Elizabeth Maconchy

Dame Elizabeth Violet Maconchy LeFanu (19 March 1907 – 11 November 1994) was an Irish-English composer.

She is considered to be one of the finest composers Great Britain and Ireland have produced.

Elizabeth Violet Maconchy was born in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, of Irish parents, and grew up in England and Ireland.

Her family moved to Ireland in 1917, where they lived in Howth, on the east coast.

The adolescent Maconchy began her musical studies in Dublin, studying piano with Edith Boxhill, and harmony and counterpoint with John Francis Larchet.

Those formative years in Ireland were important for Maconchy who considered herself Irish.

Throughout her career she was identified as an Irish composer, or as an English composer with Irish influences, by reviewers and commentators.

In 1923, at the age of sixteen, she moved to London to enrol at the Royal College of Music.

At the RCM Maconchy studied under Charles Wood and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Her contemporaries at the college included Grace Williams, Dorothy Gow, and Ina Boyle.

Early compositions such as the violin sonata and Piano Concertino of 1927 already show the influence of European composers, especially Bartok.

As a student, Maconchy was awarded the Blumenthal Scholarship in 1927, and the Octavia Scholarship of 1930, which allowed her to continue her studies in Prague.

Her first public recognition came in 19 March 1930 with a performance of her Piano Concerto, conducted by her teacher there, Karel Jirak.

This was followed on 30 August by a BBC Proms performance of her cantata The Land, conducted by Henry Wood, which was inspired by the long poem of the same name by Vita Sackville-West.

In response to the scarce opportunities for young avant garde composers and for female composers, a group of women got together to organise regular concerts at the small Ballet Club theatre in Notting Hill, London, showcasing new work.

It has been claimed that this venture "changed the face of music in London", and that it "prove[d] a lifeline for Elizabeth Maconchy through the 1930s".

In 1930 Maconchy married William LeFanu, with whom she had two daughters: Elizabeth Anna LeFanu (born 1939) and Nicola LeFanu (born 1947).

In 1932, Maconchy developed tuberculosis and she moved with her family from London to Kent.

Maconchy's cycle of thirteen string quartets, composed between 1932 and 1983, is regarded as the peak of her musical achievements.

Historian of music Anna Beer has contended that "Maconchy loved the quartet form because it represented a debate, a dialectic between four balanced, individual, impassioned voices."

She also wrote for voice.

In 1933, Maconchy's quintet for oboe and strings won The Daily Telegraph Chamber Music Competition, and was recorded by Helen Gaskel with the Griller Quartet soon afterwards on HMV Records.

She returned to Ireland in 1939, living in Dublin for a brief period, during which she composed her Fifth String Quartet, which some critics consider her greatest achievement, and gave birth to a daughter.

In 1943 she responded to war with The Voice of the City, for women's chorus, about the Battle of Stalingrad.

In 1948, she was awarded the Edwin Evans Prize for her String Quartet No. 5. In 1953, her "Proud Thames" overture won the London County Council Competition as Coronation Overture for the new Queen of the United Kingdom.

Maconchy did much to improve the conditions of composers, being elected Chair of the Composers Guild of Great Britain in 1959, a position she held for a number of years.

She was also President of the Society for the Promotion of New Music.

Maconchy was a socialist, and her activism extended to supporting the Democratic/Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and other causes.

Maconchy's friends included the English composer Elisabeth Lutyens, the Welsh composer Grace Williams, the Irish composer Ina Boyle, and the Czech music critic Jan Löwenbach.

Maconchy once declared that: "for me, the best music is an impassioned argument".

She died in Norwich, England.

Maconchy is considered to be "one of the finest composers the British Isles have produced".

Her work has been compared to that of Bartok, who was an acknowledged influence, and also to Beethoven and Mozart, as well as (favourably) to contemporaries such as Britten.

She produced over 200 works.

According to Ailie Blunnie, Maconchy was "a gestural composer, concerning herself with short musical fragments, as opposed to large-scale concepts or templates", at least in part because of her "ideology" as a composer, so that "she never planned anything out, musically speaking, in any great detail in advance of composition, [and by using shorter formats] she could afford to explore the possibilities implicit in the ideas themselves as they arose".

In terms of style, Maconchy had "a predilection for intervallic composition", and, "profoundly influenced by the resonances produced by certain intervals, [she] tended to build works around one or a small number of intervals, which varied according to the work in question".

A favoured "harmonic device" was the "simultaneous use of major and minor sonorities", which "came to denote episodes of heightened emotion".

It has been argued that her work is often "driven by rhythm", which gives it its characteristic confluence of "energy, dynamism and imagination".

Maconchy wrote three one-act operas, including the erotic comic opera The Sofa, based on an eighteenth century novel, and stylistically in "dialogue with Mozart", which shocked the audience for its explicitness when it premiered in 1959.

In 1981 she set to music prose versions of some Petrarchan sonnets, by the Irish writer J.M. Synge, under the title My Dark Heart.