Elisabeth Lutyens: Driving out the Death, Op. 81

I wrote these programme notes for a friend of mine, Cayenna Ponchione, who organised this concert in Oxford for International Women's Day 2016. I was in the second year of my undergrad, and taking a course in women composers. This is an undeservedly obscure piece (I can only find one recording), and Lutyens's music remains under-performed. I love her work.

“If I hear another perfect cadence, I will scream!” Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983) was once reported to exclaim. One of the first British composers to be working with serialist techniques (from 1938), she became notorious for her stridency, and she was loathe to water down her opinion or intellectual power for the sake of her more conservative contemporaries. Nevertheless, by the time she composed Driving out the Death for oboe and string trio her aesthetic had softened somewhat, instead embracing a more sparing but highly lyrical and sonorous style. Following what she described as “much heart-searching” and a “violent reassessment” of approach, she still retained the motivic emphasis of her earlier approach, which she uses to structure much the material.

The organising motif of this piece—D# E F#—is announced by oboe in the very opening:

Using repetition to clarify her ideas to the listener, Lutyens rearticulates this simple gesture in different transpositions and rhythms in each of Driving the Death Out's six movements, as well as embedding it (sometimes inverted—turned upside down, a serialist technique) within the accompanying string parts. The motif is laid most bare in the title penultimate movement, which is then repeated at the coda just before the end:

The movements of this piece reflect many of the composer's obsessions with death, ritual, and Greek antiquity. Titled “Carrying out of Winter”, “Pantamimos” (“pantomime”), “Carrying out of Summer,”, “Euché” (prayer), “Driving out the Death”, and “Dithyrambos” (“hymn to Dionysus”), they map the cycle of the seasons and the way in which death and rebirth relate to it. Lutyens uses the motif to illustrate the different characters of these episodes. For example, the distance of summer from winter is expressed by the E being swapped down an octave and the F# being lowered a semitone; the performed exuberance of pantomime is captured by the repeated cycling of the motif in the oboe, and its interplay with the “chantant” string voices.

The dramatic core of the piece is the central prayer movement. After the oboe's long E is reached by a glissando from the octave above at the end of the “Carrying out of Summer”, its timbre is enveloped into the viola's E of the rich, pianissimo string chord which introduces “Euché”. The extremely slow tempo and harmonic motion mean that the strings' harmonic chords glisten.

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Lutyens wrote Driving the Death Out when she was 66 years old, shortly after finishing her autobiography, A Goldfish Bowl. A chain-smoker, a heavy drinker, an ardent socialist, and sporter of bright green nail polish, her vibrant personality and self-reported “unquenched passion for life” leaps from every page. But in equal measure are her extreme devotion to her work, and her tangible disappointment that it was so under-performed in the institutional “masculine stongholds” of her working lifetime. Her life saw a series of complicated relationships: the pressure of her father Sir Edwin's enormous success as an architect, her fraught relationship with her mother Emily due to the psychological damage Lutyens felt her intense involvement in the theosophical movement had caused her, and two turbulent marriages led Lutyens to feel that she had “lived in many goldfish bowls … small parishes of the mind”, each with their own “secret voices”. Yet in retreating to her oft-isolated and clearly brilliant mind where she “always felt happier”, she asserted a staunch independence of voice, to which her self-run press is testament. As she wrote herself:

“Music, and my own work, though occupying my thoughts and time, is nevertheless not a substitute for living, my appetite for which is still unsatiated. But if one can see a world in a grain of sand, that grain of sand for me is music.”