Her admiration for that composer’s music and her adoption of influences from central Europe fed into a personal language that possessed a refined, clear-edged modernism. Nevertheless, he “quietly suffocated” Maconchy’s longing to study with Bartók.
‘RVW’ notably accepted female composition students in an era when they were still rare – he also taught Grace Williams and Ina Boyle, among others.
Her musical voice is extremely different from Robert’s, perhaps closer to Mendelssohn or Chopin, but indubitably her own.Ĭlick to load video Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994)īorn in Hertfordshire in 1907, Elizabeth Maconchy grew up in England and Ireland before becoming a pupil of Charles Wood and Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music, aged 16. Sadly, after Robert’s death she virtually gave up composing the mix of agonising bereavement and the pressures of providing for seven children meant she had neither the time nor the inclination. While still in her teens she wrote a plethora of solo piano pieces and songs, and in her thirties pieces for violin and piano plus a superb Piano Trio. She began to write a demanding and groundbreaking piano concerto when she was just 13 – the slow movement, featuring a solo cello, may later have influenced her friend Brahms, who used one in his Piano Concerto No. She had been an internationally lauded virtuoso pianist since her early teens, a prodigy whose competitor in chief was Franz Liszt himself.
Far from being mere sidekick to her famous husband Robert, Clara, one of the best female composers, was more celebrated than he was when they married.
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