Considerable evidence supports Nicola LeFanu’s claim that her mother “never felt part of the ‘English pastoral school’”, given that a great deal of Elizabeth Maconchy’s music is motivically tight, non-rhapsodic, rhythmically punchy, and dissonant, thus mitigating against associations with the fluid rhythms, long-breathed phrases, and modally derived triadic harmonies associated with pastoral music. However, there are other facets to twentieth-century English pastoralism beyond these, and to contemporaneous British artists’ treatment of the broader pastoral topic. While Maconchy’s engagement with pastoralism was both limited and idiosyncratic, it did exist. The following brief survey of how Maconchy studied, conceived of, and applied pastoralist principles and traits within a small selection of works – including her cantata The Land (1930), the Quintet for Oboe and Strings (1932), and Variations on a Theme from Vaughan Williams’s Job (1957) – provides an new point of access for understanding her distinctive compositional voice.

This chapter examines Elizabeth Maconchy’s children’s operas, situating them alongside other works she composed especially for children and young audiences. Much like Benjamin Britten, Maconchy saw the inherent value, intellect, and presence of self in children and youth, and thus did not patronise them in her compositions. Children’s opera can essentially be subdivided into three categories of works: those written about, those written for, and those written with children as the primary audience, subject, or participants. Broadly speaking, children’s operas may coalesce any of the three sets, resulting in an opera that is for an audience of children, about a child- or childhood-focused theme, and performed by a cast or cast members who are children. Justin Vickers examines Maconchy’s children’s operas as an integral facet of her compositional output not to be overlooked, and the milieu proved to be a catalyst for Maconchy’s abundant well of musical creativity. Moreover, these works may be positioned in the broader educational initiatives in music and the arts throughout the British Isles.

The Mercury Theatre, at 2a Ladbroke Road in London’s Notting Hill, was originally built as a school in 1851, that mid century year of British national and imperial pride and optimism, celebrated in Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition. Architect John Tarring (1806–1875) designed the original school for the Congregationalists as well as their adjacent Horbury Chapel (now the Kensington Temple, an Elim Pentecostal church). When the school closed, the building was utilised as a church hall (known as the Horbury Hall); in the 1920s, as the Horbury Rooms, the building was occupied by the Kensington Local Pensions Committee; and subsequently the premises were used by Abrasha Lozoff (1887–1936) as the Russian-Canadian sculptor’s studio. In 1927, Horbury Hall was purchased by Ashley Dukes (1885–1959), the successful playwright, drama critic and impresario, who was an active presence in British theatre for over half a century. Dukes met the Polish dancer Cyvia Myriam Ramberg (1888–1982), who, using the French form of her name, was later known as Marie Rambert, founder of the celebrated Ballet Rambert. Dukes and Rambert were married in 1918. Dukes purchased the Notting Hill site and initiated its conversion from church hall to (eventually) a small theatre which became the home of the Ballet Club later to transmogrify into the Ballet Rambert. Dukes’s improvements to what would become known as the Mercury Theatre included a partition within the principal open space to create a room for dance classes on one side and a small theatre on the other.

Music festivals have long been a significant forum in which to introduce new repertoire. In the United Kingdom well established events such as the Three Choirs, Norfolk and Norwich festivals or the London Proms season offered a synthesis of well-known works and premieres. The changing environment for the Arts in post-war Britain witnessed an expansion of festival activity. These initiatives were supported partly by the Arts Council and were encouraged by a desire to make music, old and new, accessible to a world starved by conflict. Elizabeth Maconchy takes an important role in the story of the festival. Her impressionistic orchestral suite The Land, the impact of war upon performance of her work, her experimental forays into opera, a fascination for narrative inspired by her own Celtic background and that of other countries, and her commitment to community music-making reveal much about her extensive contribution to twentieth-century festival culture.

Nicola LeFanu, Maconchy’s younger daughter, discusses her role as curator of her mother’s legacy. The three decades since Maconchy’s death in 1994 are covered. Obituaries are cited and an inevitable fluctuation of reputation. The centenary in 2007 is covered in depth, as since then Maconchy’s reputation has steadily grown. The chapter details the many performances, concerts and other tributes, including BBC ‘Composer of the Week’ and a heritage blue plaque on her former home. New publications (Chester Music) are detailed, from 2007 onward. The successful revivals of the three one -act operas are noted.

Increasing attention is cited, noting journal articles and the advent of key books, notably the publication of correspondence. Bibliography is provided.

Attention is paid to the abundance of new recordings, with details given.

LeFanu notes the ever-increasing interest in Maconchy’s music. She concludes with recollection of her mother’s dauntless personality, and a summary of the rich musical legacy.

While Elizabeth Maconchy was not keen on the term ‘woman composer’ her career was nonetheless affected by the fact of her gender. Against a backdrop of long-standing, widespread and seemingly intractable sexism, Maconchy found support and validation from other women composers, notably Grace Williams. This chapter explores the phenomenon of such ‘Supportive Sisterhoods’ over generations and across many different milieus, both artistic and otherwise, from the Amazons to the wives and sisters of the Lake Poets, to the CIA, to the group of women who formed the Macnaghten–Lemare concert series in the 1930s. We find that women have consistently and instinctively banded together to not only form creative partnerships but to stand against the extraordinarily persistent, if ill-founded, view that creativity is something best left to men.

Maconchy’s elder daughter Anna Dunlop, née LeFanu, provides detailed personal recollections. Maconchy’s childhood, studies, marriage to William LeFanu and early success is covered by memories that she shared with her daughter, including the struggle with tuberculosis.

From the Second World War onwards, Dunlop’s own reminiscences demonstrate that alongside her professional life, Maconchy was an affectionate, caring and maternal figure. She was skilled domestically: cooking and preserving, dress making and gardening. Wartime and evacuation were isolating. However her marriage and family life was a happy and fulfilling one and from the nineteen fifties she once again balanced this successfully with an increasingly busy professional life. Dunlop writes that her mother seldom took a break, but with her husband returned to Ireland for holidays whenever they could.

Dunlop left home for university in 1957, where her reminiscences end. Her conclusion notes that Maconchy was full of energy in all she undertook, for her family and for other composers.

Tuberculosis (TB) is an ancient disease of humans shown to be infectious by Robert Koch in 1882. It primarily affects the lungs and has been a major cause of human morbidity and mortality throughout history. When Elizabeth Maconchey developed TB in 1932, in the pre-drug era, Britain had developed an approach to treatment of which the core was hygiene therapy: this involved a healthy climate, strict rest and improved nutrition. Such care was provided in sanatoria, but could also be carried out in the home with supervision by a tuberculosis dispensary. Maconchey left London, Britain’s centre of musical life, to improve her environment and began a program of rest with slowly progressive exercise and nutrition. The management of TB evolved to include vaccination with BCG, mass screening using skin tests (tuberculin) and x-rays, surgical therapies (artificial pneumothorax, thoracoplasty) until replaced by effective, curative drug therapy in the 1950s.

Maconchy made one of the most significant contributions to the string quartet by a British twentieth-century composer and always regarded her thirteen quartets as being the pulsing heart of her ‘impassioned argument’ artistry. Why was Maconchy so drawn to the string quartet, and in what ways did she stretch the medium to new heights?

Rhiannon Mathias reveals how Maconchy’s early encounters with the music of Vaughan Williams, Bartók and Janáček helped her to forge her own original and distinctive compositional voice and examines the new frontiers that she explored in her string quartets.

As one somewhat surprised reviewer noted, Maconchy’s The Sofa contained what was possibly the first explicit representation of copulation on the British stage. Given that the opera was composed during the period of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship rules, it seems surprising indeed that Maconchy and her librettists Ursula Vaughan Williams were able to include such a scene. This chapter explores how censorship affected the British theatre scene in the mid twentieth century, and how The Sofa managed to evade its very particular restrictions. The chapter also suggests that the source material for the opera had scandal and censorship baked into its very origin story.

This survey chapter considers the public reception of female composers across the UK, USA, France, Germany and Austria at four points during Elizabeth Maconchy’s life, taking three or four examples from each period: 1904–10, 1932–9, 1959–60 and 1994–5. Composers at the end of their careers, such as Pauline Viardot and Irène Wieniawska (Poldowski) are considered alongside younger talents including Errollyn Wallen, Ruth Gipps and Margaret Bonds. Changing attitudes to class, race, ‘appropriate’ musical genres for women to engage with, and the very question of how intellectual and emotionally profound female composers could be, are considered – both in terms of prevailing narratives, and notable exceptions. Consideration is also given to the question of how these composers might be reincorporated into the historical narrative; and how much work remains to be done to raise awareness of their creative efforts.

Elizabeth Maconchy’s family moved to Dublin in 1917. The five years in which they remained in Ireland coincided with a period of remarkable change in the country: the aftermath of the Easter Rising (1916), the War of Independence (1919–21) and the Irish Civil War (1922–23). Above all, it saw Ireland gain its independence from the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’ with the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922. This chapter outlines the trajectory of the revolutionary years in their broad historical and political context. It considers the Irish revolution against the wider background of the Gaelic Revival, with which it was intricately bound, while also considering musical culture in Dublin at that time.