Элизабет Лютьенс: Ағылшын композиторының өмірі мен шығармашылығы

English composer (1906–1983)

Agnes Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE (9 July 190614 April 1983) was an English composer.

Elisabeth Lutyens was born in London on 9 July 1906. She was one of the five children of Lady Emily Bulwer Lytton (1874–1964), a member of the aristocratic Bulwer Lytton family, and the prominent English architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. Elisabeth was the elder sister of the writer Mary Lutyens and aunt of the 4th Viscount Ridley and the politician Nicholas Ridley. Lutyens was involved in the Theosophical Movement. From 1911 the young Jiddu Krishnamurti was living in the Lutyens' London house as a friend of Elisabeth and her sisters. At the age of nine she began to aspire to be a composer. In 1922, Lutyens pursued her musical education in Paris at the École Normale de Musique, which had been established a few years previously, living with the young theosophical composer Marcelle de Manziarly, who had been trained by Nadia Boulanger. During her months in Paris Lutyens showed first signs of depression that later led to several mental breakdowns. She accompanied her mother to India in 1923. On her return to Europe she studied with John Foulds and subsequently continued her musical education from 1926 to 1930 at the Royal College of Music in London as a pupil of Harold Darke. The marriage was not happy, however, and in 1938 she left Glennie. They divorced in 1940.

In 1945, William Walton was able to repay the service Clark had rendered him in relation to the premiere of his Viola Concerto in 1929. Lutyens approached Walton for an introduction to Muir Mathieson with a view to getting some film music work. He readily agreed to pass on her name, but he went a step further: He invited her to write any work she liked, then dedicate it to him, and he would pay her £100 sight unseen. The work she wrote was The Pit. Edward Clark conducted The Pit at the 1946 ISCM Festival in London, along with her Three Symphonic Preludes. She found success in 1947 with a cantata setting Arthur Rimbaud's poem Ô saisons, Ô châteaux. The BBC refused to perform it at the time because the soprano range was thought to go beyond the bounds of the possible, but the BBC was nevertheless the organisation that gave first performances to many of her works from the 1940s to the 1950s. Her work in this period included incidental music for a number of poetry readings, such as Esmé Hooton's Zoo in 1956. The BBC began playing her music again when her friend William Glock became Director of Music. Lutyens is remembered for her intolerance of her better known contemporaries among English composers including Vaughan Williams, Holst, Ireland and Bax. She dismissed them as "the cowpat school" in a lecture she gave at the Dartington International Summer School in the 1950s, disparaging their "folky‐wolky melodies on the cor anglais". Her other scores included Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (1960), Don't Bother to Knock (1961), Paranoiac (1963), Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965), The Earth Dies Screaming (1965), The Skull (1965) (a suite from this was issued on CD in 2004), Spaceflight IC 1 (1965), The Psychopath (1966), Theatre of Death (1967) and The Terrornauts (1967). Lutyens did not regard her film scores as highly as her concert works, but she still relished being referred to as the "Horror Queen", which went well with the green nail polish she habitually wore. She also wrote music for many documentary films and for BBC radio and TV programmes, as well as incidental music for the stage. Her Symphonies for solo piano, wind, harps and percussion was a commission for the 1961 Promenade Concerts. In 1969 she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). And Suddenly It’s Evening (1966) for tenor and ensemble, setting a translation of words by Salvatore Quasimodo, was commissioned by the BBC in 1967 and performed at the Proms in 1967, 1974 and 1976.

Elisabeth Lutyens died in London in 1983, aged 76.

See also List of compositions by Elisabeth Lutyens.

String Quartet I, Op. 5, No. 1 (1937) – withdrawn
String Quartet II, Op. 5, No. 5 (1938)
String Trio, Op. 5, No. 6 (1939)
Chamber Concerto I, Op. 8, No. 1, for 9 instruments (1939–40)
String Quartet III, Op. 18 (1949)
Concertante for five players, Op. 22 (1950)
String Quartet VI, Op. 25 (1952)
Valediction, for clarinet and piano, Op. 28 (1953–54) – dedicated to the memory of Dylan Thomas
Capriccii, for 2 harps and percussion, Op. 33 (1955)
Six Tempi, for 10 instruments, Op. 42 (1957)
Wind Quintet, Op. 45 (1960)
String Quintet, Op. 51 (1963)
Wind Trio, Op. 52 (1963)
String Trio, Op. 57 (1963)
Music for Wind, for double wind quintet, Op. 60 (1963)
Oboe Quartet: Driving out the Death, Op. 81 (1971)
Plenum II, for oboe and 13 instruments, Op. 92 (1973)
Plenum III, for string quartet, Op. 93 (1973)
Clarinet Trio, Op. 135 (1979)