Rebecca Clarke

With its lyrical Romanticism and often impressionistic harmony, Rebecca Clarke's music has much in common with interwar French composers such as Poulenc. Born near London in 1886, Clarke studied at the Royal Academy of Music until her father banned her from continuing lessons after she received a proposal from a teacher. Composition classes continued fleetingly with Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College, where she wrote Theme and Variations for piano (1908). Cut off financially by her family part-way through her education, Clarke supported herself as a jobbing viola player, joining Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall Orchestra in 1912. Meanwhile, her chamber music career flourished. Clarke regularly collaborated with cellist May Mukle and travelled extensively, spending much time in the U.S., where she eventually settled after the Second World War. Despite composing almost 100 works—largely chamber music, including several lullabies for her and Mukle to perform—many remained unpublished or out of print by the time of her death in 1979. The Viola Sonata (1919), with its Lark Ascending-type opening, fragmented fast movement and solemn finale, is Clarke's best-known work and is increasingly recorded (including in a version for cello).