Elizabeth Maconchy (1907 –1994)
Elizabeth Violet Maconchy was born to Irish parents in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, England. Her family moved to Dublin where Elizabeth studied piano and theory with private instructors, and then to London, where she began attending the Royal College of Music.
At RCM Elizabeth Maconchy studied composition with Ralph Vaughan Williams, who encouraged her to find her own voice. That voice was most influenced not by English composers but by the music of Béla Bartók, both for his use of small motifs to build larger textures, and for his driving rhythms. The music of Leoš Janáček seems to have been another influence.
In 1930, Maconchy’s 17-minute symphonic suite The Land (based on the book-length poem by Vita Sackville-West) was performed at the Promenade Concerts at Queen’s Hall, which earned headlines such as “Girl Composer Triumphs.”
That same year, she married William LeFanu, a librarian for the Royal College of Surgeons. This was now an era when husbands encouraged their wives to compose. After hearing The Land, Gustav Holst told LeFanu to “Keep her at it.” He responded: “She’s kept at it of her own accord, I think.” In 1932, Betty (as she was called) contracted tuberculosis, which would affect her health for the rest of her life. At the age of 80, she became the second woman composer to be honored as a Dame of the British Empire.
Although Maconchy composed operas and orchestral works, the core of her oeuvre are 13 string quartets composed between the early 1930s and the early 1980s. She said:
I have found the string quartet above all best suited to the expression of the kind of music I want to write — music as an impassioned argument …
Dramatic and emotional tension is created by means of counterpoint in much the same way as happens in a play. The characters are established as individuals, each with his own differentiated characteristics: the drama then grows from the interplay of these characters — the clash of their ideas and the way in which they react upon each other.
Thus in a string quartet one has the perfect vehicle for dramatic expression of this sort: four characters engaged in statement and comment, passionate argument, digression, restatement, perhaps final agreement — the solution of the problem.(quoted in Lutyens, Maconchy, Williams and Twentieth Century British Music: A Blest Trio of Sirens by Rhiannon Mathias)
Here is her String Quartet No. 1 composed in 1932 to 1933:
This is her String Quartet No. 3 from 1938.
These are movements 1 and 2 from her final String Quartet No. 13 from 1982 – 1983: