Clarke, Passacaglia on an Old English Tune for Viola
Rebecca Clarke got a one-line entry in the 1980 edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians informing us that she was an English violist married to the composer John Friskin.
Interest in women composers exploded shortly thereafter. Their compositions are now studied in academic circles and given frequent performances. That focus has surely played a role in bringing to light the compositions of Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979).
I will leave it to others to examine the social and economic factors that caused many women composers to languish in obscurity. But we should also credit the technological revolution that has given us easy access to the music of hundreds of formerly obscure composers, both men and women.
Clarke studied composition under Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal Conservatory. She was forced to leave school when her father cut off her funds following a dispute between them. Within a couple of years she was recognized as a first-rate violist, performing with the most prominent musicians of the time. She became one of the first female professional orchestral players in 1912.
She was not a prolific composer, leaving 52 songs, 11 choral works, 21 chamber works, a piano trio, and viola sonata. Many of her works date from the late 19-teens and early 1920s. She received greater recognition as a performer.
Clarke had another burst of compositional activity from 1939 to 1942, during which time she composed the Passacaglia on an Old English Tune for Viola. She married John Friskin in 1944, after which she stopped composing and performing even though Friskin encouraged her to continue.
For the most accurate, up-to-date information on Clarke’s life, career, and works, see her official website, rebeccaclarkecomposer.com. Clarke never “languished in obscurity”—she was world-famous in her time, for her playing, for her prize-winning compositions, as a woman of letters, as a radio-star, as a sparkling stage-personality, as a beauty, and as something of a fashion-plate. Like most of her essentially tonal cohort—male and female, British and American—she suffered a temporary eclipse after World War Two, during what turned out to be the rather brief triumph of academic serialism, but her fame was on the upswing by the time that idiotic revision of Grove came out, thus prompting the outcry. Obviously, if she had been “languishing in obscurity,” no one would have realized that an injustice had been done!