20 Facts About Elisabeth Lutyens

Agnes Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE was an English composer.

Elisabeth Lutyens was born in London on 9 July 1906.

Elisabeth Lutyens was one of the five children of Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton, a member of the aristocratic Bulwer-Lytton family, and the prominent English architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.

In 1922, Lutyens pursued her musical education in Paris at the Ecole Normale de Musique, which had been established a few years previously, living with the young theosophical composer Marcelle de Manziarly, who had been trained by Nadia Boulanger.

In 1933, Elisabeth Lutyens married baritone Ian Glennie; they had twin daughters, Rose and Tess, and a son, Sebastian.

Elisabeth Lutyens then became the partner of Edward Clark, a conductor and former BBC producer who had studied with Schoenberg.

Clark and Elisabeth Lutyens had a son, Conrad, in 1941 and married on 9 May 1942.

Elisabeth Lutyens composed in complete isolation, a process greatly impeded by the drinking and partying at the Clark flat, and the responsibilities of motherhood.

Elisabeth Lutyens was interviewed, in June 1975, by the historian, Brian Harrison, as part of the Suffrage Interviews project, titled Oral evidence on the suffragette and suffragist movements: the Brian Harrison interviews.

Elisabeth Lutyens approached Walton for an introduction to Muir Mathieson with a view to getting some film music work.

Elisabeth Lutyens found success in 1947 with a cantata setting Arthur Rimbaud's poem O saisons, O chateaux.

Elisabeth Lutyens is remembered for her intolerance of her better-known contemporaries among English composers including Vaughan Williams, Holst, Ireland and Bax.

Elisabeth Lutyens was still doing contract work for the BBC as well as freelance conducting, but those opportunities dried up and he was essentially unemployed from 1939 until his death in 1962.

Elisabeth Lutyens was involved with the ISCM and other contemporary music promotional organisations, but always in an unpaid capacity.

Elisabeth Lutyens paid the bills by composing film scores for Hammer's horror movies and for their rivals Amicus Productions.

Elisabeth Lutyens was the first female British composer to score a feature film, her first foray into the genre being Penny and the Pownall Case.

Elisabeth Lutyens did not regard her film scores as highly as her concert works, but she still relished being referred to as the "Horror Queen", which went well with the green nail polish she habitually wore.

Elisabeth Lutyens wrote music for many documentary films and for BBC radio and TV programmes, as well as incidental music for the stage.

Elisabeth Lutyens's Symphonies for solo piano, wind, harps and percussion was a commission for the 1961 Promenade Concerts.

Elisabeth Lutyens once said that she hated writing the book and only did so to record her husband Edward Clark's earlier achievements.