Mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Lynch, soloist for The Music Makers, chats to BFC about her poignant history with the work and its radical relevance in today’s world.
Singing The Music Makers feels like the ultimate call to arms. A call to arms for artists, audiences and for all of humanity alike. The whole piece is about the power of art to change the world and the course of history, through creativity, togetherness, and dreaming dreams that are bigger, braver and more radical than the world that we live in today. Yes, it’s idealistic, but honestly, it feels to me that this message is more important, and more relevant today than ever.
I have performed the epic master work, The Music Makers once before, at The Barbican Hall as a soloist with the Guildhall School. It was just over ten years ago and was a rocky time for me personally, finishing years of elite level studies, juggling life as a new mum on my own, and living in a hotel room near Old Street with a one-year old baby. The reality of being an Artist or ‘Music Maker’, despite years of training, cost, sacrifice and dreaming behind me, felt very far from reach. I remember putting on the smoke and mirrors of the glitzy gown, makeup and fancy up do, and thinking there was no way that this is going to work for me – the line in The Music Makers, “a singer who sings no more” resonated deeply on that stage.
The notion that music and art can change the world has often felt very grand, and if I’m honest, a little bit egotistical to me. How can me, spending hours locked in a practice room perfecting my vowels, Italian recit, or legato singing, really help a world filled with deep inequality and real suffering? Close to home, how can it really feed my family, and pay my bills? I have, on many occasions, been tempted to change career in favour of doing something much more tangibly ‘of service’ to the world, and yet, every time I have, I have somehow ended up back on a stage or in a rehearsal room somewhere; as if a force much bigger than me was pulling me back in. As British musicians, in a country that feels like it is increasingly undervaluing our artistic culture, we have been bombarded over the last few years with a rhetoric that we are not worthy. Constantly in a battle to prove our worth, relevance, or financial value, and it’s been hard not to internalise the narrative that what we do does not really add value to this world.
Yet, when I stop and look at the communities and people around me, I don’t have to go far to see tiny, but also monumental, impacts that Art is having on the world around me. From the grandeur of full-scale opera, to our school choir of children giving up their lunch break to experience the joy of singing together; the power of art has the capacity to change the course of anyone’s day. The power to change someone’s mood, thoughts, ideas, spark inspiration, challenge a long-held belief, make us really look at the world around us; the list is endless. The change to just one person’s day, can have a butterfly effect which, to quote O’Shaughnessy, can quite literally go on to impact the “building of great cities”. Just as I have tested the notion that being an Artist is an identity that is not within my control, so to have I realised that the impact of our Art is not within our control either.
There are tumultuous times in any artistic career, and this is certainly something I can relate to, hard. As with all jobbing musicians, the day to day is unpredictable and precarious, the culture and industry are often unkind, at times archaic, and certainly tricky to navigate. Yet, despite seeming logic, reason, and certainly financial stability, we all keep going. Chipping away, because at the end of the day, this untangible, unquantifiable thing – maybe, the dreaming of dreams – promises to continue to make a real difference, and is, at its heart, perhaps a service profession after all.
Elizabeth Lynch and the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, conducted by James Morgan, will perform Elgar’s ‘The Music Makers’ with Brighton Festival Chorus at The Anvil, Basingstoke at 4pm on Sunday 8 February 2026. The programme also includes Elgar’s ‘Cello Concerto’ and Parry’s ‘I Was Glad’.
