In 1889, Clara Macirone suggested that women composers tended to become forgotten because of lack of positions of authority; the conductors and festival directors who could programme their own works and thus remain in the public eye all tended to be men, she observed.
This month’s composer supports Macirone’s point, if in slightly roundabout fashion. Rosalind Ellicott’s works were performed by large forces under others’ batons, and remained in the public eye for some time. Why, then did she disappear as completely as her contemporaries – in fact, it could be said, more so, as her scores can still be difficult to find?
Rosalind Ellicott was born in 1957, the middle child of three. Her younger brother Arthur would go on to be a County Court Judge and Justice of the Peace, while older sister Florence would sink into married oblivion in 1873. Her first teacher was, of course, her mother, Constantia Anne Becher, who had been a well-known singer in her youth and who remained active in British musical life after her marriage to Charles Ellicott, Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. Her obituary in 1914 noted:
“She was well-known figure in musical society in the sixties and seventies of the last century, and possessed a beautiful soprano voice. A friend of notable vocalists and composers such as Jenny Lind, Titiens, Sterndale-Bennett, Dr S. S. Wesley and Sir Joseph Barnby, she nevertheless concerned herself with the welfare of young and aspiring singers and instrumentalists.”
Indeed, Constantia would later be known for singing her daughter’s songs, accompanied by the composer herself. All three children surely benefited from her musical talents, but it was Rosalind who turned out to have “an extraordinary facility for music, singing, and harmonizing correctly by ear.” Even at six years of age, her favourite musical activity was to make up her own little dances on the piano. Becher taught her until she was twelve, then used her significant connections to gain her lessons with Wesley, then organist at Gloucester Cathedral. He was also a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, and eventually Rosalind Ellicott entered there to study piano with Frederick Westlake. She remained there from 1874-1876. It was during this time that she also discovered her talents as a singer, going on to take part in oratorios and other concert works on the circuit. Indeed, it was as a soprano soloist that she began her relationship with the Three Choirs Festival in her home county.
Ellicott’s greatest fascination, however, lay with composition. She had started writing pieces while still studying with Wesley as a young teen, trying her hand at forms from song to sonata. She continued to write throughout her time at the Academy and beyond, having several pieces performed, including vocal and chamber works. The wider discovery of her talent in the 1880s led to her studying with Thomas Wingham at the Brompton Oratory in London, as story she tells in her own words to an interviewer in 1891, at the height of her success:
““I wrote a quartet by the light of Nature, and, of course, had idea whether it had any merit or not.” “And was this quartet performed in public?” Miss Ellicott laughed. “Yes, Steinway Hall. After it was finished Mr Shakespeare, the famous singing master, a very old friend of ours, came down to stay at the palace. He tried it through, and, to my great delight, said I ought to take up the study of composition seriously, and recommended me to Mr Thomas Wingham, who, as you probably know, manages all the music at the Brompton Oratory. In 1845 I put myself under him, and began once to compose for the full orchestra.”
While Ellicott would go on performing, it was as a composer that she now became known and successful – in fact so successful that newspaper reports mention in awe that “she has never paid for, or towards, the publication of any of her musical publication: in every case the published has taken the entire risk.” Her lessons with Wingham consisted in large part of orchestration, resulting in an orchestral overture entitled “Spring” which was premiered at the Bristol Festival in the same year. A dramatic overture rapidly followed, premiered at the Gloucester Festival, and later chosen to be played at the opening of the Women’s Building in Chicago in 1893, and the most successful of her cantatas, Elysium, composed in1889. This was on a lengthy poem by Felicia Hemans that had appeared in The Christian Examiner in 1825:
“Fair wert thou, in the dreams
Of elder time, thou land of glorious flowers,
And summer-winds, and low-ton’d silvery streams,
Dim with the shadows of thy laurel-bowers!
Where, as they pass’d, bright hours
Left no faint sense of parting, such as clings
To earthly love, and joy in loveliest things! ”
Three Choirs Festival
This work would receive multiple performances at festivals around the country and was published by that doyen of choral publications, Novello. Twenty years of compositions followed, from solo and part songs to orchestral works, more cantatas, and chamber music. Reviews were invariably glowing – the cello sonata gained particularly good reviews – and performances continued to abound, both in Britain and in Germany. In 1889, The Queen Newspaper felt that the question of whether women could compose at finally been laid to rest:
“With such names as Maude Valerie White and Miss Rosalind Ellicott before the public no one can any longer say that women may succeed as executants but invariably fail as composers. Musical composition is after all but one more crown which women have proved their right to wear.”
Ellicott was often interviewed, both about herself, and about music in general. The interviews are often enjoyably characterful. In one, Ellicott likens writing for orchestra to “dram-drinking” in its excitement, and defends music hall songs alongside her chosen genre. She also makes interesting observations that cast light on a changing concert scene; she advocates for new works being programmed at the end of a concert, such as her overture, as ‘a good deal of interest seemed to be felt in my work, and the whole audience remained to hear it.’
But by the turn of the century, Ellicott was already fading from view. In part this was due to a cessation in her composition activity; as the unmarried daughter, she became responsible for her aging parents, acting as secretary for her father and as companion for her ailing mother. By WWI, her music was mostly a memory, the latest performance of Elysium seeming to be one in Sligo in 1917. She retired to Kent after the death of her mother in 1914, remaining there for the remaining decade of her life. The obituaries that appeared in a few scattered newspapers were warm but brief, writing that her death would be “noted with much regret in musical circles”.
The reasons for her success in the first place, and for her subsequent neglect, will be the subject of a blog entry in two weeks’ time. Suffice it here to say that yet again, Ellicott’s story reminds us that we are starting from an erroneous position when we speak of programming women composers as if we do so for the first time; and as long as we stick stubbornly to this narrative, we are not going to solve the issue.
Here's a recording of Rosalind Ellicott’s Aria for violin and piano.
