Rebecca Helferich Clarke (27 August 1886 – 13 October 1979) was a British classical composer and violist. Internationally renowned as a viola virtuoso, she also became one of the first female professional orchestral players in London.
Clarke had a German mother and an American father, and spent substantial periods of her life in the United States, where she permanently settled after World War II. She was born in Harrow and studied at the Royal Academy of Music and Royal College of Music in London. Stranded in the United States at the outbreak of World War II, she married composer and pianist James Friskin in 1944. Clarke died at her home in New York at the age of 93.
Although Clarke's output was not large, her work was recognised for its compositional skill and artistic power. Some of her works have yet to be published; those that were published in her lifetime were largely forgotten after she stopped composing. Scholarship and interest in her compositions revived in 1976. The Rebecca Clarke Society was established in 2000 to promote the study and performance of her music.
Clarke was born in Harrow, England, to Joseph Thacher Clarke, an American, and his German wife, Agnes Paulina Marie Amalie Helferich. Her father was interested in music, and Clarke started on violin after sitting in on lessons that were being given to her brother, Hans Thacher Clarke, who was 15 months her junior. There was a family string quartet: Joseph playing cello, and Agnes, who was a pianist, playing viola, with Hans and Rebecca. Her father was abusive, often hitting her with a steel ruler over infractions such as biting her nails.
Clarke started composing at an early age and began formal studies at the Royal Academy of Music in 1903, as a violin pupil of Hans Wessely. She did not enjoy the teaching, as she said in an interview at the end of her life, which involved the "book under the arm" method for correct bowing: already at the time it was considered an "old fashioned German" style of tuition. She was withdrawn by her father in 1905, after her harmony teacher Percy Hilder Miles proposed to her. Miles later left his Stradivarius violin to Clarke in his will.
Shortly after leaving the Royal Academy, Clarke made the first of many visits to the United States. She then attended the Royal College of Music, becoming Sir Charles Villiers Stanford's first female composition student. Her substantial Theme and Variations for piano dates from this period. At Stanford's urging she shifted her focus from the violin to the viola, just as the latter was coming to be seen as a legitimate solo instrument. She studied with Lionel Tertis, who was considered by some the greatest violist of the day. In 1910 she composed "Tears", a setting of Chinese poetry, in collaboration with a group of fellow students at RCM.
Clarke also sang under the direction of Ralph Vaughan Williams in a student ensemble called the Palestrina Society, which she organised with another student, the pianist Beryl Reeves. Reeves, the daughter of William Pember Reeves and Maud Pember Reeves, married Clarke's brother Eric in 1919.
Orchestral musician and chamber ensembles in London
Following her criticism of his extra-marital affairs, Clarke's father turned her out of the house and cut off her funds. She had to leave the Royal College in 1910 and supported herself through her viola playing. Clarke, along with Jessie Grimson on violin, became one of the first female professional orchestral musicians in London when she was selected by Sir Henry Wood to play in the Queen's Hall Orchestra in 1913. She also participated in chamber groups during this period, including Nora Clench's female quartet.
Clarke was sought after as a violist, and was invited to the at-home chamber music recitals of Paul and Muriel Draper in Lisson Grove from 1911 to 1914; Paul Draper was an American tenor studying in London with Raimund von zur-Mühlen. Clarke played with Artur Schnabel, Pablo Casals, Jascha Heifetz, Jacques Thibaud, Guilhermina Suggia, Arthur Rubinstein, Pierre Monteux, and George Szell, among others.
In 1916 Clarke visited the United States, where some of her songs had been performed by Gervase Elwes. On this trip, she met Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, a music patron. Marin Jacobson has suggested that the contact was through the pianist Gertrude Watson, a friend of Coolidge who had studied under Theodor Leschetizky, and who had toured with Clarke and the cellist May Mukle for the benefit of war relief.
In 1918, Clarke premiered her short, lyrical piece for viola and piano titled Morpheus, composed under the pseudonym "Anthony Trent", at a joint recital with May Mukle in New York City. Reviewers praised Morpheus, if largely ignoring Clarke's other works.
Clarke continued to perform with May Mukle, in Hawaii in 1918 and 1919, and on a tour of the British colonies in 1923. Mukle was a good friend, and with Kathleen Long and Marjorie Hayward they later made up the English Ensemble piano quartet.
Compositions 1919 to mid-1920s
Clarke's compositional career peaked in a brief period, beginning with the viola sonata she entered in a 1919 competition sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. In a field of 72 entrants, Clarke's sonata tied for first place with a composition by Ernest Bloch; Coolidge gave Bloch her casting vote. Reporters speculated that "Rebecca Clarke" was a pseudonym for Bloch himself. The sonata was well received and had its first performance at the Berkshire music festival in 1919. In 1921 Clarke again made a good showing in Coolidge's competition with her piano trio. A 1923 rhapsody for cello and piano followed, sponsored by Coolidge, making Clarke the sole woman to receive Coolidge's patronage. These three works represent the height of Clarke's compositional career.
Clarke, after completing a world tour in 1922–23, embarked upon a career as a solo and ensemble performer in London. In 1924 she became a founding member of the Aeolian Players. She was one of the Aeolian Hall ensemble conducted in October 1928 by Maurice Ravel, in a concert of his own works, with Gordon Bryan, Gwendolen Mason and others.
Clarke performed on several recordings in the 1920s and 1930s, and participated in BBC music broadcasts. Her compositional output greatly decreased during this period. However, she continued to perform, participating in the Paris Colonial Exhibition in 1931 as part of the English Ensemble. Between 1927 and 1933 she was romantically involved with the British baritone John Goss, who was eight years her junior and married at the time. He had premiered several of her mature songs, two of which were dedicated to him, "June Twilight" and "The Seal Man". Her "Tiger, Tiger", finished at the time the relationship was ending, proved to be her last composition for solo voice until the early 1940s.
In 1936 Clarke sold the Stradivarius she had been bequeathed to a dealer in New York. At the outbreak of World War II, Clarke was in the US visiting her two brothers, and was unable to obtain a visa to return to Britain. She lived for a while with her brothers' families and then in 1942 took a position as a governess for a family in Connecticut. She composed 10 works between 1939 and 1942, including her Passacaglia on an Old English Tune. She had first met James Friskin, a composer, concert pianist, and founding member of the Juilliard School faculty, and later to become her husband, when they were both students at the Royal College of Music. They renewed their friendship after a chance meeting on a Manhattan street in 1944 and married in September of that year when both were in their late 50s. According to musicologist Liane Curtis, Friskin was "a man who gave [Clarke] a sense of deep satisfaction and equilibrium."