Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World - 'Magnificent' (Kate Mosse)

Description

'Magnificent.' - Kate Mosse'Riveting.' - Antonia Fraser 'Wonderful.' - Claire Tomalin 'Splendid.' - Miranda Seymour Ethel Smyth (b.1858): Famed for her operas, this trailblazing queer Vic-torian composer was a larger-than-life socialite, intrepid traveller and committed Suffragette. Rebecca Clarke (b.1886): This talented violist and Pre-Raphaelite beauty was one of the first women ever hired by a professional orchestra, later cele-brated for her modernist experimentation. Dorothy Howell (b.1898): A prodigy who shot to fame at the 1919 Proms, her reputation as the 'English Strauss' never dented her modesty; on retire-ment, she tended Elgar's grave alone. Doreen Carwithen (b.1922): One of Britain's first woman film composers who scored Elizabeth II's coronation film, her success hid a 20-year affair with her married composition tutor. In their time, these women were celebrities. They composed some of the century's most popular music and pioneered creative careers; but today, they are ghostly presences, surviving only as muses and footnotes to male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten - until now. Leah Broad's magnificent group biography resurrects these forgotten voices, recounting lives of rebellion, heartbreak and ambition, and celebrating their musical masterpieces. Lighting up a panoramic sweep of British history over two World Wars, Quartet revolutionises the canon forever.

Leah Broad is a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford University, specialising in twentieth-century music. She was one of 2016's BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers and in 2015 won the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism. She writes and speaks for organisations including Glyndebourne, London Chamber Orchestra and the BBC Proms. Quartet is her first book.