In 2018 the centenary of Dilys Elwyn-Edwards’s birth was widely celebrated and the attention it attracted consolidated her reputation as one of Wales’s finest composers of vocal music. Several of her songs have entered the repertoire – both in Welsh and English – and singers value her beautifully crafted works with their memorable vocal lines and meticulous attitude to word setting. To begin an exploration the listener could sample Mae hiraeth yn y môr and The Cloths of Heaven. These songs epitomise the qualities of Dilys’s finest achievements.

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Her early years in Dolgellau gave Dilys a natural musical background which was developed by staff at Dr Williams’s School for Girls who encouraged her love of poetry and of certain English composers in particular – she had an immediate love of Delius, Warlock and Vaughan Williams among others. When she went to study Music at Cardiff University she found, like Grace Williams before her, that the Department was very conservative in its attitude to compositional creativity. Grace had found her liberation in further study at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London with Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose music she’d heard at the Barry National Eisteddfod in 1920. Similarly, Dilys discovered the unique sound-world of Herbert Howells when singing his carol-anthem ‘Here is the little door’ in a choir at Cardiff. Although her career was partly disturbed by the Second World War she found her feet upon winning a scholarship to study with Howells himself at the RCM in 1947.

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One of Howells’s great strengths as a teacher was an ability to intuit where a pupil’s innate ability might lie and in Dilys’s case he identified within her earliest works a particular streak of modal melody and harmony which he found to strike a particularly Celtic note – despite the main influences on her work being English. But he knew what he was doing - there had been a vogue for the ‘Celtic twilight’ stemming from Delius and Bax to Moeran and Warlock and Howells’s own friend and mentor Vaughan Williams was, after all, of partly Welsh ancestry. The earliest work she happily acknowledged was The Bird of Christ, setting a poem by Fiona Macleod - the pseudonym of the Scottish poet William Sharp. This song has a striking individuality of which Dilys was to remain very proud right until the end.

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Having thus established her personal voice by the early 1950s Dilys never felt a need to alter it drastically and it remained a rich seam which she mined for the next half-century with a fastidious concern for detail and nuance. She was also content to regard herself as a miniaturist who knew instinctively how to trust her inner voice and genius. Among her own favourites she was always fond of her Chwe Chân i Blant ('Six Songs for Children') from 1959 which were to become classics throughout Wales and much admired by Howells himself. Her iconic Caneuon y Tri Aderyn ('Songs of the Three Birds') followed in 1962 as a BBC commission and although the last – Mae hiraeth yn y môr ('There is longing in the sea') – has become her signature song she herself preferred the others – Y Gylfinir ('The Curlew') and Tylluanod ('Owls').

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With her great ability to think herself ‘within’ the words of any poem Dilys then found her unique way of clothing them in distinctive music which has stood the test of time and pays rich dividends to any listener.

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1. The Dilys Elwyn-Edwards Archive is housed at the National Library of Wales.
2. Four Short Movements for Flute and Piano will receive their first professional performance by Duo Melus at the Mercers' Hall, City of London on Thursday 17 April 2025. info