When do four soloists become a quartet? Group biographies are increasingly ubiquitous, but they are hard to pull off. Quartet is a passionate four-part fugue, intertwining the lives of composers Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen. Smyth detested being banded with other female composers, and this book never really clarifies why its subjects should be put together. They were not close friends or collaborators, and they shared the Earth for just two decades of Quartet’s 145-year span. The narrative is forever having to restart. Not until page 261, with the birth of Carwithen, are all the plates finally spinning.
True, all four forged careers against the odds, surmounting serious obstacles and sexist dismissal. Smyth (1858-1944) was the first woman to have a stage work produced by the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Clarke (1886-1979) escaped an abusive father to become one of the first female players in a professional orchestra, and composed numerous pieces for her own instrument, the viola. Howell (1898-1982) became famous for her symphonic poem Lamia, a regular at the Proms during the 1920s. Carwithen (1922-2003) was among the first women to compose for film, but her career was curtailed by her dedication to the music of William Alwyn, her teacher and eventual husband.
Leah Broad has brought to light a wealth of new information, the result of research in 14 archives, saving for posterity music manuscripts that were decaying in damp boxes. Smyth is the spine and glue of the book, and Broad captures with wit and elan the way she hurled herself into living and loving, charting her travels and political causes, her beloved dogs, and her relationships with men and with women (including Virginia Woolf and Emmeline Pankhurst). Her The March of the Women became the anthem of the suffragette movement, and she conducted it with a toothbrush through the window of Holloway prison, where she had been jailed after a stone-throwing protest.
Broad is self-professedly “in love” with these composers’ “exquisite, breathtaking” music, and brushes off criticism as patriarchal bluster. But there is a hole at the centre of Quartet where the music should be. Technical terms are avoided completely but the challenge of creating informative description for the general reader is often dodged. The score of Smyth’s opera The Wreckers is covered in three words. Broad, a musicologist at Oxford University, offers, instead, a stodgy buffet of adjectives that will satisfy neither expert nor enthusiast. Howell’s music is “seductive, undulating”; Ravel’s “seductive, ethereal”; Debussy’s “sensual and ethereal”; Clarke’s “haunting, ethereal”. Elsewhere, a log-jam of repetitive gush: “one of the most profoundly moving pieces that Ethel ever composed”; “one of the most personal, tender pieces that Ethel ever composed”; “one of the most frolicking, buoyant pieces she ever composed”; “one of the most compelling things she ever wrote”.
Serious discussion of music could have helpfully replaced numerous purple passages of extended scene-setting. “Geese patter along the roads, weaving in and out of the dappled shadows cast by the thick red and white blossoms on the chestnut trees…” (this of a late August day, when chestnut trees would be producing not blossom but conkers). Scholarship disappears beneath the prose style of bad fiction. Thirty pages on from a portrait of Carwithen’s “dark curly hair frizzy in the wind”, we find her cycling to the sound of “birdsong, the rustle of autumn leaves and the familiar click of her bicycle wheels as she sped along the path, her curly hair flying out behind her in the wind…”.
The paperback might correct a number of mistakes, generalisations and double standards. Benjamin Britten did not write operas “that often focused on the working classes”. (Britten is criticised for failing to concede his debt to The Wreckers but his owning the score is not sufficient proof that he knew it; his opinion of Smyth’s music – “despicable” – is not included.) The composer Ruth Gipps is shown to have suffered misogynistic attacks but, a paragraph earlier, description of homophobia in the musical world omits her conspiracy-theorist sneering at “homosexual pacifists who had seized power”. Ralph Vaughan Williams, creator of the century’s most war-torn soundscapes, appears as the purveyor of “gentle lyricism”. Basic points are poorly phrased – “solo aria”, a musical line “woven between two flutes” – or simply misunderstood. Stravinsky was not “abandoning” key signatures in 1914.
Quartet adds to what we knew of Smyth, and provides the first detailed biographies of its other subjects. But it is a book of reactionary taste that sets up a false opposition between its crude conceptions of modernism (“dissonant, jarring”) and non-modernism (“memorable, singable”). The latter is the chief musical territory of Quartet and clearly Broad’s comfort zone. So her wider aim, of making “an unapologetic case for the importance of women in music history”, is weakened by the fact that her subjects are never shown in a larger context attentive or sympathetic to those women who did embrace the musical avant garde. What she deems the “aggressive styles” of Elisabeth Lutyens or Elizabeth Maconchy are given brief cameos; radical innovators such as Priaulx Rainier, Ruth Crawford Seeger and many others are totally absent. As Broad herself concludes, in an epilogue of sobering statistics about gender imbalance in classical music, there is a great deal more to say.
• Oliver Soden is the author of Michael Tippett: The Biography (Orion) and Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), published later this month
• Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World by Leah Broad is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
