JAVS Spring 2024

Clarke used her time in Hawaii to develop her musicianship in a third way: connecting verbally with her audience. Of the five musicians engaged for the season, she was the only one to conduct a series of pre-concert lectures to discuss the music performed in each concert. This way of engaging with her audience appeared to stick; years later a writer from London’s Acton Gazette and Express would remark that “the happy way she had of taking the audience into her confidence in the “little chats” by which she preluded each item was an agreeable feature of the recital.” 29 Even after her retirement, Clarke continued to work as a speaker on musical subjects. After their resounding success in Hawaii, Clarke and Mukle returned to the continental United States. In September 1919, Clarke’s Viola Snata won second prize at the Berkshire Festival. This achievement has been discussed so extensively in other sources that there is little need to cover it here; however, after the competition Clarke spent a great deal of time promoting the sonata through her own performances of it. In the United States, her efforts brought her to Detroit, Buffalo, Boston, and New York City, where she played the sonata in multiple public recitals with great success. 30 In her diaries, she also recounts private performances for the conductor Walter Damrosch and pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch. 31 In January 1920 she returned to New York City where she had, as the New York Times put it, “the novel experience of presenting her own [sonata] at Aeolian Hall … for the first time in New York.” 32 Clarke was more than satisfied with her performance, writing, “Saved myself up all day for the evening. Felt very nervous. … Concert went off extremely well. Had tremendous success with sonata & also solos. Very enthusiastic house. Jolly party here after, about 80 people.” 33 The New York Tribune reviewed the recital, praising Clarke as both performer and composer: Into the three movements the young woman has crowded the emotions of a sensitive nature. … The second movement has spectacular glissandos for the piano and showy passages for both instruments in unusual combinations. It is evident that Miss Clarke has listened sympathetically to the music of French and Spanish composers. It is in the third movement that the composer has shown her greatest genius, for here the music is mystical and macabre, in places as poignant, as moving as anything heard

in the death chamber of Melisande. The beauty of the opening theme of this movement first announced by the piano alone will not soon be forgotten. Wholly in keeping with the character of its last pages the sonata ends with a question. Had Miss Clarke written nothing more than this last part it would be enough to stamp her as a composer of remarkable talent. Like her composition, her playing was of a high order of merit. 34 In this recital, Clarke also played a sonata by Giovanni Battista Grazioli, selections from Marin Marais’s Old French Dances , Caprice Basque by Emil Ferir, and Lullaby by Cyril Scott. Clarke soon returned to London where she continued the work of promoting her sonata. In May 1920, she performed it privately for Lionel Tertis, who performed it himself the following month. 35 Clarke gave the London premier of the sonata on May 31 in London’s Aeolian Hall, to largely positive reviews. 36 She and May Mukle then returned to the U.S. to spend another summer touring Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hampshire with the violinist Gertrude Watson, this time as a trio, with Watson’s villa in Pittsfield, Massachusetts as a home base. The Berkshire Eagle lists Clarke as an attendee at the 1920 Berkshire Festival, though she did not participate as performer or composer that year. Clarke’s activities in 1921 mirrored the previous busy year, with spring performances in England, where she and Mukle joined the Music Society String Quartet with violinists André Mangeot and Kenneth Skeaping. 37 This group’s performance of Alfred Mistowski’s piano quartet may have been Clarke’s first collaboration with the pianist Kathleen Long (1896–1968), who would later found the English Ensemble with Clarke, Mukle, and Marjorie Hayward. In spring 2021, Clarke also performed her viola sonata twice, in Aeolian Hall and Wigmore Hall. She then spent another summer in New England, where she entered a brief phase of violin playing to facilitate the performance of piano trios with Mukle and Watson; their performances included works for this instrumentation by Brahms, Schumann, and Dvořák. Clarke even played solos on at least one occasion, prompting the Berkshire Eagle to observe, “Miss Clarke was at her best in two violin solos, ‘Après un Rêve,’ (Fauré) and ‘Hungarian

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