at the RCM]. She has – as I say – in my opinion decided inventive powers but is of course at present like all young people going through a new phase every month. At present she has been badly bitten by Bartok [sic] and is of course anxious to study with him, but I rather doubt the wisdom of this. I feel possibly that Respighi or Casella might be good for her – if they ever take pupils. On the other hand, neither Rome nor Buda-Pesth [sic] would I imagine be good from the point of view of general musical atmosphere and the hearing of plenty of good music etc. Also of course we must consider a place where we could find a nice family for her to live with and so on. Are Leipzig or Dresden any good nowadays? Prague has been suggested to me – what do you think of that? or I thought of sending her to Ravel but I doubt if he would take any pupils now. I should be most grateful for your advice.

 

Putting aside for a moment the perceived need for a ‘nice family’ for the nineteen-year-old girl, and the quiet suffocation of her desire to study with her favourite composer, Vaughan Williams was obviously keen for Maconchy to spread her wings, whether in Leipzig, Prague or Paris. Nothing came of the letter, however. Perhaps because of the young composer’s youth and shyness, perhaps because of the family’s lack of money to fund such travels, Maconchy remained in South Kensington, living with her mother and sisters at 188c Gloucester Terrace, Hyde Park, W2.

All was going well in London, however. Maconchy was awarded the Blumenthal Scholarship of 1927, which paid for her tuition fees and left about £90 to live on (about £5,500 in today’s money), and then the following year, the head of the college, Hugh Allen, recommended the twenty-one-year-old composer’s Concertino for Piano and Orchestra for performance by the BBC. The British Broadcasting Corporation, only founded some four years earlier, appreciated the work, describing it as quite ‘jolly’, but also noted that it had more in common with the ‘strong water’ of the Continent rather than ‘the milk’ of English tradition. The concertino was, however, never broadcast. It was not the BBC, but Maconchy,  who withdrew the piece, an early sign of the composer’s perfectionism, even at the expense of having her music performed and heard. The episode revealed two clearly visable fault-lines that would run through Maconchy’s career: the tendency of others to be concerned themselves with her Englishness or lack of it, and the tendency of the composer herself towards the most stringent self-criticism. As her RCM report from midsummer 1927 says: ‘Most satisfactory results. Still rather inclined to dwell on difficulties that she alone creates!’

By the autumn of 1928, Maconchy was entering her sixth year at the college. She and her female colleagues might have spoken in later years of the lack of ‘prejudice’ at the RCM, but the events of this year suggest that sexism was alive and well in the corridors of South Kensington. Encouraged by Vaughan Williams, Maconchy had put herself forward for the most prestigious of college prizes, the Mendelssohn Scholarship. Later, she remembered, wryly, that the judges were mostly ‘aged about ninety’, but things appeared to have gone well. A day after the competition, she was congratulated by the head of the college, Hugh Allen, on her success. Maconchy told him that he was wrong, the scholarship had gone to someone else, which bemused Allen. They must have changed their minds once he had left the room. But he soon recovered. No matter: ‘if we’d given it to you, you’d have only got married and never written another note!’

Denied the Mendelssohn, Maconchy was, in a gesture of conciliation if not guilt, awarded the Octavia Scholarship, set up to enable recipients to benefit from travelling and studying abroad. In the spring of 1930, she at last packed her bags. Vaughan Williams was sorry to see her go, but gave his student high praise, and envisioned a glorious future for the young composer: ‘Very sorry to lose her – but I can teach her no more – she will work for her own salvation & will go far.’

Maconchy’s primary destination was Prague. The city was everything she had hoped it would be, and more. She found it to be ‘a small . . . independent sort of place’ where everybody ‘was very much working on their own’. It was a perfect match for the independent composer, who discovered the music of Janáček (as great an influence as Bartók according to some commentators) and had lessons with the composer/conductor Karel Boleslav Jirák and the pianist/composer Erwin Schulhoff. Prague, unlike its neighbour and erstwhile imperial capital Vienna, described by Vaughan Williams as the best city for the music of the past, was hungry for new music. Maconchy gave it to them. The time had not yet come when a Czech Jewish Communist such as Schulhoff would fear for his life. In 1930, he was the guiding force behind, and the soloist in, the premier of Maconchy’s Piano Concerto (a revised version of the withdrawn concertino) which took place on 19 March 1930 at the Smetana Hall in Prague. It was a very fine way to celebrate the composer’s twenty-third birthday.

Wagner-loving Grace Williams, working happily in Vienna (‘almost next door’ as she wrote to a friend) came over to hear the performance. She reports:

 

Arrived in time for the second rehearsal. Betty was quite happy after the first rehearsal, and at the end of the second things were going terribly well . . . but as the concert drew near we developed the usual fear that something would go wrong in the middle and spoil it . . . But the concert performance was even better than the rehearsal.

 

Her friend’s Piano Concerto was a triumphant European debut, a fact even Maconchy herself appreciated, asking someone to make a translation of one of the glowing Czech reviews. The note survives in scribbled pencil in the archives of St Hilda’s College, Oxford:

The piano concerto by the young Irish composer, E.V. Maconchy, was the best. In spite of the natural impulses due to her youth, it shows a remarkable creative genius both in the animation and sincerity of the first and third movements and in the individual temper and fine building up of the slow movement.

 

Already in 1930, Maconchy had established a distinct musical voice, characterized by driving rhythms and, most notably, the way in which she derived the entire harmonic and melodic material from the initial three notes. Both of these qualities were reminiscent of, not merely imitative of, Bartók.

Fired up by her success in Prague, Elizabeth Maconchy (as she told it later, in her typically deadpan way) did ‘the only thing then open to a young composer – sent a score to Sir Henry Wood’. Sir Henry was, of course, the conductor behind the successful Promenade Concerts held in the Queen’s Hall: the score was Maconchy’s The Land, her compelling orchestral response to, rather than setting of, Vita Sackville-West’s poetry. The work is one of the composer’s most accessible, its long weaving contrapuntal lines magically opening up time and space, according to one critic. It also demonstrates that Vaughan Williams had not entirely failed to leave his mark upon his student.

Not only did Wood accept The Land, but it proved to be one of the sensations of the entire 1930 Prom season, with the work making headlines (‘Girl Composer Triumphs’), and Maconchy even compared to Beethoven for her ‘expression of emotion’. Maconchy’s sex was, of course, a consideration, but she was seen to transcend or, if one is being generous, redefine what it was to be ‘feminine’: ‘Modern it is, of course, in the plain meaning of that word; the method direct, terse, economical; the harmony at times acid and biting – never luxurious or sentimental or (in the pre-war sense) feminine.’

With premiers in Prague and at the Proms, could life get any better for the young composer? It seems it could. One William LeFanu had carefully engineered a meeting with Elizabeth Maconchy at a party a couple of years earlier. By 1929, he had gained the post of Librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons that would give him the financial and professional security to take a wife. On 25 August 1930 The Times noted the marriage, two days earlier, of ‘Mr. W.R. Le Fanu [sic] and Miss E.V. Maconchy’ (Billy and Betty to their friends and family) at the Santry Parish Church, Co. Dublin. The bride, The Times informs its readers, wore ‘an ankle-length gown of flowered cream silk poplin, and a veil of old Honiton lace, which was held in place by a wreath of orange-blossom’. The bridesmaids, including Betty’s sister Sheila, wore ‘ankle-length gowns of pale yellow chiffon, with amber-coloured wreaths in their hair, and carried bouquets of amber-coloured chrysanthemums’. The Times does not record how the gentlemen were dressed, but does inform its readers that the honeymoon ‘is being spent in Connemara’.

Connemara had to wait until September, however, because Maconchy needed to be back in London a few days after her marriage for the rehearsals of The Land with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Queen’s Hall. The newlyweds spent a couple of days at Hunter’s Hotel in County Wicklow, then travelled straight on to London, where William LeFanu had already prepared the flat in which they were to live. It was a sign of the man. No musician, instead a ‘quietly distinguished’ leader in the world of medical librarians, William was wholeheartedly supportive of his composer wife. At the Queen’s Hall rehearsal, none other than Gustav Holst approached LeFanu, put his hand on his shoulder (he had to reach up, remembered William), and said: ‘Keep her at it.’ Elizabeth Maconchy’s husband had a rather different, not to say less patriarchal view, both of his own role in the matter, and his wife’s agency, saying, years later, remembering the moment: ‘She’s kept at it of her own accord, I think.’

The relationship between Elizabeth Maconchy and William LeFanu would prove to be a very different one to that of Clara and Robert Schumann, so often seen as the romantic template for a musical woman. Robert may have had a beautiful vision of a collaborative professional relationship that would continue through an erotically charged, loving marriage, but that vision could not, and did not, survive the grim reality of his wife’s relentless childbearing, his own mental illness, her ability to earn more money than he did, the practical challenge of having two composers (and two pianos) in one house, not to mention the fact that Clara walked more quickly than he did. Clara, for her part, did not even need to be told to stop composing, as Alma Mahler famously would be by her husband Gustav, who informed her that the ‘role of composer, the worker’s role, falls to me, yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner’. Frau Schumann simply silenced herself.

There was to be no silencing of Maconchy, at least not by marriage. When, in future years, she wryly quoted Hugh Allen’s words regarding her failure to win the Mendelssohn scholarship (‘if we’d given it to you, you’d have only got married and never written another note!’) she provided her own gentle, pointed, riposte: ‘I did get married but I did continue to write many notes.’

Marriage did not stop Maconchy, but she was coming of age as a composer in what were extremely hard times. By the end of 1930, there were 2.5 million unemployed in Britain. To earn one’s living as a composer is hard at the best of times. After the crash of 1929 it was almost impossible. No wonder that when, shortly before taking up his place at the RCM in July 1930, the young Benjamin Britten was asked about his career choice and replied that he wanted to be a composer, the response was ‘Yes, but what else?’ The musical establishment hardly made it easy for the new generation of British composers coming through, with Vaughan Williams expressing his exasperation at the fact that, despite the existence of four orchestral series in London, young British composers did not have ‘the right of entry even for ten minutes, into a single one’. Meanwhile, the BBC’s musical programming was spearheaded by Edward Clark, a former pupil of, and avid enthusiast for, Schoenberg, which might explain why the first two seasons of contemporary music concerts did not contain a single work by a British composer.

The lack of a career infrastructure and performance opportunities for all young composers was exacerbated for women by good old-fashioned sexism in the classical music industry. Even after the triumphs of 1930, Maconchy recalled that no one ‘suggested a commission, or a grant, or even a chatty interview on the radio, let alone another performance. The publishers weren’t interested. They were all men, of course, and tended to think of women composers being capable of only the odd song or two.’ They would have ‘liked some pretty little thing – I don’t mean a pretty little person – not steady, serious music’. Maconchy singled out Lesley Boosey, of Boosey and Hawkes, as particularly hostile. One of Boosey’s readers ‘was frightfully keen to publish some songs and a string quartet’ of hers, but ‘all Boosey would say was that he couldn’t take anything except little songs from a woman’. Later, using her typical understatement that masks but does not completely hide her bitterness, she would say ‘that really was a very difficult thing to get over’.

Faced with the intransigence of the music industry, a remarkable group of women got together in 1931 and changed the face of music in London, at least for a few years. One was Iris Lemare, that rare thing: a female conductor. The other two were the violinist Anne Macnaghten and the composer Elisabeth Lutyens. Together they launched a series of concerts to showcase new music by young composers, alongside works from eras under-represented in the concert halls of London at the time. The Macnaghten-Lemare Concerts were to prove a lifeline for Elizabeth Maconchy through the 1930s.

The women’s venue was the small, cheap Ballet Club theatre in Notting Hill, once a Ragged School, but bought in 1927 by Marie Rambert’s husband as performing and rehearsal space. Their methods were collaborative and informal, with no committee, no hierarchy, just the drive to create a platform for their own work, whether as performer, conductor or composer: ‘honestly’, remembered one of the organizers, ‘it wasn’t altruistic, it suited each other’s ends’. Anne Macnaghten, however, who shouldered much of the organizational responsibility, was eloquent about the driving vision, her words relevant to the world of music, past, present and future. As she said, ‘the great thing is to have lots of music going on all the time, lots of things being performed’. Committees always sought:

 

To set themselves up as judges, arbitrators, as to what is good and what is bad. The thing is to play music, and it will settle itself sooner or later. As long as there’s plenty of opportunity to get new works performed, no harm will be done; what is awful is if somebody is really doing something very good but nobody knows about it.

 

As the Musical Times reported: ‘there is nothing quite like these concerts in London. The concert givers get to grips with the real thing in a most delightful, unconventional way, and after an evening spent with them one feels that music is gloriously alive.’

Some of the critics, however, found it hard to see past the phenomenon of women composing, performing and conducting. Although the organizers insisted that the concerts were not a ‘deliberate feminist gesture’ and that they ‘just happened’, they were perceived by others as a ‘decidedly feminist’ business, and, in the case of Maconchy, once again her music was seen to challenge gender categorizations with her ‘almost aggressive virility’ pointedly contrasted with the ‘gentle, melancholy and reflective little songs’ produced by the single male composer on one particular programme. Not all were happy at this redefinition in the art of the possible for women, complaining that ‘No lipstick, silk stocking or saucily tilted hat adorns the music.’ Instead, ‘all is grim, intense, and cerebral’. The ‘ladies’ involved were ‘formidably clever, or tried to be’.

To be labelled as ‘cerebral’ was, of course, far from being a compliment, at least for a woman. It suggested not only that Maconchy had far more in common with the intellectual continental composers than her own British, let alone English, tradition, but, worse even, that she was assuming a masculine intellectuality that she could not possibly possess. It seems that Maddalena Casulana’s message from over 350 years earlier was still not getting through. Reviewers believed that women did not, and could not, possess in equal measure the ‘high intellectual gifts’ of men. The irony for Maconchy was that her ‘cerebral’ qualities, which are certainly present in her music, were, according to her advocates and to the composer herself, always harnessed to those traditionally ‘feminine’ traits of feeling and emotion. Her fellow composer and friend, Richard Rodney Bennett, for example, described Maconchy as ‘intellectually passionate, passionately intellectual’, whilst Maconchy claimed that ‘for me, the best music is an impassioned argument. I can find no satisfaction in the coldly reasoned discourse.’ All the ‘rigid self-discipline’ she demanded from a composer ‘must always be directed to the fullest expression of the underlying emotion and never to its exclusion’.

Perhaps it was the combination of these qualities that prompted the hard-working Anne Macnaghten to say that when she met Maconchy she thought: ‘here is a composer who makes it all worthwhile’. Maconchy would be the most performed composer in the Macnaghten-Lemare series, with eleven works to Benjamin Britten’s eight, but the series was not merely a platform for the composer but an impetus for her move into the genre that she would make her own, the string quartet.* Maconchy’s First Quartet of 1933, ‘strong young music of great energy’, with its characteristic ‘driving Bartókian rhythms’ was inspired by Macnaghten’s request for new music for her own all-woman quartet. Put simply, in those early years of the 1930s, at the Ballet Club, Notting Hill, Maconchy’s music was indeed ‘gloriously alive’.

The composer herself was, however, struggling. She faced a threat far greater than that posed by sexism, whether from the benign Hugh Allen or the prejudiced Lesley Boosey. In 1932, at the age of just twenty-five, Betty Maconchy contracted tuberculosis, the disease that had killed her father ten years earlier, and that she was told would now kill her. Her one chance for survival would be to move to Switzerland. Maconchy’s response? She wanted to ‘die here’.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. Billy and Betty moved to the village of Seal Chart, in Kent, away from the foul air of London. There they resolutely, some would say naively, set up home in a three-sided wooden hut (complete with piano), always open to the elements, although in a concession to the English climate the hut was mounted on a turntable so that it could be turned away from the prevailing wind, rain, sleet or snow. William LeFanu nursed his wife assiduously through a series of debilitating episodes. He wrote to Grace Williams on 23 August 1932: ‘Betty was going to write to you herself but a week ago she had another attack of haemorrhage and she has been flat on her back for a week.’ What he doesn’t say is that night after night he had to place ice on Betty’s chest to stop the haemorrhaging.

Whether it was the three-sided hut, the ice, the care of her husband, or the composer’s sheer willpower, Betty Maconchy did not die. Three years of severe illness left her weakened, with one lung completely ravaged. And yet, even under these most testing of conditions, Maconchy continued to compose and to be performed. She was sustained by the loyalty and practical help of those friends who remained in London, the city itself now denied to her. Elisabeth Lutyens remembered, fondly, that in putting on the Macnaghten-Lemare concerts ‘we were a family, all helping in comradeship with the necessary part-copying, arranging and playing as and when we could’. This ‘comradeship’ would come to Maconchy’s aid in the autumn of 1933, when she was suffering from a renewed and severe flare-up of TB and found herself, unsurprisingly, unable to copy out the parts for a performance of her two motets for double chorus scheduled for 11 December. The composer turned to a copyist, which proved to be a mistake, as becomes clear in her exasperated letter to Grace Williams: ‘The FOOL who was to have done the second choir parts has been completely useless – said when he saw the thing last Monday that he’d be able to do them quite easily – then took four days to do ONE and left a note to say he couldn’t do any more!!!’ Into the breach stepped Grace, the composer Dorothy Gow (another RCM friend) and the young Benjamin Britten, who together copied out the parts themselves between them.

Four years after the onset of TB, Maconchy returned again to quartet writing. Her Second Quartet, written in 1936, was, unsurprisingly given the experiences of the previous years, a ‘more inward, more searching’ work, according to the composer herself; music that is ‘haunting, at times haunted’, according to one critic. A photograph of Maconchy from the year before, taken in Prague shows the composer looking away from the camera, thoughtful, searching, preoccupied but not unhappy. All these qualities are present in her quartet, premiered at a Macnaghten-Lemare concert on 1 February 1937, then performed in Paris later in the year. The musicologist, Rhiannon Mathias, explains the significance of the work’s form and, in particular, demonstrates that the intense lento opening movement was the composer’s ‘first attempt at creating a monothematic movement’:

 

[The movement’s] powerful and compelling argument grows from the quiet viola melody heard in the opening bars. Characteristically, this expressive melody is built from close intervals of tones and semitones, and these intervals are used, as in the music of Bartók, as essential building blocks for the movement. Although the movement can be said to be based around the tonal centre of G, the music is contrapuntal in concept and as such does not follow a formal structure based on key, a feature underlined by the absence of key signatures.

 

Mathias argues that while the following three movements are ‘closely related, each having their thematic origin in the first movement, the only tangible sense of tonal resolution comes in the finale; even then, the music is “C-centred” rather than being definitively in the key of either C major or C minor’. What is more, although the Second Quartet has ‘a recognizably pastoral quality’, it is of a ‘dark and disturbed kind, far removed from the Englishness of Butterworth or even Vaughan Williams’. What had been evident in the 1920s, still held true in the 1930s. Maconchy would find her own distinct path, despite or because of the teaching she had received from ‘Uncle Ralph’.

The composer would, over the course of her career, return again and again to the quartet. Her thirteen works in the genre were, according to Maconchy, her ‘best and most deeply-felt works’, and, from the start, they were something she ‘enjoyed doing tremendously’, the composing never losing ‘the sense of excitement and exploration that goes with writing a string quartet’. In their creation, and their content, the quartets exemplify the combination of passion and intellect that is the hallmark of both the woman and her work.

Maconchy loved the quartet form because it represented a debate, a dialectic between four balanced, individual, impassioned voices. Here, and throughout her music, counterpoint is absolutely vital to the composer. For her, it meant more than making ‘melodic lines coalesce vertically to create a new harmonic interest’. It meant creating what she called a ‘counterpoint of rhythm’. By ‘the free movement of several rhythms simultaneously we can hope for more rhythmic development than by any amount of experiment’ with a single rhythm. Always, however, the counterpoint had a purpose. She understood a string quartet as ‘four characters engaged in statement and comment, passionate argument, digression, restatement, perhaps final agreement – the solution of the problem’. There are echoes here of Maconchy’s working relationship with the musicians who played her music, a relationship that entailed rehearsals becoming an intense dialogue between the composer and performer, a ‘musical intimacy’, all in the pursuit of the perfect realization of her score.

Passion, interplay, intimacy: but at the same time Maconchy was ‘selfish and solitary’ (her own words), unable to ‘imagine working with others’. This was perhaps the secret of her professional survival. If there was a composer who could still maintain her ‘rigid self-discipline’ when forcibly isolated from the musical world whilst she battled with TB, then it was Elizabeth Maconchy. And if there was a composer who could continue a steady rise to musical prominence under these conditions, it was Elizabeth Maconchy.

Through the 1930s, Maconchy wrote three quartets (and began her fourth); was broadcast by the BBC; won prizes; and was widely performed at home and abroad. Krakow, Budapest, Brussels, Paris, Warsaw, Düsseldorf and Lausanne, to name but some of the cities where she was performed, all heard her music. Maconchy found time to support the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and to be active in the Left Book Club, established in 1936 – both further indications, if they were needed, of her republican, socialist politics. She even gained a publisher. Rhiannon Mathias records that:

 

[A] carefully worded paragraph in the ‘Notes and News’ section of The Musical Times (May 1939) informed readers that Maconchy had decided ‘to work in close collaboration with a publisher’, and had ‘appointed Mr. Max Hinrischen [founder of Hinrischen Edition Ltd.] as her business representative.’ Fittingly, one of the first of her pieces to be issued in print by Hinrischen Edition was her formidably bullish Third String Quartet (1938).

 

Grace Williams was unstinting in her praise for this particular work, which consists of one movement, and lasts about ten minutes. The quartet was the:

 

Real stuff of music, & making a lovely sound, it is your most mature work (Dorrie [Gow] agrees with me, too) & is really first-rate quartet writing . . . It is grand when a modern work gives one the same sort of wholesome complete feeling that one gets from listening to Mozart or any of the others. But oh what a rare experience!

 

Back in 1933, The Times had written that Maconchy had already reached the enviable position in which ‘she can be sure that anything she may say will be listened to with attention’. By 1938, if Williams was coupling Maconchy with Mozart then others were hailing her as the future of British music: ‘Pride of place goes to a girl’, wrote one journalist in a survey of young composers.

She was hardly a girl. When she signed her contract with Hinrischen in May 1939 she was a married woman of thirty-two, only three years younger than Mozart at his death. And she was four months pregnant. The summer of 1939 was, however, not exactly a time for optimism, whether personal or national. Already, her friends in Prague were lost to her with Czechoslovakia falling to Nazi Germany in March. Now, on 3 September 1939, Britain declared itself at war. The composer, in her eighth month of pregnancy, was already in neutral Ireland, staying with relatives.* Elizabeth Anna LeFanu was born in Dublin’s maternity hospital on 24 October 1939. In the spring of 1940, the decision was made to return to Seal Chart in Kent.

By September 1940, Maconchy is reeling from the personal and professional impact of living in a nation at war:

 

Domestic jobs, & gardening . . . & 1st Aid lectures & practices keep me quite busy, & I get some work done too. I was to have had my 3rd quartet played at the National Gallery concert to-day – but the viola of the [Blech] quartet was called up for his training as a pilot in the RAF 2 days ago, which was rather sad – but I hope they will do it later on. – I had a preliminary rehearsal of my ‘Dialogue’ with the orchestra (at Queen’s Hall) early in August. The pianist Clifford Curzon is excellent – couldn’t be better – and he likes the work very much. The orchestra read it pretty badly – but I think when it has had 2 proper rehearsals it will be allright [sic]. It’s on Sept 26th – none of the Proms are being broadcast, as you know, which is a pity.

 

Maconchy still clings to the idea that the show might go on, that her professional life might continue, through these years of conflict. She was not alone. As the programme to the cancelled concert noted laconically: ‘In case of an Air Raid Warning the audience will proceed downstairs where adequate protection is available.’

Then, three days later, came the Blitz. At 5.30pm on 7 September, some 348 German bombers escorted by 617 fighters pounded London for thirty hellish minutes. There was a second round of incendiary bombs maybe two hours later, lasting into the next day. Nazi Germany’s aim was to destroy British morale ahead of a land invasion. The cancellation of a performance of Maconchy’s Dialogue, which had been rehearsed back in August, was just one very small casualty of war. The premiere of Elisabeth Lutyens’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, on the first night of the Blitz, revealed the stark reality that proceeding downstairs to ‘adequate protection’ might not quite be enough. The composer, together with Sir Henry Wood, the performers and the few audience members who had been brave enough to venture out, were forced to spend the night in the old Queen’s Hall. ‘The next day we learnt that the docks had been hit’, Lutyens recalled. ‘Whether it was the performance of my work or the German bombers, the Proms temporarily ceased.’ Lutyens’s very English irony was little defence against German bombs.

Down in Kent, LeFanu and Maconchy made a huge bonfire of all their letters and documents. They feared, and with good reason, that they lay in the path of the ascendant invaders, and wished to leave nothing that would make their friends, family or colleagues vulnerable to the Nazis. Given their commitment to the socialist causes of the 1930s, they had good reason to fear for themselves, but, meanwhile, there was urgent business to be done, because William LeFanu was tasked with the evacuation, from London to Shropshire, of the library of the Royal College of Surgeons. It was achieved, and only just in time: the building would be destroyed by the bombs only three weeks later. By the start of 1941, father, mother and baby Anna were based at Downton Castle, Shropshire, with LeFanu also working as an air raid warden, a member of the Home Guard and organizing the supply of periodicals to army and navy hospitals.

Maconchy could have been forgiven for focusing all her energies on survival, and her young daughter. There was no electricity, and simply keeping the paraffin or oil lamps filled, or the log fire supplied with wood, were arduous daily tasks. As for all families in 1941, food was scarce and rationing strict, so growing (and more importantly, preserving) one’s own fruit and vegetables became a necessity.

It would take more than war, however, to silence Elizabeth Maconchy. In the dark days of 1942, her Dialogue was finally performed (at the Albert Hall, the new home of the Proms after the bombing of the Queen’s Hall), and the composer made the arduous wartime journey to London to be present. That same year, she began her Fourth Quartet, her ‘masterpiece’ according to some. Rarely flamboyant in expression, the development of the musical material, particularly in some of the more chromatic passages, has what has been called a diamond-edged precision about it, with not a note straying out of place. Its motivic structure is a maze of inversion and retrograde patterns, and is established at the outset – the viola entry (bars four to six), for example, is an inversion of the first bar of the cello theme. Interestingly, while this is by no means twelve-note music, the use of integrative motivic cells suggests a thorough working knowledge of the method. Maconchy was, indeed, exploring twelve-note technique at around this time but, like Britten and Tippett, stopped short of embracing the method as a whole.

Maconchy understood very well that she was ‘already an economical composer’, and she did not need the discipline of twelve-note technique to make her even more so. When the work was performed by the Blech Quartet in June 1943, and broadcast by the BBC to Europe, the composer wrote, tellingly, to her sister Sheila that ‘they made it sound “grimmer” than it need’; ‘I wanted much more gaiety in the 2nd and 4th movements – it was all too careful and painstaking and they didn’t let themselves go.’ Gaiety, it seems, was hard to conjure in the summer of 1943.*

The Fourth Quartet was hailed by critics for its ‘eloquence charged with a characteristic astringency’, the composer for her ability to express ‘a compact argument’ with ‘impassioned conviction’. As had been the case some ten years earlier, Maconchy was, flatteringly, allowed into the English canon, taking her place in the ‘tradition of English chamber music to which Purcell belongs’. But now the comparison worked towards harnessing both composers to the imperative of national, in this case defined as English, survival. Something very similar had happened to Boulanger and her music during the Great War, nationalism trumping sexism at a time of crisis.

The war effort needed heroes, needed inspirational stories, and the dogged continuation of musical life in London through the years of Nazi bombs loomed large in the national consciousness. ‘It takes more than a war to destroy an English tradition’, the Times critic wrote in May 1943, before adding that ‘music in the metropolis has the same function to perform for the national well-being as the hub has for the wheel’. Both Britten’s First Quartet and Maconchy’s Fourth Quartet were held up as evidence that British composers continued to work in the face of adversity.

A small composition from 1943 shows Maconchy responding directly to the war. ‘The Voice of the City’, for women’s chorus and piano, marks if not honours the Battle of Stalingrad, often seen as a crucial turning point in the struggle by the Allies to overcome Nazi Germany. Astonishingly, the text Maconchy set was a poem written by a fourteen-year-old Welsh schoolgirl, Jacqueline Morris from Hengoed. Her class had been given the task of writing an essay entitled ‘The Voice of the City’. Morris’s head teacher was so impressed with the essay’s passion that she asked the girl to turn it into a poem. The poem is three parts lament, one part rallying cry for the future, Stalingrad’s future. It is powerful, emotive and simplistic: one suspects that Stalin himself might have approved of it as a patriotic text, and it was certainly an appropriate text to set for Maconchy’s sponsor, the Workers’ Music Association, an organization close to the composer’s socialist heart. If the rigid self-discipline of one composer could win the fight against Nazi Germany, then Britain had nothing to fear.

On a personal level, the war years took their toll upon Elizabeth Maconchy. First her sister, Sheila, was diagnosed with TB. Unlike Betty, she decided to head to Switzerland in order to combat the disease, so left England shortly before the outbreak of war. Violet Maconchy followed Sheila in 1940, escaping the Blitz only to die in Switzerland just a few months after her arrival. Sheila lived on only until 28 May 1945. In addition to the loss of both her mother and sister, Maconchy knew, perhaps more than most, what was happening to her friends and colleagues in central Europe. Just one example is enough. Erwin Schulhoff, communist and Jew, supporter of Maconchy, performer of her Piano Concerto back in 1930, died of tuberculosis in a concentration camp in 1942. It was a gentler end than that faced by many others. Maconchy and LeFanu did what they could, providing the necessary sponsorship for the daughter of the music critic, Jan Lowenbach, a friend from Prague. The young woman, known as Mimo, was able to make the journey to England, and lived with the couple and baby Anna for about a year before crossing to America to join her parents, who had found shelter there.

On a professional level, the war, which made it hard for any composer to be heard, made life particularly hard for the uncompromising Maconchy. Vaughan Williams wrote, sympathetic to the composer’s frustration, wise as to her lack of ‘popular’ appeal, and offering practical support:

 

I do feel it very hard that you do not get your stuff done – Have you anything new you could send in to the proms? If so let me know at once & I will write to [Sir Henry Wood] . . . I fear we must confess that you are not popular – I know though theoretically that is a very noble aspiration practically, it is galling. But dearest Betty, you are still young – I was about 30 before I ever heard a song of mine done in public . . . so push on and one day perhaps the key will turn in the lock.

Maconchy, now in her mid-thirties, was, however, finding it hard to create something new, to ‘push on’. She had experienced what she called ‘moments of silence’ before. She knew she was neither a popular, nor indeed a comfortable, composer. But whilst in previous years, a friend like Grace Williams could help her keep her nerve, stay strong (‘You mustn’t bother your head any more, my girl, about writing safe scores. It doesn’t become you’), this time the moment of silence did not feel temporary. Grace became seriously concerned and, like Vaughan Williams, attempted to help her friend, in this case with the BBC:

 

A word about Betty . . . For the last few months her letters have shown that she is terribly depressed about composing. She has never shown any signs of losing heart before – but now she does sound very down-hearted and writes things like ‘I think that perhaps I am finished as a composer’ which isn’t a bit like her, but hardly to be wondered at when you consider how consistent the neglect of her music has been ever since war began. A composer just can’t carry on indefinitely without contact with players and performances. You know what I think about her things and I know I’m right and others will hear them with my ears some day – but don’t let it be too late.

 

At Broadcasting House, moves towards a performance were made, but again events took over, this time the Doodlebug bombing of London in June 1944.

The ending of the war should have provided a respite, but did not. Although a return to Seal Chart was impossible, because the cottage had been almost completely destroyed by bombing, step by step, LeFanu and Maconchy rebuilt their lives. They moved to Wickham Bishops in Essex, where, happily, Nicola, a sister for Anna, already seven and a half, was born in April 1947, and then made another move, to Boreham, only six miles away, and to the house, Shottesbrook, where the family would remain for many years. The birth of a second child returned Maconchy to a life where, as she put it, ‘you have to learn to compose between feeds’. Once breast feeding was no longer necessary, it was possible to work at night. Nicola LeFanu remembers falling asleep to the sound of her mother composing, whilst Maconchy herself spoke later of ‘falling asleep in the small hours, my head on the keyboard’.* She combined motherhood with composition by taking characteristically practical, common-sense steps: ‘I always made sure there was someone to push the children in the pram for an hour or two. The rest of my writing I did when they were asleep.’ Alongside caring for her children, she was also committed to making a home for them at Shottesbrook, which included creating a flower garden to complement their father’s orchard of rare fruit trees. Maconchy was always quick to acknowledge William LeFanu’s contribution, recognizing that everything would have been that much harder if she hadn’t married a man sympathetic to her work. Things would also have been much harder if that man had not been able to support his composer wife financially, a fact Maconchy also acknowledged with her usual directness. The final element to the successful combination of family and professional responsibilities for a woman composer who works from home was a wall, or, more precisely, the two thick walls that divided LeFanu’s study from Maconchy’s piano. It was a domestic pattern that worked for both husband and wife.

For all the practical solutions, for all the commitment, Maconchy was only too conscious of the impact upon a female composer of, if not the bearing of children, then the very serious business of raising children. When discussing composition, Maconchy would always insist that there was no difference in the capacity of the sexes, no difference between the music of men and women, but she did acknowledge the different roles in society taken by men and women when it comes to raising children:

 

It is not impossible to write music if one has children – though difficult enough: but rearing them comes just at the time when one ought to be making a career, and it is almost impossible to combine the two, if one takes one’s children seriously . . . Unfortunately, the experience and stimulus of performance are an essential part of the growth and development of a composer – it is not only a matter of ‘getting known’. This, and not inferior capacity, accounts I believe for the relatively small number of women composers who have so far established themselves. I think myself that it is a mistake to divide composers into men and women – as if the music they write is necessarily different . . . Can any honest and intelligent listener who does not know already tell which it is?

 

For Maconchy, it seems, occupation of the twin roles of composer and mother involved a kind of rigid compartmentalization. Her prize-winning Fifth Quartet was written, for example, in Dublin in 1948 at a time when Anna LeFanu, aged eight, was in hospital with appendicitis, and, back in London, Nicola, aged two, had been admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital. Nicola suggested later that her mother’s ability to produce a prize-winning quartet during these months demonstrated once and for all that ‘adverse circumstances may have no direct bearing on works of art’. Maconchy’s self-discipline ensured that they did not.

To some of her friends, Maconchy remained a conundrum. They could not square the domestic Betty (maker of jam, bottler of fruit and breast-feeder) with the fierce, uncompromising composer of avant-garde music. Anne Macnaghten, sounding both bemused and amused, described Maconchy as ‘like a tiger inside . . . between nursery rhymes and washing nappies’.

What place did this tiger mother, as committed to her children and her fruit bottling as she was to her quartets, have in the brave new postwar musical world? At first sight, it was a significant place, because Maconchy continued to compose and to be performed. The Fifth Quartet was premiered in April 1949 at a London Contemporary Music Centre concert, the work demonstrating a kinship with that of the composer Grace Williams, yet another indication of the enduring importance of the friendship, personally and musically:

 

It is fascinating to note this slow movement’s musical kinship with Williams’s own Sea Sketches for string orchestra (1944), a piece which Maconchy admired. The chords used at the beginning of the quartet’s slow movement, for example, are the same chords heard in the strings at the opening of the Sea Sketches, although the effects achieved are quite different. This intriguing correspondence suggests that the deep friendship enjoyed by these two composers could find expression, perhaps most intimately, in purely musical terms.

 

Another quartet followed in 1950, and was premiered in 1951 at the Festival of Britain. Then, in 1954, Maconchy accepted an invitation to join the committee of the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain and, five years later, was elected as chair. Working for her fellow professionals, as she did in many and various ways, including sitting on the music panel of the BBC or the Arts Council, was Maconchy’s way of giving back to her industry, and also reflected and channelled her socialist belief in public solutions to individual problems. Always fired by the desire to get new music performed, she was later to become the first woman to hold the presidency of the Society for the Promotion of New Music, and Maconchy would, eventually, become a Dame of the British Empire in recognition of her tireless attempts to improve conditions for her colleagues and for her profession.

In other ways, the future Dame Elizabeth Maconchy appeared, on the surface at least, well and truly part of the British establishment. When, following the death of King George VI in February 1952, the London County Council launched a competition for a Coronation Overture for the new queen ‘as part of London’s contribution to British Music in the Coronation Year’, Maconchy’s majestic Proud Thames won. The work was premiered at a special gala concert at the Royal Festival Hall on 14 October 1953. The critics were, however, divided. One, perhaps predictably, lamented the lack of a ‘decent tune’; another, far more positive, thought the only problem was that the work was too short.

And yet just as had happened after the Proms’ performance of The Land in 1930, Maconchy’s brief moment of apparent celebrity was not sustained. One can cast around for reasons. Did Maconchy fail to join the ranks of Benjamin Britten or William Walton in the nation’s musical consciousness because of a sense that she was not really an English composer? After all, her music (or most of it) placed her in the camp of ‘European toughness’ rather than ‘English lyricism’.* After all, she described herself as Irish, despite spending most of her life living and working in England’s cities and villages, or, as expressed in a concert programme from the 1930s, ‘Elizabeth Maconchy is of Irish parentage, but is English by residence and training’. In the pre-war era, Maconchy could be described as, at one and the same time, and without contradiction, Irish, British and English, and then, during the Second World War, she was fully harnessed to the cause of British/English patriotism, despite her avowed socialist republicanism. Now, however, full independence for Ireland in 1948 meant that this daughter of Dublin was a stranger in her own land, a woman with a Protestant, Unionist heritage and an English upbringing. No matter that she was a Republican, relishing her childhood memories of finding signs of secret camps and hidden ammunition as she and her friends played in the nearby woods, of having a relative whose car was stolen and used to assist Éamon de Valera on an escape mission. At the same time, however, was she perhaps also a stranger in her adopted home of England?

Or was it simply the effect of straightforward prejudice against a female composer? Elisabeth Lutyens was sure there was a double standard regarding the music of men and women: ‘If Britten wrote a bad score, they’d say, “He’s had a bad day.” If I’d written one it was because I was a woman.’ From time to time, Maconchy herself criticised the establishment, at least with regard to their limited expectations of women composers. As has been seen, she found it hard to accept that Lesley Boosey thought women could only compose a few songs, whilst in 1949 she wrote to Grace Williams, asking ‘Why oh! why haven’t they given you a commission? (Possibly their “advisers” think anything so large as an opera unsuitable for women??)’ Maconchy’s daughter, Nicola LeFanu, believes that prejudice, whilst not as overt in the postwar period as it had been, remained the real challenge for her mother in these years. She remembers sensing her mother’s lurking depression:

 

My own first memories date from these years. On the one hand I remember her as the most positive and energetic person imaginable, devoting herself to creating a country life for us by day; at night we could hear the sound of the piano as she settled down to work into the small hours. On the other hand I can remember as a young child looking at her face in repose and saying ‘Why do you look so sad?’

 

In the three years after the war she worked on a symphony, which she withdrew after its first performance. Her letters to Grace Williams reveal the extent of her self-criticism and her dissatisfaction with herself and the symphony. These were not easy years for her; she felt isolated, living in the country with no extended family to help her with two young children. It was very different from the international success she had had before the war. Nor were the postwar years easy for any other woman, a phenomenon noted by a number of historians.

As LeFanu notes, Maconchy, always a hard taskmaster, not least when it came to her own music, was at this time almost silenced by self-criticism. Others had previously noted that ‘Elizabeth Maconchy is severe with herself and pursues her ideas relentlessly.’ She could also be severe, at least in private, about her fellow composers if they failed to match her own rigorous standards. Maconchy, for example, wrote to Grace Williams about the music of Elisabeth Lutyens, whose talent she admired (‘she’s got something up her sleeve’) but whose self-discipline was sadly lacking: ‘but oh it’s so carelessly done: that sort of harum-scarum attitude towards composing shouldn’t be allowed’. For Maconchy, writing music ‘like all creative art, is the impassioned pursuit of an idea’. The great thing, she argued, was ‘for the composer to keep his head and allow nothing to distract him’. She is not, at least consciously, referring to events such as her daughters’ hospitalization, but the compositional ‘temptations to stop by the way and to be side-tracked by felicities of sound and colour’. These temptations must be resisted: ‘everything extraneous to the pursuit of this central idea must be rigorously excluded – scrapped’. Elsewhere, when writing about Vaughan Williams, Maconchy suggested that ‘composers may be divided into Wrestlers and Speedwriters’. Vaughan Williams ‘was always a Wrestler’. So was Beethoven. And so was Elizabeth Maconchy. These qualities go a long way to explain her sense of wonder at those composers, men like Mozart or Schubert, for whom, as she put it eloquently, music ran down their pen onto the paper. Scrapping, self-criticism, dissatisfaction: these had all driven Maconchy to ‘push on’, but now they threatened to paralyse her. The tiger was turning upon herself.

Maconchy’s way out was a surprise, possibly even to her. She wrote a one-act erotic comic opera, based on an eighteenth-century libertine novel, with an ‘irreverent, high-voltage score’, packed with ‘original tunes and rhythmic dynamism’. It was a witty and fearless work, both musically and morally.* The Sofa, gasped one critic, represented ‘the only attempt I have ever seen to present the act of copulation on the public stage’. A member of the audience in 1959 noted that ‘for a moment, one’s eyes hardly dare accept their own testimony. There was raucous laughter, much indiscreet giggling and one felt the shudder of the superstitious; indeed I gather that some people that night were startled out of their lives, others indeed mortally shocked.’ Unabashed in its treatment of the sexual act, the performance of the work in a semi-public form probably saved it from the censor’s cut. Or maybe it was that Maconchy was simply ‘too amiable and innocent’ a composer for the subject, full of ‘Irish whimsy’ rather than ‘Gallic satire’, in the words of one critic. Once again, the composer’s gender and nationality, rather than her music, occupy centre stage.

The writing of a libertine work seems to have prompted Maconchy into offering witty nods and winks to the operatic canon, whether Offenbach, Strauss or even Mozart’s ‘Queen of the Night’. Perhaps she was sending a message to the musical establishment: see, I can do what they do, it is simply that I have chosen not to do so. Perhaps she was just having fun. The Sofa appeared to get Maconchy out of the rut she was in during the mid-1950s. She is ‘at her most relaxed and good-humoured’ in her 1960 Reflections, and returns in a more serious, sustained way to her dialogue with Mozart, begun in The Sofa, but now continued in the creation of companion pieces to his Clarinet Quintet and Sinfonia Concertante. The composer was developing her skills as a writer for voice, whether the three John Donne settings for Peter Pears, in 1959 and 1965, or two further one-act operas. Maconchy would write with passion about this:

 

In searching for words to set every composer stumbles upon a magic moment of recognition: this is it, this is what I’ve been looking for – a sort of love at first sight reaction. It may not in fact be one’s first sight of the poem but suddenly there’s an instinctive sense of possession. The poem becomes as it were part of oneself. That for me in any case is how the writing of song starts, or a choral work or any setting of words. This initial impulse starts the piece going, and the sense of complete identification with the words continues to grow as the work takes shape and persists to the end.

 

As the years passed, and Maconchy continued to work with the intensity implicit in every word here, her work (in the words of her daughter) always ‘in a continuous state of regeneration’, she also began to embrace an increased expressive freedom. This is nowhere more evident than in her fascination with ‘free writing’ whereby the performers are instructed to ‘all sing, choosing from the phrases at will, unsynchronised’. Maconchy had used something akin to this in one of her one-act operas, The Departure, in the late 1950s, and she turned to it again in her Eighth Quartet of 1967, most strikingly in the work’s slow movement in which, as musicologist Rhiannon Mathias explains, ‘sections of long, braided melodic lines for all four instruments are played tempo libero, senza misura’ (free time, without measure). Alongside the exploration of new compositional techniques, Maconchy remained true to her trademark ability to derive all of the musical material in a piece from a small number of core ideas, but now she developed these building blocks with even more skill, rigour and passion. The Tenth Quartet of 1972, a work of labyrinthine structure, uses, again in the words of Mathias, ‘an alchemical-like process of motivic and thematic transformation’, by which a series of quiet chords and an unassuming viola fragment, heard at the very beginning, ‘transmute into the lyrical whole’.

In 1981, now in her mid-seventies, Maconchy chose to set the work of the Irish writer J.M. Synge, his prose versions of a number of Petrarch’s sonnets, and the resulting My Dark Heart makes compelling listening, dealing as it does ‘in intimate, half-articulated thoughts and desires’. Petrarch’s poetry is at one and the same time tragic (his beloved Laura is dead), celebratory (of spring when ‘the air and the waters and the earth itself are full of love’) and, according to Maconchy’s own programme notes, despairing yet anticipatory: ‘the poet is in despair to be still living himself. Then his mood changes, “I am going after her – may she be there to meet me”, and the words end in serene anticipation.’ It has been said that My Dark Heart shows that Maconchy has ‘moved a long way from the business-like, no-nonsense mood of her early style’, but its expressive freedom neither denies nor outdistances her earlier self.

That Maconchy’s ‘earlier self’ is somewhere present in My Dark Heart is only fitting, since the work was a commission from the RCM for their centenary celebrations, nearly sixty years after the college had set the teenage composer on her path in life. In the early 1980s Maconchy seems to be preoccupied with echoes and connections, with beginnings and endings. Two years after writing My Dark Heart, she took the work’s closing chords and used them as the building blocks for the entirety of her Music for Strings, a commission for the 1983 Prom season. Two of the institutions that had launched Maconchy in her career as a composer now honoured her. Was it a coincidence, or just one final wry gesture from the composer, that made Maconchy decide to spring a surprise on the Albert Hall audience? So sudden and unexpected is the ending of her Music for Strings that it left the promenaders unsure of when to applaud.

 

Anne Macnaghten said of her friend Elizabeth Maconchy that she was ‘incapable of writing half-heartedly’. Maconchy did not live half-heartedly either. This wholehearted, passionate, driven, intellectual composer created disturbing, exciting, often vehement music. Complex counterpoints of melody and rhythm, and rigorous structures, contain but never completely contain lyricism, wit and fire. The tiger might have bottled fruit, changed nappies and devoted herself to committee work, but she remained a tiger.

The process of composition was rarely easy. Maconchy began, each time, with a fragment or idea that came into her head ‘of its own accord’. Then she worked outward, keeping the ‘feel of the form’ in her head. That form, she argued, ‘must proceed from the nature of the musical ideas themselves – one cannot simply pour music into a ready-made mould’. Above all, ‘the composer must try to evolve a form that is the inevitable outcome of his own musical ideas and provides for their fullest expression’.

Maconchy’s life might have been easier, and her work more celebrated, had she been willing to pour her music ‘into a ready-made mould’. But, as Vaughan Williams knew she would back in 1929 as he sent her into the world, Elizabeth Maconchy had to, and did, work out her own salvation. There could be no other way.

 

 

 

* The sixteen-year-old Benjamin Britten had one of his first public performances in Notting Hill.

 

* Ireland in 1939 was nominally a Dominion of the British Empire and a member of the Commonwealth, although it had been declared a ‘sovereign, independent, democratic’ state in 1921. Britain’s dominions were not required to follow their leader into war, and Ireland chose not to, fearing an invasion from the United Kingdom as much as from Nazi Germany.

 

* Harry Blech was at the time in the RAF, and played in the air force band at Uxbridge.

 

* ‘My earliest memories are of hearing my mother playing the piano when I was in bed going to sleep at night when I was very tiny. I think of it as a sort of romantic memory but it’s really the opposite; she was a professional composer and at that stage the only time she had to write music was when her children were in bed.’

 

* Maconchy is more indebted to ‘Bartók and Hindemith than to Vaughan Williams or Britten’ in the words of one recent music guide. Maconchy’s contemporary, Elisabeth Lutyens, certainly believed that her own loyalty to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique did her no favours. As she observed, ‘to adopt a technique, like the 12-tone, associated with a German, Schoenberg (albeit that, earlier, I had thought I had “discovered” it myself, from my study of Purcell), was “mittel-European”, un-English and iconoclastic. I was soon made to feel like a Communist before the Committee for Un-American Activities.’

 

* Mathias helpfully summarizes the plot. Dominic, a louche young prince, hosts a ball at his Parisian palace and is caught with capricious Monique in flagrante delicto on a sofa by his overbearing grandmother. In a fit of fury, grandmamma casts a spell on him, transforming him into a sofa, and informs him that only someone successfully making love to him can break the spell and return him to human form. As the party progresses, various scenarios occur. Three party girls sit on the sofa (Dominic) and are eventually approached by three young men. Two of the couples leave to dance, but Lucille remains on the sofa with her admirer: ‘so far so good’, comments the upholstered Dominic, a line apparently contributed by Vaughan Williams himself. Instead of attempting to seduce her, however, the young man merely proposes to her, much to Dominic’s exasperation. The couple leave and Monique now flirts with Edward, an old flame, on the sofa. Monique’s seduction breaks the spell and she is shocked by the mysterious and, from her point of view, ill-timed, reappearance of the real Dominic.