Rebecca Clarke

The British-American composer Rebecca Clarke is best-known for her chamber music – which, as a superb viola player, she composed with the instinctive mastery of an insider. Born in North London, she trained under Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music, and became one of the first female orchestral players in London's Queen's Hall Orchestra. Her first major success as a composer came in 1919 when her Viola Sonata won second prize in a composition competition organised by the American philanthropist Elizabeth Coolidge – prompting sexist rumours that "Rebecca Clarke" was a pseudonym for a male composer. Building a performing career between the UK and the USA (where many of her family lived), she composed choral music and songs as well as a handful of impassioned, superbly conceived chamber works, of which the Piano Trio (1921) has established itself as a classic. After moving permanently to the USA in 1939, she found that her compositional impulse "dried up" (as she put it) despite the encouragement of her new husband, a fellow musician. She was "rediscovered" in the 1970s at the time of her 90th birthday – when she spoke candidly about her career and work, prompting a reappraisal of her music. Her Sonata is now a standard of the Viola repertoire, and the Piano Trio is established as one of the 20th century's masterpieces in this challenging medium.