Have we got it wrong about Rebecca Clarke?

Paul Brownsey says:

“Misnomers”? Not “mistakes”?

David K. Nelson says:

Interestingly she is often claimed as an American composer. By we Americans that is.

Violists have featured the Clarke Sonata for some years now as very much a centerpiece of their repertoire. I was not aware of a version for cello and piano, but I see on the website of the Rebecca Clarke Society that the piece is listed as for viola (or cello) and piano. I was aware it has been orchestrated into a viola concerto, which I have not yet heard. That too is mentioned on the Clarke Society website.

Patricia McCarty, an excellent violist, recorded it years ago with Virginia Eskin at the piano. Back when I was a record reviewer, the version I liked and reviewed was that by Hartmut Lindemann and Ben Martin on the Tacet CD label.

Christopher Johnson says:

If we’re going to “put things straight” about Rebecca Clarke, who was my wife’s great-aunt, let’s make sure we’ve got hold of actual facts. Clarke’s father was American and and her mother was German, but she and her three siblings were born in Harrow and had dual British-American citizenship from birth. She divided her time between England and America from her youth, but her training was top-of-the-line English (RAM with Wessely, RCM with Stanford), the bulk her concert-career took place in the UK (one of the first women in the Queen’s Hall Orchestra under Wood, Aeolian Hall, Wigmore Hall, BBC) and in Europe, and she made two round-the-world concert-tours. While she settled in New York after her marriage in 1944, she always thought of herself as culturally English, and spoke accordingly. She was back and forth across the Atlantic at least once a year until 1939, when war broke out in Europe. She was frantic to get back to London, but was refused reentry for the duration — musicians, the British consul told her, were “unproductive mouths.” She and her husband (the pianist James Friskin, himself a transplanted Scot) became passionate members of the British War Relief Society, just as Clarke and her lifelong best-friend May Mukle, the great British cellist, had barnstormed the States during World War I, concertizing to raise funds for British war-related charities. When she “played in a trio,” or any other ensemble, it was with the likes of Tertis, Casals, Monteux, and Szell. When she hosted old pals from abroad in her Manhattan apartment, they were the likes of Myra Hess and Vaughan Williams (“Uncle Ralph” to her). Say what you will about Clarke’s compositions, but don’t pretend she was some kind of jumped-up wuss who spent the bulk of her 94 years playing “Country Gardens” in a tea-shop trio for inattentive Yanks.