JAVS Spring 2024

Why do not more women devote themselves to the viola? The viola has the tones of a contralto; it suggests distinction; there is a patrician air about it which the more light-fancied violin can no more emulate than a dressy servant girl can look like a countess. It was Miss Rebecca Clarke who stirred these thoughts in me. True, they lay dormant there, so to speak, and it only required a whisper to bring them uppermost. So Miss Clarke played the “Sussex Mummers’ Noel.” … It has a grave, rich melody, true English in character, English of the folk, like ‘There Were Three Ravens Sat on a Tree,’ and Miss Clarke played it with fine expression. 20

In January 1917, Clarke performed the Sussex Mummer’s Carol as well as Brahms’s trio for viola, cello, and piano (originally written for clarinet, cello, and piano) in a recital in New York City at the Music School Settlement. 21 She and Mukle performed again in New York City in March at St. Thomas’s Church. 22 Seeking more repertoire for herself and Mukle to play, Clarke wrote several new pieces between 1917–1918: Irish Melody , an arrangement for viola and cello; Morpheus for viola and piano; Untitled Movement in E minor for viola and piano; Lullaby for violin and piano; and Lullaby and Grotesque , two duets for viola and cello. During this time Clarke also met Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, whose Berkshire festivals would prompt some of Clarke’s most successful compositions, and Gertrude Watson, a pianist who lived in Pittsfield and with whom Clarke and Mukle would collaborate a number of times throughout the following few years. 23 The three formed the Onata Quartet with the violinist Walter Stafford in 1917, the group’s name first appearing in the Hartford Courant in September. 24 Clarke and Mukle’s work with the Onata Quartet likely immersed them in much of the repertoire they w ould later play with their more famous piano quartet, the English Ensemble. On February 13, 1918, Clarke and Mukle performed a recital in New York City’s Aeolian Hall. The New York Tribune included a glamor shot of Clarke in its notice of the concert (fig. 4).

This recital is the one known time that Clarke used the pseudonym “Anthony Trent” as the composer of her piece, Morpheus. She also played Frank Bridge’s Allegro Appassionato for viola and piano; Hubert Parry’s Sarabande, arranged for viola from his Partita for Violin and Piano in D minor; and Clarke’s two duets for viola and cello, Lullaby and Grotesque. The New York Tribune reviewed the concert, focusing almost entirely on Clarke, despite Mukle’s greater fame at the time: Figure 4. Advertisement for Clarke’s New York debut in Aeolian Hall. Photo Source: “News and Comment of Concert and Opera,” New York Tribune, February 10, 1918, 3.

Rarely heard, except in company with some sixty or eighty other orchestral instruments, the viola was the chief centre of interest at the recital given yesterday afternoon by Rebecca Clarke, violist, and May Mukle, ‘cellist, at Aeolian Hall. The beauty of the instrument, which possesses something of the flexibility of the violin with the intensity of the ‘cello, was admirably exploited by Miss Clarke, and set the audience wondering whether more could

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