Into the light

Composer Rebecca Clarke with her viola

TULLY POTTER COLLECTION

Why it took nearly a century for an important, beautiful concert piece for cello and piano from a 20th-century female composer to be published is incomprehensible. We can certainly blame contemporaneous sexist attitudes towards women, but was there also something more personal here?

The Rhapsody for cello and piano by Rebecca Clarke was the last in a series of three works supported by the rich and powerful American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (who commissioned only a few female composers but many male ones). The British composer’s Viola Sonata had nearly won the big prize at the 1919 chamber music competition in Berkshire, Massachusetts. It was only denied the top award because the judges did not believe a woman could write such excellent music. (The winning composition was Bloch’s fine Suite for viola and piano, and the judges opined that he’d probably written Clarke’s piece as well.) This gross injustice did, however, bring Clarke one piece of good fortune, namely the support and friendship of Coolidge herself. Shaking off the judges’ snub, she went ahead and produced her very effective Piano Trio (1921) and the Rhapsody (1923) for cello and piano.

It is interesting to note that there was a flurry of exceptional cello works produced in England around the end of the First World War. Delius’s Sonata and Concerto, the Bridge Sonata, the Elgar Concerto and the Ireland Sonata – all these popular, successful works appeared between 1916 and 1923. The common link was Stanford, who taught composition at London’s Royal College Music and who worked with or supported all these composers except Delius – and he was Clarke’s teacher, too. Her Rhapsody should have achieved the same level of success.

The manuscript score was evidently worked at with diligence by its (probable) dedicatees, cellist May Mukle and pianist Myra Hess. It shows all the visible signs of thorough discussion and perhaps arguments between the three parties. Passages are scratched out; notes and accidentals are altered; fingerings are written in, assertively and instructively; shortcuts are suggested and confirmed, presumably to tighten the structure. Here and there, whole passages are inserted or given a second version. At an advanced stage in these preparations the score seems to have been withdrawn or rejected – but by whom? The music is undeniably attractive and instrumentally rewarding. Mukle, Hess and Clarke were three women of standing, strong personalities and famous. I can’t believe the players could have lost their patience with the music itself. The manuscript is a bit spidery but much clearer than many pieces I have learnt. I hope it wasn’t a petty disagreement over some amendment that made Clarke sweep up the parts and leave the room in a huff. The young Debussy did just that, gathering up the score and parts of his early Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, thus launching that work into outer darkness from which it struggled to return for many years – and there must be many similar stories featuring other composers and their works.

I doubt that it was insecurity on Clarke’s part, for her reputation was, for a brief period, flying at its highest and her three fine large-scale works should all have been taken up immediately and with pleasure, not just the Viola Sonata and the Piano Trio. This was still two full decades before her late marriage to James Friskin, which marked a virtual end to her compositional ambitions.

We’ll never know what happened that day in 1923. The sad result was complete oblivion for a major British cello-and-piano work until well into the 21st century, despite its composer living for another five decades.

Could there be another reason for Clarke withdrawing the piece? In the piano part there are some passages which seem to require three staves, and these bars are difficult to play effectively as they exploit layered textures over the whole keyboard, like an orchestral reduction. If she’d intended originally to create a cello concerto, did she doubt her own ability to orchestrate the piano part?

The vaults of the Library of Congress in Washington DC received the manuscript score when Clarke died in the US in 1979. There it lay, forgotten. Somehow, a photocopy found its way into the BBC Music Library and then, eventually, to Raphael Wallfisch and me, because we are known for championing 20th-century English repertoire. Apart from recording all the cello concertos and cello-and-piano sonatas from the early decades of the century, we’ve recorded the fruits of the next creative flurry following the Second World War .

Why do I love this Clarke work so much? Enough to be willing to decipher the cramped photocopied script, make decisions on which accidentals are intended, learn all the notes, prepare a music-notation-software copy of the cello part for Raphael, and persuade Lyrita/Nimbus to record and publish it? What grabbed me initially was the special and attractive harmonic language – richly coloured and idiosyncratic, dissonant but still tonally rooted. It has real logic, which is one reason why doubtful accidentals can generally be clarified. Certain harmonies mixing adjacent chords recur like waymarks. Inevitably for the date and place of the work’s composition, Clarke exploits the juxtaposition of chromatic and modal harmonies, structurally setting one against the other – in the same way that Vaughan Williams and Holst did.

Players can quickly appreciate the strength of the work’s structure. Clarke’s characterful opening material generates nearly all the later music as she manipulates sonata form and builds a standard overall fast–slow–scherzo–coda structure, the clearly defined sections linked thematically and well contrasted in tempo. The first movement (moving from D into F) and the slow movement (in E) are represented by two sections of the same length – each about 130 bars. Then the big final section – about 260 bars in length – melds a scintillating scherzo and trio in A minor with a reprise of the opening movement incorporated into the trio section, and a conclusive coda.

The instrumental writing is generally idiomatic, exhilarating under the fingers and brimming with pianistic and cellistic delights. I can understand why Clarke, the leading violist of the day, could write so well for the cello, but the piano writing is superb too. There are effects that show the influence of Debussy and Ravel, harmonies that exploit the exoticism of Scriabin and Stravinsky, and clever motivic tricks which would not shame Schoenberg, Bloch or Bart-Clarkes rhythmic sensuousness, which I have always enjoyed in her songs and in the Piano Trio and Viola Sonata, is alluring, too, be it the ambivalent syncopated triplets in the slow music or the frenetic polyrhythms of the scherzo.

A hand-written page of Clarke’s Rhapsody manuscript

manuscript courtesy bbc music library. circle image benjamin ealovega

The manuscript score was worked at with diligence by the composer, May Mukle and Myra Hess, showing visible signs of thorough discussion and perhaps arguments between the three parties

John York and Raphael Wallfisch

As a girl, Clarke suffered the harshness of a bullying, philandering father; in her twenties she encountered the prejudices of a male-dominated musical world and the problems that arise when success comes suddenly; and in her fifties she submitted to the final subjugation beneath the powerful personality of a more successful husband. She must have looked back over the decades as she approached her end in 1979 and wondered why it had not been different – easier. I wish I’d known her. In this centenary anniversary of the injustice dealt her in the 1919 competition, Raphael and I have played the Rhapsody many times – and the beautifully printed score is at last available to all players, thanks to Nimbus Music Publishing (NMP 1079). I sincerely hope it will tempt other admirers of 20th-century English music to take it on. They, and their audiences, are in for a treat.

Raphael Wallfisch and John York’s 2015 recording of Rebecca Clarke’s Rhapsody for cello and piano is available on Lyrita (SRCD 354).