Passacaglia on an Old English Tune

• Clarke composed this passacaglia in 1941, during her 1939-1941 sojourn in the United States. She had come to the USA to visit her two brothers in 1939, but, to her dismay, became stranded there when WWII broke out.¹

“I came over here to visit my brothers in 1939 – if the war had already started I don’t think I would have left London, because all my friends, the people I was most interested in, stayed in London, and I don’t think I would have wanted to leave under those conditions…

After that, I was here for a time and I got awfully homesick. So I went to the British Consulate to try and get a visa to try and go back to England, and they wouldn’t give it to me. They said I was an ‘unproductive mouth’ … [they] meant that I was too old already by then to do anything for the war effort.”

– Rebecca Clarke, from a 1978 interview²

“The Passacaglia can be seen as Clarke’s meditation on things British, her friends and colleagues, and the musical life of London, the city she considered her home.”

Rebecca Clarke scholar Liane Curtis³

• Clarke performed the premiere of this piece on March 28, 1941 at a concert at Temple Emanu-El in New York City.⁴
• This work was published in 1943.⁵ Clarke released it in the original version, for viola, and in an arrangement for cello.⁶
  • Clarke’s friend and colleague, cellist May Mukle, owned a copy of the cello version signed “With love, Becca.”
• This passacaglia is based on this tune from The English Hymnal (Oxford University Press, 1906), which was edited by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The tune is attributed to Thomas Tallis.⁷

1. Liane Curtis, “Rebecca Clarke and the British Musical Renaissance,” in A Rebecca Clarke Reader, ed. Liane Curtis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 34.
2. Quoted in Ibid.
3. Ibid., 36.
4. Ibid., 34.
5. Liane Curtis, “Clarke [Friskin], Rebecca,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed May 18, 2022, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000044728. 
6. Liane Curtis, “Passacaglia on an Old English Tune for Viola (or Cello) and Piano: Program Notes,” Hildegard Publishing, accessed May 18, 2022, https://www.hildegard.com/pdf_notes/494-02601_notes.pdf.
7. Liane Curtis, “Rebecca Clarke and the British Musical Renaissance,” in A Rebecca Clarke Reader, ed. Liane Curtis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 35-36.