ABSTRACT
Lutyens had attained a new level of technical assurance in such pieces as the Sixth String Quartet (1952) and the ‘Wittgenstein’ Motet (1953), but neither piece, nor any of her other works, had received the level of attention they deserved. Indeed, like Williams, only a handful of her concert works had actually been commissioned up to this point. The challenges confronting Lutyens in the 1950s were, however, of a different nature to those facing Williams, and part of the problem lay with the shifting perspectives of the immediate post-war musical climate in England. Whilst the hostile attitudes of the war years towards continental and dissonant compositional styles gradually became less flagrant, there were still diehard conservatives who were ‘trying to keep England free of the moderns, free for Elgar, the Three Choirs Festival, England and St. George’. 1
