(Agnes) Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE (9 July 1906, London – 14 April 1983, London) was a English composer.
Contents |
She was one of the five children of architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and his wife Emily, who was profoundly involved in the Theosophical Movement. From 1911 the young Krishnamurti was living in their London house as a friend of Elisabeth and her sisters. At age nine she began to aspire to be a composer, which given the prowess of her father in architecture, and the domineering nature of her mother, allowed her to elude her parents' attempt to live vicariously through their children. In 1922, Lutyens pursued her musical education at the École Normale de Musique in Paris, before accompanying her mother to India in 1923. On her return she studied with John Foulds and subsequently continued her musical education from 1926 to 1930 at the Royal College of Music in London as a pupil of Harold Darke.
Lutyens is credited with bringing Schoenbergian serial technique (albeit her own very personal interpretation of it) to the UK. She disapproved of the 'overblown sound' of Mahler and similar composers, and instead chose to work with sparse textures and develop her own type of serialism; she first used a 12-note series in Chamber Concerto I for 9 instruments (1939), a work that has been compared with Webern's op.24 Concerto, but earlier than this she had been using the techniques of inversion and retrograde fundamental to a serial idiom, and she claimed she had been inspired to this by precedents she found in older British music, especially Purcell.
She did not always employ or limit herself to 12-note series; some works use a self-created 14-note progression, for instance. She was very fond of the music of Debussy, whose musical influence can be distinctly perceived in her work, and she became close friends with Luigi Dallapiccola. But her negative opinions of strict serialism caused an ideological rift between herself and her serialist colleagues. Descriptions of her music cite 'extraordinary achievements, demonstrating a completely personal serial style and very original structures', arguing that even though without a tonal centre, the notes in her music seem to have a natural and 'precisely ordered place'.
Lutyens, together with the conductor Iris Lemare and the violinist Anne MacNaghten, who formed a string quartet, made an extraordinarily influential trio. Their concerts proved to be a powerful force within the musical world of London, introducing composers such as Benjamin Britten, Elizabeth Maconchy, Grace Williams, Malcolm Williamson and Alan Rawsthorne. Composition was not just a hobby for Lutyens, but rather a way of life. She spent hours every day composing, whether her music had been commissioned or not.
In 1933, Lutyens married Ian Herbert Campbell Glennie, a baritone singer, and bore him three children. The marriage was not happy, however, and in 1938 she left him for Edward Clark, a distinguished conductor and BBC producer who had studied with Schoenberg, and whose influence may have been a decisive factor in her adopting serial techniques. Clark and Lutyens married in 1942. She composed in complete isolation, a process greatly impeded by the drinking and partying at the Clark flat, and the responsibilities of motherhood. Lutyens paid the bills by composing film scores for Hammer Films’ horror movies and also for their rivals Amicus Productions films, including Don't Bother to Knock (1960), Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965), The Skull (1965) (a suite from this was issued on CD in 2004), Theatre of Death (1966), and The Terrornauts (1967). She also wrote music for many feature and documentary films and for BBC radio and TV programmes, as well as incidental music for the stage. She was very prolific at this work and was known in the business for her quip 'Do you want it good, or do you want it Wednesday?'
She found success in 1947 with a cantata setting Rimbaud’s poem O Saisons, O Châteaux. The BBC refused to perform it at the time because the soprano range was thought to go beyond the bounds of the possible, but the BBC was nevertheless the organization that gave first performances to many of her works from the 1940s to the 1950s, after which there was a tendency to ignore her until her friend William Glock became Director of Music.
By the late 1960s, however, her music was in greater favour and she received a number of important commissions, including Quincunx for orchestra with soprano and baritone soloists (1959–60), which was premiered at the 1962 Cheltenham International Festival and uses a quartet of Wagner Tubas in the orchestra. Her Symphonies for solo piano, wind, harps and percussion was a commission for the 1961 Promenade Concerts. In 1969 she was made a C.B.E.. Her autobiography, A Goldfish Bowl, describing life as a female musician in London, was published in 1972. In her later years she took many private pupils, including the composers Malcolm Williamson, Alison Bauld, Brian Elias and Robert Saxton. She also acted as a mentor to the young Richard Rodney Bennett, though he was never a formal pupil.
A combative and idiosyncratic character and a composer of music that has been described as ‘sensuously beautiful’, Elisabeth Lutyens had to struggle to earn her place among the composers of classical twentieth century musical canon, and her music is still seldom heard or recorded. She was also one of the models for Henry Reed's satirical depiction of Dame Hilda Tablet in a series of 1950s radio plays.