Alicia Adelaide Needham

Alicia Adelaide Needham

Alicia Adélaide Needham (born October 31, 1863 in Oldcastle , County Meath , as Alicia Adélaide Montgomery; died December 24, 1945 in London ) was an Irish composer of songs and ballads. A committed suffragette , she was the first woman to conduct at the Royal Albert Hall in London and the first woman president of the Eisteddfod in Wales .

Professional background

She went to boarding school in Derry and spent the following year in Castletown . She studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, initially only for one year (probably the academic year 1880/81): piano with the Irish pianist and composer Arthur O'Leary, harmony and counterpoint with Frank Davenport and at times with George Alexander Macfarren and Ebenezer Prout . She resumed her studies in 1884, graduated in 1887, and became a licensee of the academy in 1889.

Actively supported by her husband, who organized concerts for her and arranged her first publications, her musical career began in 1894 with a series of publications and piano and song recitals.

Personal

She married the London doctor Joseph Needham in 1892 and gave birth to their only child, Joseph , in 1900 .

plant

In total she wrote about 700 compositions, most of them songs. There are also some duets, trios and quartets for voices and piano, some piano music, some orchestrations of songs, choral hymns, marches for brass bands and a church service.

The British Library holds more than 200 works published by her, including song cycles and similar collections of up to 12 pieces. She appears to have stopped composing before 1920, and little was heard from her from that year. She died, largely unnoticed by the public, on Christmas Eve 1945 in London.

Thanks to the later fame of her son Joseph Needham as a respected biochemist and sinologist , his private property - including his mother's papers - was first archived at the University of Bath and then in Cambridge . This includes published music, personal and professional correspondence for the years 1877 to 1921, extensive diaries for the years 1879 to 1924, photographs, notebooks, etc. The survey of the "Joseph Needham Papers" in Cambridge mentions that their extensive diaries lead to a very unhappy marriage reveal, but there is not a word about it in her typescript autobiography which she had earmarked for publication. In this source, she describes her early career from the mid-1890s as follows: “For ten years, I could also say twenty years or more, songs, piano solos, quartets, trios, song cycles, hymns, all from my lucky pen flowed. They were so productive in those years that sometimes when I was tired I was afraid to look into a book of poetry lest I notice a poem and immediately set itself to music in my head, and I should be inclined to run away and write it down . "

With no family or musical ties to Wales, she was appointed first president of the National Eisteddfod of Wales in 1906, with colleagues such as the Lord Mayor and Bishop of London and two lords. A few years later she was also named "Bard of Wales" under the title "Harp of Ireland". She was the first woman to conduct at the Royal Albert Hall. In 1910 she was VIP at a banquet in Dublin, which Lord Aberdeen, the then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, gave in honor of the "Irish Women of Letters".

Her greatest commercial success was when she won the 1902 song competition for the coronation of King Edward VII . More than 300 composers sent in their contribution. Needham was awarded the £ 100 prize for a song she wrote at the last minute while accidentally staying in a room at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin .

Her husband's death in 1920 marked a serious change in Alicia Needham's résumé. She was forced to sell the house and the furniture, paintings, books and china and had to move to a much smaller apartment in a less modern part of the city. She writes in her autobiography (pp. 67–68): “[…] my music room shelves stayed empty, and four tons of books were sent away, all the best things and treasures were sold, I only have enough for a small apartment.” She was probably alive several years from the sale of the house and family property, but its decline is clearly visible as she does not seem to have composed after 1920. Her correspondence collection ends in 1921, her diaries end in 1924, her autobiography in 1926. The "Joseph Needham Papers" in Cambridge show that she turned to astrology and the occult; she began to believe in the rebirth of the dead and devoted herself to so-called " ghost photography ". Announcements in the Irish Times and the British Medical Journal   from 1933 indicate that by then she had been in serious financial trouble and health problems, with a Dr. JS Crone from the Irish Literary Society organized a "testimonial". The last public news about her is that she converted to Catholicism in December 1934 .

Publications (selection)

• An Album of Hush Songs (1897)
• The Seventh English Edward (1902)
• A Bunch of Shamrocks: Irish Song Cycle for Four Solo Voices (1904)
• Twelve Small Songs for Small People (1904)
• Four Songs for Women Suffragists (1908)
• A Bunch of Heather: Scottish Song Cycle (1910)
• Army and Navy Songcycle (1912)

bibliography

• Annie Patterson: "Alicia Adelaide Needham," in: Weekly Irish Times , June 9, 1900
• Eithne Nic Pheadair [= Annie Patterson]: "Alicia Adelaide Needham", in: The Leader 23 (1916) 14, p. 227f
• Jennifer O'Connor & Axel Klein: "Needham, Alicia Adelaide", in: The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland , ed. H. White & B. Boydell (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013)
• Oxford DNB

Individual evidence

1. ↑ women's database fembio.org. Retrieved July 18, 2020 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b} This report is based mainly on her handwritten autobiography entitled "A Daughter of Music", which was archived in Cambridge under the "Joseph Needham Papers" as "Ms.Needham: A.97".
3. ↑ Page 28 of the autobiography entitled "A Daughter of Music", which was archived in Cambridge under the "Joseph Needham Papers" as "Ms.Needham: A.97".
4. ↑ See Níc Pheadair (1916)
5. ↑ The Irish Times , June 26, 1933, p. 6
6. ^ The British Medical Journal , Oct. 14, 1933, p. 716
7. ↑ The Irish Times , December 21, 1934, p. 8.