Peggy Glanville-Hicks

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Peggy Glanville-Hicks (December 29, 1912, Melbourne–June 25, 1990, Sydney) was an Australian composer.

Contents

[edit] Biography

At age 15 Glanville-Hicks began studying composition with Fritz Hart in Melbourne. She spent the years from 1931 to 1936 as a student at the Royal College of Music in London where she studied piano with Arthur Benjamin, conducting with Constant Lambert and Malcolm Sargent and composition with Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Her teachers also included Egon Wellesz. She later asserted that the idea which opens his fourth symphony was taken from her, and it reappears in her 1950s opera The Transposed Heads.

After leaving England, she lived in Greece from 1950 to 1976 and in the United States where she asked George Antheil to revise his Ballet mécanique for a modern percussion ensemble for a concert she helped to organize before returning to Australia in the 1980s. [1] She lost her sight in later life.

Other facts of note:

  • She was married to British composer Stanley Bate from 1938 to 1949. [2]
  • From 1949 to 1958 she served as a critic for the New York Herald Tribune.
  • She was a close friend of the expatriate writer and composer Paul Bowles.

[edit] Music

Major works in her output include the Sinfonia da Pacifica (1952-53), Etruscan Concerto (1956), Concerto romantico (1957), and her Harp sonata which was premiered by Nicanor Zabaleta in 1953 as well as several operas. Her best known operas are The Transposed Heads and Nausicaa. The Transposed Heads is in six scenes with a libretto by Thomas Mann and premiered in Louisville, Kentucky on March 27, 1954.[3]

Nausicaa was composed in 1956 and premiered in Athens in 1961. The libretto was prepared together with Robert Graves based on his novel Homer's Daughter. [4]

Her last opera, Sappho, was composed in 1963 for the San Francisco Opera, with hopes that Maria Callas would sing the title role. However, the company rejected the work and it has never been produced.[5]

[edit] References

  1. ^ American Mavericks, Program Notes
  2. ^ Papers of Peggy Glanville-Hicks MS9083. Retrieved on 2007-08-09.
  3. ^ Opera Glass
  4. ^ The Australian Music Centre
  5. ^ 'Buried symphonies score a chance at resurrection', The Age, July 27, 2007.

[edit] Books

  • Beckett, Wendy (1992). Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Pymble, NSW: Angus & Robertson. ISBN 0-207-17057-6.
  • Hayes, Deborah (1990). Peggy Glanville-Hicks : A Bio-bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-26422-8.
  • Murdoch, James (2002). Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Transposed Life. Hillsdale, New York: Pendragon Press. ISBN 1-57647-077-6.

[edit] External links and Resources

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