Letter from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Isolde Menges
Letter No. VWL5310
Letter from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Isolde Menges
Letter No.: VWL5310
The White Gates,
Westcott Road,
Dorking.
Nov 23 [1930]
Dear Miss Menges
I venture to introduce to you a former pupil of mine Elizabeth Maconchy (Mrs Le Fanu)
She has written a violin sonata of which I think very highly. She is anxious to show it to you. I should be very grateful if you would give it your sympathetic consideration.
yrs sincerely
R Vaughan Williams
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Date estimated from context: presumably before the Sonata for Violin and Piano (1927) had its first performance in a Macnaghten-Lemare concert at the Ballet Club Theatre on 18 October, with Anne Macnaghten (violin) and Helen Perkin (piano), but after her marriage in summer 1930. The reviews were mixed. While H.E. Wortham remarked in The Daily Telegraph that “the slighter movements impressed most,” the critic at The Observer denounced the work for its ultra-modern tendencies: “one asks oneself whether it is not time to drop the pose that music has nothing to do with emotion? Ought we not at the end to be able to say, How lovely! and not have to, How clever! Can’t we leave chess or mathematics, or whatever it is, to the Continent?” Christian Darnton’s review in The Music Lover offered a more balanced assessment of the work: “Elizabeth Maconchy’s five-year-old violin and piano sonata was not as raw as one might expect from a composer who is still so young. Not many people her age can look back so far with so little cause for bashfulness”.
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