"Too Much of Albion"? Mrs. Coolidge and Her British Connections

Abstract

When, in the space of little more than a year in 1915 and 1916, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge' found herself bereft of her husband and both her parents but in possession of a fairly large fortune, the manner in which she would thenceforth indulge herself, as she later put it,2 in her passion for chamber music only gradually began to take shape. First, the Berkshire Quartet was established under her patronage; and two years later, in 1918, it formed the backbone of a Berkshire Festival of Chamber Music at her summer estate on South Mountain near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. No British musicians were involved as composers or performers in this first September festival, but at least one, the cellist May Mukle (1880-1963), was present as a guest, the third category of importance to Mrs. Coolidge. Mukl' had been on tour with Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979), an English viola player and aspiring composer, and it seems that it was in New York in 1917 that they first made contact with Mrs. Coolidge. Clarke, who had established herself in the United States in 1916,3 was probably at the 1918 festival, too; she was certainly at the second one in 1919, for that year her Viola Sonata won second prize in Mrs. Coolidge's competition. (In fact, it had tied in a dead heat with Bloch's Suite for Viola and Piano; Mrs. Coolidge had to give the casting vote.4 You should have seen the faces of the jury when it was revealed the composer was a woman! Mrs. Coolidge wrote to Clarke.)5 The sonata was performed by Louis Bailly and Harold Bauer on September 25 in a program that included the first American performance of Elgar's String Quartet. Two days later a concert of vocal chamber music included a Purcell aria and Vaughan Williams's On