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Dame Elizabeth Violet Maconchy Le Fanu DBE (19 March 1907, Broxbourne, Hertfordshire – 11 November 1994) was an English composer, most noted for her cycle of thirteen string quartets.
Biography
Maconchy began to compose at the age of six. After the First World War, her family moved to Ireland. Here she took piano lessons, but was advised by her teacher to study at the Royal College of Music in London, where she began studying at the age of sixteen. Her teachers included Arthur Alexander (piano) and Charles Wood and Ralph Vaughan Williams (musical composition). Her music attracted the attention of the most distinguished musicians of the day, including Sir Henry Wood, Sir Donald Tovey and Gustav Holst.
Here she became interested in the contemporary music of Central Europe, particularly Bartók, Berg and Janáček. On the recommendation of Vaughan Williams, Maconchy undertook further study in Prague, where her piano concerto was premiered in 1930 on her 23rd birthday, by Erwin Schulhoff, the same year in which Henry Wood premiered her orchestral piece The Land, and in which she married William Le Fanu (1904–1995).
In 1930 Maconchy married William LeFanu; they had two daughters, Nicola LeFanu and her sister.
In 1932 Maconchy developed tuberculosis. She moved to the country lived entirely outdoors and allegedly cured herself by will-power.
She received a CBE in 1977. The last of her celebrated string quartets, the thirteenth (subtitled Quartetto Corto) was written in 1984. Maconchy was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1987. Known to her friends as Betty LeFanu she lived for many years in Boreham, Essex. She was Chair of the Composers Guild and of SPNM (succeeding Benjamin Britten as President).
Family
The composer Nicola LeFanu -- the second of Maconchy's two daughters with husband William LeFanu - dedicated her String Quartet No 2 (1996) to the memory of her parents.
Works
In 1930 her piano concerto and her orchestral piece The Land were premiered.
In 1933 she wrote her first string quartet, perhaps the medium for which she was best known, and she composed 13 of these in all, spanning over 50 years.
In 1933 her quintet for oboe and strings won a prize in the London Daily Telegraph Chamber Music Competition, and was recorded by Helen Gaskel with the Griller Quartet soon afterwards on HMV Records.
After the difficulties of the war years, Maconchy began to receive a large number of commissions, and composed much music for orchestra, chamber groups and voices. She wrote three one-act operas:
- The Sofa (1957) - a comic opera
- The Departure (1961)
- The Three Strangers (1967).
Her other choral and vocal works include:
- the cantata Heloise and Abelard
- settings of Gerard Manley Hopkins,
- settings of the Synge/Petrarch sonnets of My Dark Heart "one of the most haunting late works".
- Sea, Moon and Stars (1977) for Soprano and Piano, commissioned by Jane Manning and Richard Rodney Bennett with words taken from the poems and meditations of Thomas Traherne
References
- this and several other bio-details come from the Purcell Room Programme Notes 1 March 2007 by her daughter Nicola LeFanu
- Programme notes, op cit
- Programme notes op. cit.
- R.D. Darrell, The Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music (New York 1936), 278.