The work
‘I take this opportunity to emphasise that I do indeed exist… and that my Viola Sonata is my own unaided work!’ So wrote Rebecca Clarke in a programme note for a recital in 1977 that included her Viola Sonata. By this point, nearly 60 years after Clarke had written the piece in question, she chose to adopt a lightly humorous tone, poking fun at those who may have thought she wasn’t a real composer, even that her sonata was somehow fraudulent. Yet it must have grated, to say the least, that