THE AVOWED REPUTATION SERIAL
THE AVOWED REPUTATION PROFESSIONAL

In 1947, dogged by ill-health, she returned to Barry to be cared for by her elderly parents in bracing sea air. She mingled with racy set in 1930s London and took a Polish lover, but she maintained a sturdy discretion while working mostly for the BBC. Grace Williams lived, by comparison, an innocuous life. Clark won the case, but his reputation was ruined and Lizzie’s works were further prejudiced by the libel chill.

In a celebrated 1950s libel case before the future Lord Scarman, he sued the composer William Frankel for alleging that he embezzled funds from musical trusts and used his position to advance second-rate Communist composers. Clark was roundly loathed by colleagues and forced into early retirement. Lutyens married a fellow-misanthrope, a BBC producer called Edward Clark who was a Schoenberg pupil, an avowed Communist and the Corporation’s main point of contact with European modernism.

Strikingly ugly, almost simian-looking, she boasted embarrassingly of her sexual appetites – ‘I’ve had a hundred lovers, 99 men and one woman, and the woman was by far the best.’ She was prone to accosting uniformed men on intercity trains.

THE AVOWED REPUTATION PROFESSIONAL

Lizzie Lutyens was a crabby soul who frustrated by professional neglect, turned alcoholic, anti-social and venomously anti-semitic. Which begs the question why, apart from the obvious gender impediment, are these two remarkable and distinctly gifted women so glaringly unperformed? There are, as you might suspect, a clutch of personal reasons, along with a whiff of scandal. Without Grace, Wales has no modern concert music to call its own. Grace Williams left her mark stylistically on every subsequent Welsh symphonist, none of much wider renown but collectively the voice of a nation. Among Lutyens’ students were Peter Maxwell Davies, present Master of the Queen’s Musick, as well as his predecessor Malcom Williamson who said of her that she was the one composer in Britain who ‘was thinking in world terms: she had mentally crossed the Channel.’ Others who clustered around her skirts include Richard Rodney Bennett, Harrison Birtwistle and William Glock, the all-powerful, austere controller of music on the BBC.

Grace Williams, born to a pair of parish schoolteachers in the Welsh docks town of Barry, studied with Vaughan Williams, was warmly admired by Britten and wrote in a lushly decadent Straussian style until, in mid-life, she discovered a satisfying idiom rooted in Welsh cadences.īoth were enduringly influential.

THE AVOWED REPUTATION SERIAL

Both, in other words, are women.Įlizabeth Lutyens, daughter of the New Delhi architect acclaimed in his day as the greatest since Christopher Wren, was the first English musician to adopt the serial method of composition pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg. The two have little in common beyond a date of birth in 1906, a vocation and a disability that excludes them from the classical canon. Somewhere at the periphery you may find a pair of lively centenarians, uncelebrated elsewhere. When the BBC Proms are announced at the end of the month, they will be built around the usual clutch of anniversaries of composers great and small. La Scena Musicale Online Reviews and News / Critiques et Nouvelles

The avowed reputation