JAVS Spring 2024

While viola enthusiasts appreciate Clarke’s compositional contribution to viola repertoire, her advocacy for the viola through international tours, recitals, and radio performance is often overlooked in comparison with her male contemporaries. In a time before commercial air travel, and in a world complicated by World War I and its aftermath, international tours were no small matter, and Clarke’s pre-dated any such tours by Tertis or Primrose (outside of continental Europe). 4 The organization and funding behind her tours must have been substantial, and they are a testament to her persistence in a male dominated field. Clarke’s performances abroad drew consistent praise and often resulted in critical reappraisal of the viola as a solo instrument. This first article in a two-part series presents new details about Clarke’s early career and international tours, while the second will focus on her radio broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Clarke’s formal training began in 1902, when at age sixteen she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music, where she studied violin with Hans Wessely. Towards the end of her second year, she received a marriage proposal from her harmony teacher, Percy Miles. This event led her father to abruptly remove her from the school. In the years that followed, Clarke visited relatives in the United States and experimented with writing art songs. 5 Her father sent some of her songs to Charles Villiers Stanford, a well-known Irish composer who taught at the Royal College of Music. Stanford invited Clarke to enroll in the Royal College and study with him, which her father permitted her to do in 1908. The result of this was not only an opportunity for intensive compositional training, but also Clarke’s switch to viola. She studied the viola with Lionel Tertis during this period, likely privately since Tertis taught at the Royal Academy. Sometime after 1911, but before Clarke had finished her studies at the Royal College, a dispute with her father led him to kick her out of the family home and cut her off financially. 6 Within a day she was able to secure a room in London and arrange a professional gig as a violist in the Royal College orchestra. 7 “And so,” she wrote, “in hardly more than twenty-four hours, I had reached a watershed, and the whole course of my life had begun to run in a different direction. I was living in London, a professional musician, preparing to earn my own living. It was exhilarating and rather frightening. Actually, I was too dead tired to realise it all” (fig. 1). 8

There is little documentation of performances in which Clarke participated in the years preceding World War I. In January 1911, she performed in a concert played entirely by women, featuring music by the composer Ethel Smyth (1858–1944). 9 This is the earliest record showing Clarke collaborating with the violinist Marjorie Hayward (1885–1953) and the cellist May Mukle (1880–1963), both of whom would become important colleagues throughout Clarke’s entire performance career. The three were about the same age and Mukle and Hayward had known each other as students at the Royal Academy of music. 10 During her early career, Clarke often performed with other women; two notices name her as part of the Solly String Quartet and the Nettleship Quartet, both all-woman groups. 11 She also performed with the famous Hungarian sister violinists, Jelly and Adila d’Aranyi (later Adila Fachiri), who were great-nieces of Joseph Joachim. Most importantly, Clarke joined the Norah Clench Quartet when she replaced the violist Cecilia Gates in 1910; May Mukle was also a member of this ensemble. 12 During this time, Clarke and her colleagues were often hired to play in private homes; she specifically mentions Walter Wilson Cobbett, a “rich chamber music enthusiast” and amateur violinist who frequently hired musicians to play quartets with Figure 1. Publicity photo, ca. 1911. This photo was taken close to the time Clarke left home, becoming an independent earner as a violist. Photo Courtesy of Christopher Johnson, rebeccaclarkecomposer.com, photo taken by H. Walter Barnett.

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring 2024