The word integrity is probably best to describe Betty Maconchy and her music.
She was born in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire in 1907 of Irish parentage. Although
her family were not musical, she began to compose at the age of six and such
works were little piano pieces. She had a happy childhood in the country.
The family moved to Ireland after the First World War where her father took
up a job in Dublin. She continued piano lessons as well as harmony and
counterpoint. After a time her teacher advised her to study at RCM in London.
The decision to uproot and go to London was sadly made possible by the death
of her father in 1922. The following year she began her studies with Arthur
Alexander for piano and Charles Wood for composition and, later, with Vaughan
Williams. She was 16, shy, unprepared and had only heard an orchestra once,
in Beethoven's 7th, and had never heard a string quartet.
Vaughan Williams was not an accomplished teacher but 'a wonderful man and
a tremendous influence'. He told Betty that he had 'learned the hard
way and that, perhaps, that was the best way'. He was a great encouragement
and told Maconchy that, "brilliance for its own sake was 'not allowed'; that
one must have an adequate technique and express one's ideas in the clearest
way".
Although this was sound advice it may have been somewhat counter-productive
since some critics believe that Maconchy's music lacks colour. Others have
said that this was probably a reflection of her gentle character and, as
many women composers of the time found, it was considered to be a little
vulgar for women to compose exciting or quasi-masculine scores.
After being a pupil of Vaughan Williams for about a year Betty discovered
the music of Bartôk which was a revelation to her and remained so
throughout her life. Here was a composer untrammelled by convention and tradition
and with a rugged freshness quite at variance with the plodding pomposity
and 'correctness' of some English music of the time. Like Elisabeth Lutyens,
and many others, she found the longueurs of Elgar and Parry tedious.
She won several prizes at College including the Mendelssohn Scholarship which
many years later, her daughter, Nicola LeFanu also won.
After leaving RCM, Vaughan Williams recommended Maconchy further study in
Prague, rather than in Vienna. In 1929 she studied for a few weeks with Karel
Jirak. She did visit Vienna and there are stories of her smoking cigars with
fellow student Grace Williams in the city's streets and cafés. In
1930 Jirak conducted the première of her Piano Concerto with
the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. The soloist was Erwin Schulhoff. In the
same year Henry Wood gave the first performance of her orchestral suite The
Land. It was a great success for the newly-married Mrs William LeFanu
who had sent a score to Wood 'out of the blue' and was delighted when he
happily took it up.
That there was prejudice in this England, and elsewhere, against women composers
is true but Betty once told me that she had no real difficulty at RCM but,
rather, with music publishers. They believed that 'girl composers' could
only write little piano pieces and songs.
In 1932 Elizabeth Maconchy developed tuberculosis, the disease that killed
her father. It was recommended that she go to Switzerland but she said that
if she was going to die she would wish to do so either in Ireland or England.
She went to the south-east coast of England and completely 'disappeared for
a while' from the musical world. She developed her own line of thought and
became individual.
Some of her work was performed by the MacNaughton-Lemare concerts and, in
1933, her Oboe Quintet won the Daily Telegraph chamber music prize.
It was also the year of her String Quartet No. 1, the medium to which
she felt the most affinity. She once told me that she liked impassioned arguments
in music and hoped that this was apparent in her string quartets. She was
at her most comfortable in writing for strings and enjoyed contrapuntal devices.
Her method of composition is straightforward. She begins with a simple idea,
perhaps a mere fragment, and works outward. She explained that the plan is
conscious and then the unconscious takes over. "When the work is complete
it is difficult to say how much has been conscious or unconscious," she would
say.
Betty composed mostly at the piano and admits that she scrapped a great deal.
She said, "Composing is a selfish and solitary occupation and there is no
money in it." She was financially supported by her husband but they lived
somewhat separately.
Her first daughter, Anna was born in 1939. Fortunately, Betty was very
domesticated and often spoke of having to compose between feeds, nappy changes
and bottling home-made jam.
During the Second World War she composed her String Quartet No. 4
which was highly acclaimed and rightly so. It is a strong, dark, uneasy work
and has a very personal character. Her Quartet No. 5 was her first
to attract a wide audience and probably the first work of hers to be recorded.
It was written in Ireland in 1948, the year after the birth of her second
daughter, Nicola. It is curiously reminiscent of the string quartets of the
Dutch composer, Willem Pijper who had recently died. It is an incredibly
mature and concise work and, as with many of her works, it is a marvellous
pattern for fellow composers and students both to study and to emulate. While
this piece should not be underrated, its appeal is essentially to professional
musicians. It is a faultless score. It should have made her reputation but,
sadly, prejudice still existed against her sex and her intellectualism. The
work should be judged on its evident merit and not on the sex or age of the
composer. But sexism takes on other forms. As one example, I was one of five
adjudicators at a cello competition where my fellow judges wanted to give
the award to a young cellist because she was very pretty!
It may not be hyperbole to state that Maconchy was, and still remains, the
finest British composer of music for strings ... not only in her thirteen
string quartets, although she did not number the last one, thirteen being
an unlucky number but also in her Symphony for Double String Orchestra
(1945-8), long overdue for a revival and her Music for Strings
premièred at the proms in 1983. Music for Strings is different
in structure from all her previous works but, as usual, it is entirely
practicable. As already indicated her string writing is exemplary; some believe
it is not unlike Tippett and it is vastly superior to Elgar. Indeed, her
favourite instrument is the viola.
There is also a Symphony for full orchestra premièred by Sir Adrian
Boult and, as far as I am aware, never heard again.
She enjoyed the intimacy of rehearsing with people she had composed for.
Her love of poetry is not purely to consider putting music to it. She is
on record as saying that some poetry is so complete in itself that it should
not be put to music; she has also said that the poetry of Gerrard Manley
Hopkins does suggest music. She stated, "Music should be passionately
intellectual and intellectually passionate. Just intellectual would make
the music dry and driven by an emotional force; whereas, passion without
a mind behind it is no good at all."
W.H. Auden, in his inaugural address as professor of poetry at Oxford, said,
"When I write I feel I am embarking on a perilous voyage in an unknown sea.
I never write from experience." And that can be said of Betty Maconchy and
others. For example, Edmund Rubbra said the same thing.
In the 1950s and 1960s she turned to opera, writing three one-act operas
namely The Sofa (1957), The Departure (1961) and The Three
Strangers which was completed in 1967 having been almost ten years in
the making. To shed the reputation that she could only write for strings,
she composed Music for Brass and Woodwind (1966) and the dramatic
monologue Ariadne (1970) for soprano and orchestra. Nine years later,
the Croydon Philharmonic Society performed Héloise and
Abélard, an cantata for soprano, tenor and baritone, chorus and
orchestra.
Possibly the finest of her choral works are the settings of Dylan Thomas's
And Death Shall Have No Dominion for choir and brass (1969) and Louis
MacNeice's Prayer Before Birth (1971). No words can be a substitute
for hearing these deeply-felt and splendid works. Among her vocal works is
a beautiful setting of J.M. Synge's My Dark Night for soprano and
instruments (1981).
And the string quartets continued. The String Quartet No. 9 (1969)
has a slow movement sorrowing at the Soviet occupation of Prague, a city
that she had visited some forty years earlier. Yet it has to be said that
her music is never trivially sentimental; what is heartfelt in her music
is in no way akin to Hollywood slush, nor, thankfully, is it of the wallowing
kind one associated with Elgar but, rather, a direct musical statement, matter
of fact yet profound. The Quartet No. 10 of 1971 is in one movement
and benefits from its sound structure and rhythmic vitality. Its successor,
String Quartet No. 11 was commissioned by the City Music Society to
celebrate the 650th anniversary of the granting of its charter
to the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. It was first performed by the Lindsay
Quartet in the Goldsmiths' Hall, London. There is some hesitancy in this
piece where continuity and communication seem to break down. Here her music
is probably at its most derivative.
A leading British composer once told me that Betty's attitude to music was
probably even more creditable than the music itself. She was made a CBE in
1977 and an DBE in 1987. When she died in 1994 she bequeathed to the discerning
British music public a very fine legacy of string quartets upon which she
will be constantly judged. In this realm she set a high standard. There seems
no foreseeable challenge to this achievement. Perhaps she summed up her life
of music when she said, "Being a composer is a wonderful life sentence from
which there is no escape."
© Copyright - David
C.F. Wright, 1996 revised 2000
Lengnick
See also ELIZABETH
MACONCHY DBE (1907-1994): Some biographical
and musical notes by her daughter
Nicola LeFanu.
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