Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark: The Orchestration of Progress in British Twentieth-Century Music

"Elisabeth Lutyens was the first composer I ever saw in the flesh, so she has a tiny place in my heart for that reason alone. She was a rather imposing figure who spoke with these cut-glass vowels. You would see her sometimes at concerts. I was far too scared to go and speak to her, but you couldn’t help noticing her. She was the daughter of Edwin Lutyens, the architect of New Delhi, and her mother was one of the Bulwer-Lyttons so she was essentially aristocratic. She was also just about the first composer in England to take up Schoenberg’s invention of the 12-tone system—the way he formalized his harmony after abandoning tonality. It was regarded as very continental and not the kind of thing English composers did, but Lutyens did it. In a way this book—which is a double biography of Lutyens and her second husband, Edward Clark—shows how that came about. Again, there are things missing. Edward Clark was a conductor who had studied with Schoenberg at the beginning of the 20th century. But he wasn’t a composer, and we don’t know what he studied. Annika Forkert, the author of this book, is frustrated at not being able to find that out. It’s one of the things we still don’t know. When he met Elisabeth Lutyens, Clark had been working at the BBC but had left. We’re not quite sure why. But the two of them got together. It wasn’t the most satisfactory of marriages. Clark felt that if he couldn’t be a conductor—which he couldn’t, because he’d lost his work with the BBC—then he didn’t want to do anything. So it fell to Lutyens, who had three young children from her first marriage and now a new baby with Clark, to try and earn money. As the only 12-tone composer in England, that was never going to be easy. I didn’t know much about Clark. His greatest claim to fame was the contents of his phone book because he knew Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók and Maurice Ravel and was able to bring them to the BBC to do concerts in London before the Second World War . He helped to make London into a cosmopolitan musical place. But by the time he got together with Lutyens that had all gone and it fell to her to support him. Lutyens is a fascinating figure. She was a great teacher. Her students were very loyal to her in spite of her anti-Semitism . She would say terrible things to her Jewish students, and yet they still spoke highly of her. They felt a sense of protectiveness towards her, perhaps, because she was depressed and an alcoholic and had a difficult life. Lutyens wrote a lot of music, including for Hammer Horror films. That’s where she took her 12-tone system and it worked: people actually wanted it and paid for it. So she spent a lot of time writing scores for film as well as for radio dramas and occasionally TV."