‘I take this opportunity to emphasise that I do indeed exist… and that my Viola Sonata is my own unaided work!’ So wrote Rebecca Clarke in a programme note for a recital in 1977 that included her Viola Sonata.
By this point, nearly 60 years after Clarke had written the piece in question, she chose to adopt a lightly humorous tone, poking fun at those who may have thought she wasn’t a real composer, even that her sonata was somehow fraudulent.
Yet it must have grated, to say the least, that anyone ever doubted her Viola Sonata was Clarke’s creation. It was, after all, her deep affinity with the instrument that led her to write one of the most important works in the viola repertoire.
We named it one of the best pieces of viola music of all time
When did Rebecca Clarke start playing the viola?
Clarke began her musical life as a violinist, taking it up as a child. As a student at the Royal College of Music, she switched to the viola, a not unusual path to follow.
Her teacher, the renowned Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, urged her to make the swap – and not only because good viola players were scarce and in demand. She was one of his most promising composition pupils – the only woman he’d ever accepted as a student, Clarke proudly noted – and Stanford felt that playing the viola in the college orchestra would place her ‘right in the middle of the sound and [you] can tell how it is all done’. His advice proved shrewd. Clarke became a first-rate performer – one of the few women in the early 20th century to support herself as an independent viola player – and the instrument suited her.
And she thought deeply about what made the viola distinctive, exploring how viola-playing composers from Mozart to Vaughan Williams had written for it. Brahms, she wrote, ‘seems to have had a particular affinity for its intensely personal tone – sombre yet glowing, reserved yet eloquent’, and Dohnányi wrote viola music that was ‘unblushingly and delightfully romantic, giving to the viola just the warm, emotional melodies it loves to play’.
When did Rebecca Clarke compose her viola sonata?
In the winter of 1918-19, while giving a series of chamber concerts in Honolulu, the Anglo-American composer began work on her own Viola Sonata, which itself would be full of feeling and intensely personal.
Stanford might have had hopes for her orchestral writing, but it was chamber music that Clarke loved above all else. Reading of a composition competition at the Berkshire Music Festival set up by the American patroness Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and offering a prize of $1,000, Clarke set about finishing her Sonata, finalising it in the summer of 1919 in Detroit. She posted it off and awaited the results.
From 73 anonymous entries, Clarke made it into the final two. And it’s no surprise her piece impressed the judges.
The music and style of Clarke's viola sonata
A passionate three-movement sonata, the work roves across the viola’s whole range, making the most of its intense sound in the upper reaches and the huskier tones on its lowest string.
Clarke’s voice is distinctive, rooted in the Austro-German tradition yet also steeped in a love of the English pastoralists like Vaughan Williams and French impressionists such as Debussy and Ravel. While in Hawaii, Clarke heard gamelan and a Chinese orchestra, whose sounds also echo in the Sonata.
Her harmonic blend draws on tonal, modal and octatonic scales; her melodic writing moves between impassioned outbursts and rhapsodic reverie. It’s a piece full of life and poetic feeling, and the score is prefaced with a quote from the French poet Alfred de Musset’s La Nuit de Mai: ‘Poète, prends ton luth; le vin de la jeunesse fermente cette nuit dan les veines de Dieu’ (Poet, take your lute; the wine of youth ferments this evening in God’s veins).
How did it do in the competition?
Clarke was up against stiff competition – and the jury couldn’t decide which of the two finalists should win. Coolidge had the casting vote. She gave it to the other piece, which turned out to be Bloch’s Suite for Viola. As the final decision had been so close, the judges decided to open the second envelope and name the runner-up.
‘And you should have seen their faces when they saw it was by a woman,’ Coolidge later told Clarke. The composer wasn’t put out to have come second – she graciously said it had been an honour to tie with Bloch, who was one of her great inspirations – but it was hard to hear the rumour that ‘I hadn’t written the stuff myself, that somebody had done it for me’.
Still, such sexist attitudes didn’t stop Clarke. The Sonata’s premiere at Coolidge’s festival had given her ‘the greatest impetus to further work that anything possibly could’. She entered the contest again in 1921, this time with her Piano Trio – and again came second. Coolidge and Clarke became firm friends: her 1923 Cello Rhapsody was commissioned as a result.
Yet her fame suffered a dip. In 1980, the year after her death, Clarke was granted a mere line in the New Grove Dictionary of Music, describing her as ‘English viola player and composer’ with a cross-reference to her husband, James Friskin. However, along with the Piano Trio, the Viola Sonata has been at the forefront of the recent renaissance in Clarke’s music. Less than ten years ago, in 2015, there were only around 15 recordings to choose from; now there are over 35.
The best recordings of Rebecca Clarke's Viola Sonata
Tabea Zimmermann (viola)
Kirill Gerstein (piano)
Myrios MYR 004
For a performance that encompasses the whole gamut of emotions and moods found in Clarke’s Viola Sonata, Tabea Zimmermann and Kirill Gerstein are the duo to beat. In many other recordings, the musicians pigeonhole the music, taking it too far into a Brahmsian direction, say, or treating it as a Vaughan Williams imitation.
And yet the Sonata speaks clearly in Clarke’s own voice, one that’s full of contrast and complexity. Regular chamber-music partners, Zimmermann and Gerstein reveal those layers in a performance that wraps thoughtful detail into a spontaneous outpouring of music.
One of the trickier aspects to reconcile is the balance of the impassioned, rhapsodic, rhetorical seam of writing with the hushed, impressionist, improvisatory moods, especially in the outer movements. Zimmermann and Gerstein achieve this blend right from the opening declamatory flourish that morphs into a free-wheeling viola line. Zimmermann soars in the lyrical lines of the Impetuoso, while Gerstein finds a beautiful variety of touch and colour at the keyboard – and the pair never lose sight of the musical architecture either.
Although it’s the shortest of the three movements, the central Vivace often flummoxes performers, and there are several otherwise impressive recordings that are scuppered by sluggish tempos or the performers landing too heavily when the music should dance lightly. The Zimmermann-Gerstein duo captures the music’s Puckish spirit, springing and scurrying around their instruments, coordination as tight as aerial performers. The rippling central section is a chance to show off colour and atmosphere, beautifully done here, while the spring cross rhythms keep their momentum where other players get bogged down.
The Adagio-Allegro starts with a solo piano line in the left hand, marked ‘semplice’. Enigmatic in character, it can easily fall flat in performance, but, in muted tones, Gerstein gives it shape and meaning. And where it can feel like an oddity in some performances, Zimmermann and Gerstein manage to make it feel connected to a later pianissimo section in the piece.
Marked ‘lontano’, the piano speaks as if from a different land, while the rustling viola tremolos build in intensity. The New York Times wrote that Clarke was ‘moved by a strong feeling for beauty’ after the work’s the first performance, words which also seem apt for this 2010 recording
Barbara Buntrock (viola)
Avi Music AVI 8553304
Barbara Buntrock is a former student of Tabea Zimmermann, and while they both share the same sensitivity to colour and tone, this 2014 performance with pianist Daniel Heide is no mere carbon copy.
Buntrock stamps her own mark on the Impetuoso, balancing its enigmatic, rhapsodic hushed moments with decisive drive in the expansive lyrical passages. The delicate, playful elegance of the Vivace wafts French perfume, and she and Heide avoid the clumsy emphases that trip up so many other players. The finale is given space to breathe – and Heide’s piano playing is beautifully sensitive.
Richard Yongjae O’Neill (viola)
Decca 481 9170
This 2005 recording sets its sights on intensity – and boy does it pay off. The Korean-American viola player gives a performance full of atmosphere, excitement and passion, matched by pianist Warren Jones.
The pair tap into a gorgeous seam of yearning in the opening Impetuoso, building up to a great melodic outpouring towards the end of the movement. The Vivace is lively and immediate, sparks flying between the instruments. O’Neill’s sound gleams in the final Adagio-Allegro and once again the duo prove themselves masters of the music’s emotional peaks and troughs.
Ellen Nisbeth (viola)
BIS BIS-2182
Rising-star Ellen Nisbeth is joined by fellow Swede Bengt Forsberg for this nuanced and sensitive performance from 2017. Her tone is more lithe than luminous, casting the music in a subtly different light to the other recordings explored here. It’s effective, especially in the sprightly Vivace.
We’re up close in the recorded sound too, which lets us hear the grain of the viola sound. In the final movement, Nisbeth’s legato playing draws out Clarke’s long-breathed phrases, supported by supple playing from Forsberg, while the ending is gutsily done.
