With respect to the violin and cello, the viola may be said to have qualities which it may share with the traditional “British” attitude. There is a certain amount of understatement in the viola: it can be played with as much virtuosity as the violin and it can sing as beautifully as the cello, but frequently it favours a more reserved style. And if one thinks of the melancholic colours of the British fogs – particularly those typical of the beginning of the twentieth century – or, by way of contrast, if one has the gorgeous nuances of the autumn in mind, these images seem to resonate with the touching and warm timbres of the viola.
Besides these subjective feelings, which may or may not be shared by the reader, it is an objective fact that the Renaissance and early Baroque tradition of the consort of viols – a typically British ensemble – was revived in a historical perspective at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, the study and performance of those ancient masterpieces invited many contemporaneous musicians to take inspiration from this quintessentially British heritage, and thus caused a proportionally vivid interest in the viola on the part of the British composers.
Clearly, this interest was further sparked by the fact that some of the greatest British composers of the era were viola players themselves. This is the case with Rebecca Clarke and with Frank Bridge, two of the composers represented here, while Ralph Vaughan Williams – who played the violin – left valuable works in the viola repertoire.
Rebecca Clarke and Frank Bridge probably used to play side by side as fellow members of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra, an ensemble conducted by Henry Wood; Clarke was one of the first female professional orchestra musicians, and her friendship with Bridge continued also at a later time.
Clarke had been born in a musical family, even though her childhood had been marked by the presence of a violent father. He was an American, while his wife was German; therefore, Rebecca grew up in a multicultural context and was encouraged in her musical activities. However, and possibly due precisely to her father’s behaviour, for her entire life she doubted her own value and talent, and composed relatively few works, only a bunch of which were published during her lifetime.
Her gifts, however, had been noted very early by one of the greatest British musicians of the era, i.e. Charles Villiers Stanford, who admitted her, as his first female student, to his class of composition at the Royal College of Music. Stanford rightfully guessed that Clarke’s sensitivity and personality were better suited to the viola than to the violin (which had been her favourite instrument up to that time). Allegedly, he told her: “You are right in the middle of the sounds and can tell how it’s all done”. Indeed, she found her voice by playing the viola and began composing for this instrument.
Some of her works found their way in her recital programmes, but the prejudices of the time were against women composers. On one occasion, she feared that there could be too many “Clarkes” on the programme (counting her pieces and her performances), and so she used a male pseudonym as the composer of the piece she liked least among those she had written. To her chagrin, the reviewers showed enthusiasm for the piece by “Anthony Trent”, while they virtually ignored her “official” works.
The turning point of her compositional life was represented by the Sonata for viola and piano, written when she was approximately thirty years old; here too, however, gender prejudices weighed on her career. She sent the piece to a composition contest where the works were judged anonymously. The jury’s opinions were divided about whether her piece or one by Ernest Bloch (his famous Suite for Viola) should be awarded the first prize. In the end, Bloch won and Clarke came second; however, when the composers’ names were disclosed, the realization that the second prize had been won by a woman caused a sensation. As Clarke herself narrates, it, “When I had that one little whiff of success that I’ve had in my life, with the Viola Sonata, the rumour went around, I hear, that I hadn’t written the stuff myself, that somebody had done it for me. And I even got one or two little bits of press clippings saying that it was impossible, that I couldn’t have written it myself. And the funniest of all was that I had a clipping once which said that I didn’t exist, there wasn’t any such person as Rebecca Clarke, that it was a pseudonym for Ernest Bloch!”.
In the following years, Clarke continued her activity as a composer and as a performing musician, also founding some all-female chamber ensembles, including one with cellist May Mukle. For her, Clarke created a cello version of her Passacaglia, signed “With love, Becca”. In spite of this, there is some mystery surrounding the dedication of the original version for viola, marked “for BB”. While Clarke explicitly declared the piece to be a homage to one of her nieces, it has been argued that “BB” may have referred to Benjamin Britten, or perhaps to Britten’s teacher, Frank Bridge who had recently passed away.
This work dates in fact from 1941, and is the only published piece from Clarke’s output during wartime. The declaration of war had forced her to remain in the US, where she had gone to visit her siblings; when the war was over, she eventually decided to stay in America. In 1944, in fact, she had casually encountered James Friskin, a pianist who had been her fellow student at the Royal College of Music; they fell in love with each other and were married shortly thereafter, both being already in their fifties.
For her husband-to-be, Clarke composed I’ll Bid my Heart be Still, written during their short engagement. The tune is defined as coming from an “Old Scottish Border Melody”, but the piece is a tender, intimate and confidential discourse between (Clarke’s) viola and (Friskin’s) piano. It may therefore represent a promise of fidelity, while the two instrument’s melodic lines intertwine with each other. Moments of expressive intensity are not missing, portraying the couple’s deep relationship, but the overall mood is one of quiet calm.
If this short piece is built on an ancient Scottish tune, the Passacaglia is structured around an “Old English Tune”. It is in fact a sacred chant, a Veni Creator Spiritus which was at the time attributed to Thomas Tallis; however, the most significant aspect is that it had been included in The English Hymnal, the collection of tunes edited by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
In 1926, Vaughan Williams had composed his own Six Studies in English Folk Song, whose original version was for the cello and whose dedicatee was, once more, May Mukle. Her sensitivity and refinement had elicited in the composer the confident belief that his pieces would be “treated with love” by the performer. These six miniatures weave the threads of the ancient tunes Vaughan Williams knew so well into the fabric of a modern modal idiom, evoking the British choral tradition while reinterpreting it creatively.
In turn, the two pieces by Clarke’s colleague and friend Frank Bridge are refreshingly idiomatic in their treatment of the viola. They mirror their composer’s intimate knowledge of the instrument: in Clarke’s words, Bridge “was one of the finest viola players I’ve ever heard. He could have made a career as a fine conductor but couldn’t stand orchestral musicians. He was without doubt the most talented musician I’ve ever met”. Similar to Clarke, Bridge has not encountered the recognition he deserved; however, his Pensiero and his Allegro appassionato constitute a balanced and intriguing pair displaying the full palette of the emotional gamut: from the reflective and thoughtful to the impassioned and enthralling, and throughout the pieces the complex equilibrium between viola and piano is never lost.
As previously said, Bridge died while the Second World War was still raging; on the contrary, Rebecca Clarke died a nonagenarian, at the eve of the Eighties. It was in fact her ninetieth birthday which sparked a renewed interest in her and in her music. Following her marriage, her compositional activity had virtually ceased, and her fame and name seemed to have been almost forgotten, in spite of the efforts of her great patroness Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who always believed in Clarke’s skill, gifts and potential. The celebration for the composer’s birthday, and in particular a radio broadcast, attracted once more the attention of a larger audience and, following her death, a high number of her manuscripts was found and studied.
This album, therefore, represents a welcome tribute to Clarke, but also an equally welcome attempt to contextualise her output and style within the larger framework of the British chamber music school of the first half of the twentieth century. The collective picture these works form together embodies, in fact, a rich tradition, a fecund creativity, and a poetic world deserving knowledge, appreciation and recognition.
Album Notes by Chiara Bertoglio