Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World — a trailblazing group biography

After centuries of comparative obscurity, women in classical music have been much in the news. Tár, Todd Field’s film about a charismatic, abusive composer-conductor who falls foul of intergenerational culture wars, has been criticised for depicting the manipulative musical genius as a woman, in an industry better known for its male monstres sacrés.

Leah Broad’s debut group biography cleverly interleaves the lives of four pioneering English women composers spanning the late 19th to late 20th century. The Oxford musicologist evokes the prejudices and obstacles faced by women in classical music so vividly that it could be seen as a corrective, or companion piece, to Todd Field’s compelling grand guignol narrative.

Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), the oldest, most widely known and often widely derided of Broad’s Quartet, wrote of the “temptation to pretend that women are non-existent musically”. It was a temptation that the musical establishment of the time found difficult to resist. The conventional view, according to Broad, was that “it was a biological impossibility for women to manage the kind of abstract thought associated with composition”.

She points out that her four subjects were not the first, or only, women composers. Nor were the obstacles they faced, or the view that female music-making should be a strictly domestic accomplishment, confined to the English musical world. German composer Fanny Mendelssohn, gifted sister of the more famous Felix, was told by their father: “music will perhaps become his profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.” Clara Schumann, gifted wife of the more famous Robert, admitted defeat, writing: “I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose — there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?”

When the work of women composers was noticed at all, it was dismissed as too femininely frivolous — merely “decorative” was George Bernard Shaw’s description of Smyth’s choral Mass — or imitatively masculine. “Why will so many women of the present day not recognise that they are women, and that they are most attractive when they are most womanly?” asked another critic, adding that Smyth’s Mass “necessarily and properly fails when she endeavours to become too masculine in her methods”. Unsurprisingly Smyth, a close friend of Virginia Woolf and Emmeline Pankhurst, became a militant suffragette and was briefly imprisoned for throwing a brick through the window of an unsympathetic politician.

In contrast, Rebecca Clarke, born in 1886, a generation after Smyth, “rarely expressed forthright support for women’s causes”, and balked at being pigeonholed as a “woman composer”. She was a virtuoso viola player, one of the first women to be hired by a professional orchestra, and she composed nearly 100 works across forms and genres, only a score of which were published in her lifetime (she died in 1979). Smyth’s suggestion that Clarke’s career had been aided by her Pre-Raphaelite good looks was not well received; Clarke, who moved to America and largely gave up composing after she married in her fifties, declared Smyth a “funny, cracked old thing”.

Smyth had a warmer relationship with Dorothy Howell (1898-1982), whose Proms debut in 1919 with her symphonic poem Lamia was critically acclaimed. According to a reviewer, Howell was “one of the sunniest, most natural, and unassuming girls . . . the very antithesis of what the general public imagine a musical genius to be.” She was also described as the English Strauss. But critics turned on her, denigrating later work for displaying “merely an imitative feminine gift”, and she failed to get subsequent compositions published, let alone performed. Smyth, a veteran self-publicist, counselled Howell to “pester conductors” for performances but such assertiveness wasn’t in the younger composer’s nature. Instead, she found an outlet for her music within the Catholic church, turned to teaching and lived quietly in the Malvern Hills, where she regularly tended the nearby grave of Edward Elgar.

It might be argued that Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003), the youngest of Broad’s quartet, became an agent of her own obscurity. A formidably talented pianist and cellist, she enjoyed early success as a composer with an acclaimed piano concerto and orchestral overtures. At Rank, Britain’s largest film production company, she became one of the first women composers of film music, weathering endemic gender inequality, disparities in pay and failure to credit her scores. But in later years, she devoted herself to promoting not her own work but that of composer William Alwyn, her music teacher and, after a long affair, her husband.

Carwithen’s generation “had to handle just as many prejudices and stereotypes as Ethel, Rebecca and Dorothy had, if not more so”, writes Broad, describing the musical establishment of the time as macho and belligerently heterosexual. She cites a 1955 announcement by the music director of the Arts Council that he was launching a campaign “against homosexuality in British music”, stating that: “The influence of perverts in the world of music has grown beyond all measure. If it is not curbed soon, Covent Garden and other precious musical heritages could suffer irreparable harm.”

Happily, the campaign didn’t hamper the careers or legacies of Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett and Peter Maxwell Davies. But musical women, disparaged as “housewife composers”, often failed to thrive and much of the work written by Broad’s trailblazing quartet remained unpublished and unperformed. In this absorbing group biography, Broad deftly handles the complexities of different lives and personalities, placing her subjects in the musical and social context of their time. One could do with fewer novelistic flourishes — descriptions of sunsets, flickering candlelight and “jewels glistening under blood red lampshades” — but Broad has a rare gift for eloquent evocation of the music itself and answers the key question (was the work any good?) resoundingly in the affirmative, making a persuasive case for a revision and expansion of the musical canon.

And now, she tells us, we can decide for ourselves as new recordings and performances of these neglected works emerge. She does, however, caution against complacency. Only 8.2 per cent of orchestral concerts worldwide feature works by women; only 37 per cent of players in American orchestras are women; and fewer than 10 per cent of American orchestras have been conducted by women. These are figures that might, in the case of the controversial lklbe used as an effective plea in mitigation.

Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World by Leah Broad, Faber, £20, 471 pages