Quartet: How Four Women Changed The Musical World - 'Magnificent' (Kate Mosse)

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Broad paints vivid, at times over-imagined, pictures of all four women and the worlds in which they lived and worked. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. For instance, Rebecca Clark – the most interesting of the four – “traps yearning, soaring, rhapsodic melodies in frames that seem far too delicate to contain them”.

A stellarwork of social and music history sprinkled with emotional dashes of love, sex, and politics. Even during her lifetime, it was suggested that Rebecca couldn’t have written her own work and, even, didn’t actually exist. Those recordings are being added to all the time, and interest in music by female composers is gaining momentum, yet, as Broad cautions in her epilogue, such enthusiasm has always been followed by a backlash. How Four Women Changed the Musical World is the subtitle of this passionate biography of four notable women composers of late 19th- and 20th-century Britain.All experienced some form of establishment acclaim during their careers, and all, save for Clarke, were staunch Conservatives, with supreme faith in institutions (Smyth in the armed forces and monarchy, Howell in religion, Carwithen in marriage). In addition to their public concerts, the ensemble visits Solace Women’s Aid’s refuges and give concerts there. With a different family she might have been sectioned for her boldness and refusal to conform, and my thoughts turn to the women who were, and to those who didn’t have enough fight in them, or who just didn’t succeed against such huge odds, and to all their combined missing music (and art and writing). This was not an amateur ensemble and often played canonical repertoire by composers such as Mendelssohn and Grieg, although it also played lighter music at seaside resorts.

It was Smyth who was the most radical of the four, loudly challenging assumptions about women’s musical capabilities and refusing to be the meek woman she was expected to be. The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice. The scene of Smyth in Holloway prison conducting her fellow suffragette inmates with a toothbrush as they paraded around the prison yard has been recounted many times before, but Broad goes far beyond that here: the tenderness of her letters, and the mixture of rash temper and tenacity with which she bore her disappointments, reveal a still more intriguing character.

Howell’s music is “seductive, undulating”; Ravel’s “seductive, ethereal”; Debussy’s “sensual and ethereal”; Clarke’s “haunting, ethereal”. With her playing described in the press as “ alluring”, “ unforgettable” and “a wonder”, Fenella is one of the UK’s most established and versatile violinists. Supporting Doreen Carwithen following the death of her husband was her lifelong best friend Violet Graham.