5 - Completing the Lives

Summary

Days before his seventy-fourth birthday, Edward Clark died of a coronary thrombosis in his and Lutyens’s flat in Belsize Park Road, London. It was Spring 1962 and Lutyens was fifty-five. This loss devastated her in many different ways, but as a caesura in her work, it rang in two more decades of creative work that saw Lutyens’s at her most productive, focused, and influential. There were many stories to be shared, many future students to be taught, and some of her best pieces still to be written. Calum MacDonald, who compared two operas from both sides of the watershed that was Clark’s death (Infidelio from 1954 and Time Off? Not a Ghost of a Chance from 1967–8), came to the conclusion that ‘[t]he Lutyens of the Sixties and Seventies is the composer who really matters’.²