Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) wrote vocal chamber music over the whole of her career, from Wandrers Nachtlied, her first completed composition, in 1903, through to her overhaul of Lethe, in the winter of 1976/77. Taken together, her songs and duets constitute one of the greatest and most distinctive contributions to the vocal repertoire of the twentieth century.

Clarke started experimenting with composition as a teenage violin-student with only a few terms of harmony and piano under her belt, but her earliest works—eighteen songs and a vocal duet, mostly to German texts—clearly anticipate the thematic deployment of the deep bass, the boldness in combining widely disparate ranges, the poetic literalism, and the highly developed musical taste and theatrical judgment that would characterise the great works of her maturity. They also demonstrate a lively market-awareness in their deployment of so much German verse, with the occasional musical nod to Brahms, at a time when the Lieder-recital was a cutting-edge growth industry, London’s recital-halls rivaled anything in Berlin and Vienna, and Brahms’s late works were still thought of as lean, stripped-down contemporary music.

Some of these pieces—perhaps including Aufblick, Nacht für Nacht, and Vergissmeinnicht, to guess by the beautifully finished autographs—led to Clarke’s being taken on as a student by Sir Charles Stanford, the greatest composition teacher of the age. Stanford believed in withholding “the crutches of suggestive poetry” until a student had demonstrated her “power of writing absolute music,” but almost immediately he made a practical suggestion that would transform Clarke’s life: “You must come into the orchestra,” he said. “Change over to the viola, because then you are right in the middle of the sound, and can tell how it’s all done.” As a result, Clarke became, not only one of the world’s great violists, but a composer who always left a nice acoustical pocket for any leading part, be it instrumental or vocal, so that her compositions practically balance themselves. Another powerful influence was Vaughan Williams’s song-cycle On Wenlock Edge and its principal exponent, the great Gervase Elwes, whose style—simple, direct, forceful, fully theatrical, every phrase crackling with emotional life, fiercely characterised, rhythms briskly articulated but flickering with subtle rubato, mood and feeling always to the fore, and technical correctness be damned—would find echoes in the work of every other singer Clarke admired or associated herself with.

Elwes took up Shy one and The cloths of heaven around 1918, and made Clarke so famous as a composer of songs that her triumph with a concert-length instrumental piece—her now-classic Viola Sonata—at the 1919 Coolidge Competition not only caused a sensation, but came as a complete surprise, even to those who thought they knew her work. Clarke was courted by other great recitalists, including Lawrence Strauss, John Goss, and Povla Frijsh, all of whom made a specialty of The seal man, and Norman Notley, who premiered the Old English Songs, and then, with his partner David Brynley, prompted the tenor-baritone duets. Shy one and The seal man became fixtures in the concert hall and—perhaps surprisingly, in the case of The seal man—on the adjudication circuit, and Frijsh included Shy one in her recorded anthology of art songs, released to international acclaim in 1941. Clarke’s vocal music suffered a dip in popularity during the heyday of what she called “the ground-glass school of composition,” but strong new advocates emerged, beginning in the 1960s with Jane Manning and Richard Rodney Bennett, and continuing to the present day with Jan de Gaetani, Graham Trew, Patricia Wright, Antony Rolfe Johnson, Sarah Walker, Suzanne Mentzer, Sarah Connolly, James Gilchrist, Emily d’Angelo, James Newby, Golda Schultz, Roderick Williams, Nicholas Phan, and Kitty Whately, to name but a few.

Much of Clarke’s vocal music has been recorded, but the present album brings it all together under one roof, including a complete survey of the early songs (only Tears was previously recorded), and first recordings of Weep you no more, sad fountains, in its original solo version, and the epic Binnorie: A Ballad. It would take a sizeable monograph even to begin to lay out the riches in these works, or to sketch their histories. Luckily, Clarke’s work speaks so powerfully for itself that only a few bits of background information may be necessary.

Aufblick (1904) shows that Clarke’s artistic judgment was firmly in place, almost from the beginning. Webern, Szymanovski, and Bax each set this text within a few years of Clarke, but only she had the acuity to introduce a distinct new sound just before the voice cries, “Hark!”, the discipline to forgo illustration of the gushing stream and twinkling stars that are explicitly not present on the occasion, and the discrimination to understand that an evocation of Glockenchöre (“bell-choirs”) emanating from a far-off cathedral must fall somewhere between a single bell-tone (Webern) and a clangour of overwhelming magnitude (Szymanovski, Bax).

O Welt (1904): Clarke’s father was from Boston, and she was used to hearing and seeing American English in the home, so “Oh” often replaces “O” in her manuscripts. This particular text may have been given to Clarke by the writer, a friend of Clarke’s father. A slightly different version was set by Arnold Mendelssohn, the writer’s cousin. I can find no evidence that the text was ever published in its own right.

Vor der Türe (1905), an ambiguous lullaby, plays on “Wulf” (the child’s name) and “Wölfchen” (“little wolf,” a faintly alarming term of endearment), encrypting the fact that the poet’s son was named Wulf, and, thus, that the hand rocking the cradle may be the poet’s own.

Durch die Nacht (1906): The rapid staccato fluttering in the piano-part imitates the “humming and singing” of telegraph wires, which Clarke captured one afternoon, on her way to the town swimming-pool, by pressing her ear to the poles.

A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah (1920) is a virtual lexicon of Clarke’s close involvement with Ernest Bloch’s music, which also provided inspiration for her Trio and The seal man.

The seal man (1921-24) is a tragedy of pure intent and honest dealing, despite much victimist palaver to the contrary. It is not essential to read the source from which Clarke extracted her text—John Masefield’s yarn of the same title, in A Mainsail Haul—but it will be clarifying.

Come, O come, my life’s delight and Three Old English Songs (both 1924) mark the beginnings of a deliberate turn towards “writing absolutely simply,” with Bloch nowhere evident.

Binnorie: A Ballad (c1941) was discovered in Clarke’s papers long after her death. Circumstantial evidence suggests that she wrote it during World War Two, while marooned in the United States and thrown, unhappily, upon the mercy of her two sisters-in-law, and that she subsequently concealed its existence. In any case, there is no record of her ever having mentioned it.

Lethe: Clarke set this piece aside while she and I were cataloging her works in 1976/77, revised it, threw away the original manuscript, mentioned it only after the catalogue was done, and dated it 1941, but never decided where it fit into that year’s crowded field. It seems like the inverse of Binnorie, taking all the things that make that piece so shocking—the passionate declamation, the huge leaps, the steady rain of dissonance—and gentling them into a slow-moving, delicately inflected, almost disembodied incantation that barely raises its voice.

The donkey (1942) was conceived as a showpiece for Povla Frijsh, who, at that point in her career, was as much diseuse as singer. It, too, may encrypt a reaction to Clarke’s uneasy family situation, with savage, dissonant, hammer-blows, sweeping over more than an octave, at “Starve, scourge, deride me,” a baleful, low monotone at “I keep my secret still,” and a screaming echo of the opening of Clarke’s Viola Sonata—note for note, at pitch—at “a shout about my ears.”

Finally, a few words about our decision to record The seal man and Binnorie in new arrangements featuring that mainstay of Clarke’s other career, the viola. Clarke was a prolific arranger, and she deliberately undermarked her publications, so as to give performers plenty of leeway. More to the point, she hated being treated like a monument (“I’m not Beethoven, you know!”), and if anyone asked her how she wanted something played, she snapped, “Do it your way, not mine.” We have followed her lead, on the theory that, even if she weren’t sold on the result, she would have said, “Well, I can certainly hear how you feel about the music.”

Christopher Johnson © 2025

Of any composer, one might reasonably ask: why record their complete works? It’s a fair question—even for so-called “canon” figures like Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, or J S Bach. No creative career is without missteps, and a comprehensive catalogue inevitably includes both masterpieces and lesser works.

Yet it is precisely through such exhaustive study that we’ve come to understand these composers’ musical languages so well that their music—early, middle, and late—has become second nature to musicians and listeners alike. This deep familiarity shapes our sense of their style and reinforces their place in history.

Rebecca Clarke, by contrast, dismissed the idea that her unpublished works were worth revisiting. “I’m not Beethoven,” she reportedly scoffed. But that’s precisely why we must examine them. For composers who have not yet received their due—and who have been historically marginalized for any number of reasons—such study is essential. Without it, how else can we understand their syntax, their voice, and their place in the broader musical landscape?

Clarke’s hesitation—“I’m not Beethoven”—reflects a familiar artistic humility, perhaps even insecurity. It’s understandable. Every artist wants to present only their best. But for those of us who champion her music today, this instinct must be balanced against a broader truth: canonical composers have long benefited from the preservation and performance of all their works, not just the best-known ones. Clarke deserves no less.

Each of Clarke’s songs reveals a composer rich in imagination, literary insight, and expressive nuance. They are musically sophisticated, thoughtfully crafted, and brimming with the potential that becomes fully realized in mature masterpieces like The seal man or The cloths of heaven. Much like Bach—whose greatness lies in the remarkable consistency of his vast output—Clarke’s songs, subjective as taste may be, rarely (if ever) miss the mark.

We are deeply grateful to our colleague Christopher Johnson for making available Clarke’s early unpublished manuscripts for this album. This recording affirms her place as one of the great song composers of the 20th century—and the vocal repertoire is richer for it.

Nicholas Phan © 2025