There was very little in the background of Elizabeth Maconchy to account for her musical genius. Her father played the piano a little, her mother was quite unmusical. Of her two sisters one was tone-deaf, the other only mildly interested. Although she had piano lessons from an early age, her first experience of a concert was hearing the Hallé in Dublin when she was fifteen. But at six she began, unprompted, to write pieces for the piano.
Although both parents were Irish, the family lived in Buckinghamshire, visiting Irish grandparents only at holiday times, until she was twelve. Then came four years in Dublin, with piano lessons from Mrs. Boxwell. She continued to write piano pieces and had a few lessons in composition fron Dr. Larchet. Her father died when she was fifteen and in the following year her mother brought the children back to England. There was now no mistaking Elizabeth's talent and she was sent to the Royal College of Music, where she studied first with Charles Wood and then with Vaughan Williams. She won the Sullivan and other prizes, the Blumenthal Scholarship and, after six years, was awarded the Octavia Travelling Scholarship. She visited Vienna and Paris and spent two months in Prague, where she studied with Jirák and had one memorable encounter with Suk. None of this affected her style of writing, but the tremendous interest which her music aroused must have been very stimulating. She returned to Prague in March 1930, when her Piano Concertino was played by Schulhof and the Prague Philharmonic. It was very well received and the Press was enthusiastic. That summer her suite The Land was introduced by Sir Henry Wood at a Prom. Her Marriage to William Le Fanu took place the same week. She was then twenty-three and well on the road to success.
In 1932 tuberculosis, which she must have contracted years before from her father, suddenly flared up and was discovered. Characteristically, she refused to be sent off to Switzerland. Instead she went to live in Kent, where the fresh air and her own determination eventually cured her, but from then on it meant a complete withdrawal from the musical life of London and this caused a serious interruption of her career.
She continued to write, and won a prize in the Daily Telegraph Competition in 1933 with her Oboe Quintet. Donald Tovey invited her twice to Edinburgh for performances of her music and Sir Henry Wood introduced further works at the Proms. Her name appeared regularly in the programmes of the MacNaghten-Lemare Concerts (1932-36) and broadcast performances increased steadily. She was twice represented at the I.S.C.M. Festivals (Prague, 1935 and Paris, 1937). Interest was growing abroad, as shown by the Cracow and Warsaw concerts of her chamber works in 1939.
In the autumn of 1939 the elder of her two daughters was born and this, together with the condition of the war years, made continuous work very difficult for some time.
Since the war Elizabeth Maconchy has become increasingly recognised as one of our outstanding composers. Concert and broadcast performances have grown. Her work was chosen for the Copenhagen International Festival in 1947. She won the Edwin Evans Prize with her Fifth String Quartet (1948) and the L.C.C prize in Coronation year with her overture Proud Thames. 1955 brought the broadcast series of her six String Quartets on the Third Programme. She is at present working on her seventh.
There have only been two real influences - Vaughan Williams and Bartók. It is not easy to trace Vaughan WIlliams in her music but he must have played a very important part in her develpoment, giving confidence and inspiration, helping to stimulate her individuality and pursuit of intrgrity. Introducing her Sixth Quartet at the I.C.A. in February 1952, she said, “Writing music, like all creative art, is the impassioned pursuit of an idea ... The great thing is for the composer to keep his head and allow nothing to distract him. The temptations to stop by the way and to be side-tracked by fecilities of sound and colour are ever present, but in my view everything extraneous to the pursuit of this central idea must be rigorously excluded - scrapped.”
Bartók's music she discovered for herself, by chance. It set fire to her imagination, opening up new worlds. It also convinced her that she must set about the problems in her own way. “The form ... must proceed from the nature of the musical ideas themselves - one cannot simply pour music into a ready-made mould. The composer must try to evolve a form that that is the inevitable outcome of his own musical ideas and provides for their fullest expression.” She believes that further harmonic and rhythmic advance must come through counterpoint. “To crowd new and extraneous notes into existing harmonies may perhaps add a certain colour, but it does not represent any real development. On the other hand the several threads of the music moving in melodic lines can coalesce vertically to create a new harmonic interest. A counterpoint of rhythm exists side by side with melodic counterpoint. By the free movement of several rhythms simultaneously we can hope for more rhythmic development than by any amount of experiment with monodic rhythms.”
Elizabeth Maconchy is severe with herself and pursues her ideas relentlessly. An enormous amount has to be worked through and scrapped before she achieves what she wants. Once this point is reached the music flows and takes hold of her. Above all she maintains that music must be the expression of emotion. “For me the best music is an impassioned argument. I can find no satisfaction in the coldly reasoned discourse. The rigid self-discipline which the composer must impose on himself must always be directed to the fullest expression of the underlying emotion and never to its exclusion.”
Her best work is to be found in her String Quartets, her Symphony, the “Donne” Motets and the recent Symphony for Double String Orchestra. In many other works, such as the Concertinos for various solo instruments with strings, the Nocturne for orchestra, the Duo for violin and cello and the Yeats settings for soprano and women's chorus, the content is slightly less concentrated and they are consequently a little easier to take in at a first hearing. In all these her integrity hold good, for she is incapable of writing half-heartedly; but there has been less active struggle to reach the deepest penetration into what she wants to say.
The interruption caused by her illness probably tended to intensify her individuality, though from the first it was strongly marked. The MS. of a Violin Sonata, written when she was nineteen, is immediately recognizable as her work, both in the handwriting and the music itself. Of how many composers would this be true?
Her music has always been characterised by a preoccupation with short themes playing around a few notes:
The often resulting major-minor efect is an unmistakable “finger-print”, ocurring whenever there is strong emotion and often producing a state of extreme tension. It amounts to almost an obsession, but although it appears in so much of her work it is certainly no sterile repetition of a successful formula but rather the renewal of a deep experience.
To the listener her music gives the impression of pent-up energy and emotion, disturbing and exciting, often vehement. But if these elements prevail, she is capable of other moods - there are movements of wonderful serenity, as in the slow movenet of the Fifth Quartet and even light-heartedness (for example, the sparkling last movement of the First Quartet.)
It is sometimes asked whether her writing has any national flavour. Certainly there is no conscious use nor any discernable trace of Irish folk tradition, but if the Cotswolds can be found in Vaughan Williams and others of the English School it may not be fanciful to see another, more disturbing landscape in her music - the bare mountains, dark loughs, black bogs and turf stacks of Connemara, the country nearest her heart.