Ethel Leginska

Ethel Leginska in 1916.

Ethel Leginska née Liggins (13 April 1886 – 26 February 1970) was a British pianist, composer, conductor and music educator, having among her students harpsichordist Gavin Williamson, a long-time student of Artur Schnabel and Theodor Leschetizky, James Henry Fields, Daniel Pollack and Bruce Sutherland.[1] She was a pioneer of women's opportunity in music performance and conducting,[2] being the first woman in music history to conduct many of the world's leading orchestras.[1]

Life and career

Ethel Liggins was born in Hull, Yorkshire, England,[3] to Thomas and Annie Peck Liggins.[1] With support from wealthy patron Mary Emma Wilson, she attended the Hoch conservatory in Frankfurt, where she studied piano under James Kwast, and composition under Bernhard Sekles and Iwan Knorr.[1] She also studied in Vienna in 1900 with Theodor Leschetizky.[3] She went on tour in Australia in 1905,[4] and performed in Europe under the stage name Ethel Leginska from 1906 on, as suggested by Lady Maud Warrende.[3] She married American Roy Emerson Whittern in 1907 and had one son,[1] but the couple divorced in 1918 and Leginska resumed her career, making her American debut in New York's Aeolian Hall on 20 January 1913.[1] After an unsuccessful custody fight for her son Cedric,[1] she became outspoken about inadequate opportunities for women.[1]

In 1923, Leginska went to London to study orchestral conducting with Eugène Aynsley Goossens.[1] The following year she worked with Robert Heger, conductor of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and conducted a performance of her orchestral suite Quatre sujets barbares.[1] In 1925, she made her debut as a conductor in the United States with the New York Symphony Orchestra in the Carnegie Hall.[1] She ended her performing career in 1926 and turned to conducting, composing and teaching. She had been working as a conductor since the early twenties, using her status as a performer to book engagements as a guest conductor of European orchestras by promising to play as soloist.

Ethel Leginska sitting at a piano
Ethel Leginska sitting at a piano

After conducting the New York Symphony Orchestra,[5] Leginska continued to find engagements in American cities including Boston and Los Angeles.[5] She established the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and the Boston English Opera Company,[5] founded the National Women's Symphony Orchestra in New York in 1932 and served as director of the Chicago Women's Symphony Orchestra.[5] In the late 1930s she lived in London and Paris before settling in 1939 in Los Angeles, where she founded the Concert Office New Ventures in Music,[1] set up a studio and worked as a piano teacher. Leginska Ethel died in Los Angeles of a stroke on 26 February 1970, aged 83.[6][7]

As professor

After 1935, work opportunities seem to decrease for Leginska. In 1938, she lived in London and Paris where she taught, before finally settling in Los Angeles in 1939. There she worked as a piano teacher of notable reputation. Among Leginska's students were James Henry Fields, Daniel Pollack, Bruce Sutherland,[8] and Gavin Williamson, a long-time student of Artur Schnabel and Theodor Leschetizky.

In a book by Harriette Brower, Piano Mastery: Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers published in 1915, the following is said about Leginska: "I believe in absolute freedom in all parts of the arm, shoulder to fingertips. Rigidity seems to me the most reprehensible thing when playing the piano, which is the most common of all kinds of performers default."

During the war in 1943, she founded, along with Mary Holloway, the concert agency New Ventures in Music with the French slogan: Youth Works![1] The agency organized concerts with the Little Symphony Orchestra, where her students improved their abilities. With the support of many musical personalities, her concerts were a great success. She played both Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, and the complete Beethoven's sonatas and variations, as well as the works of Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann.[1]

In 1957 in Los Angeles, Leginska gave the premiere of her opera The Rose and the Ring, based on William Makepeace Thackeray's story of the same name, written a quarter of a century earlier.[1]

As composer

In addition to her concert career, Leginska took courses in harmony with Rubin Goldmark from 1914,[1] and lessons in composition with Ernest Bloch in New York from the summer of 1918 on.[1] She soon followed these classes with composition of a range of pieces for piano and chamber ensembles.

The first work performed in public, which was something rare for a woman at the time, was a string quartet inspired by four texts by the Indian poet Tagore,[1] which won a composition prize in the Berkshire Chamber Music Festival Competition. The symphonic poem Beyond the Fields We Know with the title borrowed from poet Lord Edward Plunkett came shortly after. The Gargoyles of Notre Dame was inspiered by Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and her four-movement orchestral suite Quatre sujets barbares is a musical work inspired by the life and paintings of French artist Paul Gauguin.[1]

Works

Ethel Leginska's body of work is relatively small, consisting of piano pieces and songs, excluding her orchestral works and three operas. Among her major compositions are quartets for strings and piano, four Poems and six nursery rhymes. Many of her works are still unpublished.

Melodies

  • Kalte
  • I Have a Rendezvous With Death
  • Sorrow
  • Quatre mélodies (1919, Ed. Schirmer)
    1. At Dawn (text by Arthur Symons)
    2. Bird Voices of Spring (text C.S. Whittern)
    3. The Frozen Heart (text by Otto Julius Bierbaum)
    4. The Gallows Tree (over text of an old ballade)
  • In a Garden' for baritono, tenor, and soprano (words by Ethel Leginska — 1928)
  • Six Nursery Rhymes, for soprano ad lib. and piano or chamber orchestra (1925)
    1. Jack and Jill
    2. Three Mice
    3. Sleepe Baby Sleep
    4. Georgy Porgy
    5. Little Boy Blue
    6. Old King Cole
  • Forgotten

Orchestral

  • Beyond the Fields We Know, Symphonic Poem (New York 12 February 1922)
  • Quatre sujets barbares, after Paul Gauguin, (Munich 13 December 1924)
  • Two Short pieces for orchestra (Boston 29 February 1924 for Pierre Monteux)
  • Fantasie for piano and orchestre (New York 3 January 1926)

Chamber music

  • Quatuor à cordes, after four poems by Tagore (Boston, 25 April 1921)
  • From a Life, for 13 instruments (New York 9 January 1922)
    1. Allegro energico
    2. Lento dolentissimo
    3. Vivace
  • Triptych, for 11 instruments solo (Chicago 29 January 1928)

Piano

  • The Gargoyles of Notre Dame (1920, Ed. Composer's Music Corporation 1922)
  • Scherzo after Tagore (1920, Ed. Composer's Music Corporation 1922)
  • At Night
  • Cradle Song (1922)
  • Dance of a Little Clown
  • Dance of a Puppet (1924)
  • Three Victorian Portraits (Suite in three movements)
    1. Nostalgic Waltz
    2. A Dirge
    3. Heroic Impromptu

Opera

  • Gale, the Haunting, Opera in one act (Chicago 23 November 1935)
  • The Rose and the Ring Opera (1932, Los Angeles 23 February 1957)
  • Joan of Arc (Los Angeles 10 May 1969)

See also

For Leginska's notable students, see List of music students by teacher: K to M#Ethel Leginska.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 Love Griffin, Melodie. "Ethel Leginska: Pianist, Feminist, Conductor xtraordinaire, and Composer" (PDF). Sail.cnu.edu. CNU.
  2. ↑ Phenix, Katharine (1996). Subject guide to women of the world.
  3. 1 2 3 Marguerite Broadbent, Terry Broadbent. "Leginska: Forgotten Genius of Music The Story of a Great Musician". Leginska.org. Leginska.org.
  4. ↑ "Town Hall Sydney". The Freeman's Journal (Sydney, NSW). 9 September 1905.
  5. 1 2 3 4 "ETHEL LEGINSKA (1883-1970) British pianist". Forte piano pianissimo.com. Forte piano pianissimo.
  6. ↑ "ETHEL LEGINSKA (Ethel Liggins)". Retrieved 31 December 2010.
  7. ↑ Sadie, Julie Anne; Samuel, Rhian (1994). The Norton/Grove dictionary of women composers (Digitized online by GoogleBooks). ISBN 9780393034875. Retrieved 31 December 2010.
  8. ↑ "Ethel Leginska". Retrieved 12 July 2014.

External links

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