Australian Dictionary of Biography

Esther Rofe, c.1940s

National Library of Australia

Esther Freda Rofe (1904–2000), composer, was born on 14 March 1904 at Camberwell, Melbourne, youngest of four surviving children of Victorian-born Alfred Bromwich Rofe, Congregational minister, and his Tasmanian-born wife Flora MacDonald, née Johnson. Her mother had studied science at the University of Melbourne before her marriage in 1890 and had campaigned for women’s suffrage in Victoria. Able to read music before she could read and write, Esther began piano lessons at the age of four and violin lessons a year later. Her teachers included Harold C. Smith and Ada Freeman (Corder) for piano and Louis Hattenbach and Alberto Zelman junior for violin. She was educated at Presbyterian Ladies’ College, East Melbourne (1911–14), and Stratherne Presbyterian Girls’ Grammar School, Hawthorn (1914–19). By the age of fourteen she was a violinist in the semi-professional Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO), conducted by Zelman. In 1924 she accompanied Zelman and his wife, the soprano Maude Harrington, for concerts in Perth, where she was described as ‘one of Melbourne’s leading pianists’ (West Australian 1924, 10). Earning a living as a performer, she played violin or piano as a member of the Magpies Ladies Orchestra, in the orchestra pit for musical comedies, at garden parties, in cinema orchestras, and as an accompanist for recitals.

Rofe began composing at an early age, studying score-reading with Zelman and composition with A. E. Floyd and Fritz Hart. In July 1926 she conducted a performance of her ‘fairy opera’ Mogarzea, written when she was only fourteen, in aid of the Children’s Hospital Appeal. A movement from her flute sonata was performed by John Amadio in August 1930; her settings of three poems by John Masefield were heard by the Musical Society of Victoria in September 1931; and Galley Rowers for chorus and orchestra premiered at the Auditorium in October 1931. Hart conducted the MSO in a performance of Rofe’s tone poem The Founder at the Melbourne Town Hall in June 1932, when it was praised for its ‘emotional colour’ (Argus 1932, 8).

With a small legacy from an aunt, Rofe sailed for London, arriving on 31 August 1932. She later recalled she felt ‘hemmed in’ in Melbourne, where ‘nobody was interested in a woman learning composition’ (Petrus 2000, 27). From September 1933 to mid-1936 she studied composition, conducting, score-reading, and orchestration at the Royal College of Music, with teachers including Arthur Benjamin, Herbert Howells, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. In 1933 her tone poem was trialled by the British Broadcasting Commission (BBC) in a concert of new works and her London Song (1932) for tenor and piano was published by Augener & Co. With Miriam Hyde and Peggy Glanville-Hicks, she participated in a broadcast to Australia of their original works in July 1935. Her compositions in this period were ‘vocal, piano and chamber works in a predominantly contrapuntal style’ (Petrus 2000, 27).

In the late 1930s Rofe acted as secretary for the English composer Gordon Jacob and adapted ballet scores for the Sadler’s Wells orchestra. After studying documentary film with Stuart Legg, a producer and director at the GPO Film Unit, she composed and conducted soundtracks for travel documentaries. Excerpts from her Sea Ballet (1935) were performed by the BBC Edinburgh Orchestra on 26 December 1938. At the outset of World War II she volunteered for the Women’s Auxiliary Fire Service, managing a unit of 70 women. When her mother fell ill, she left London in April 1940, expecting to return, but the war prevented it.

Back in Melbourne, Rofe taught composition at the Melba Conservatorium and was employed by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) as a musical balance officer for recordings in its Melbourne studio, the first woman to perform this role. In 1942 she took a job as a composer-arranger for the Colgate-Palmolive Radio Unit, moving to Sydney. In conjunction with the dancer and choreographer Dorothy Stevenson, she revised her Sea Ballet, renaming it Sea Legend, and it was premiered by the Borovansky company in Melbourne on 12 November 1943. Reviews described it as ‘attractive modern music’ (Advocate 1945, 20), and it accumulated more than 200 performances in Australia and New Zealand, and another 55 in Britain (1948–50) for the Mona Inglesby company. Borovansky then commissioned her to compose Terra Australis, to a story by Tom Rothfield depicting the arrival of Europeans in Australia and their interactions with Aboriginal people, which premiered in Melbourne on 25 May 1946. Described in the press as the ‘first real Australian ballet’ (Mail 1946, 6), it confirmed Rofe as one of the most successful Australian composers for the theatre.

Independent and adventurous, Rofe was an enthusiast of camping and canoeing, and from the early 1940s she leased Pelican Island in south-eastern Tasmania. Following her mother’s death in 1950, she lived for many years at nearby Southport, working as a freelance arranger and composer. The Ballet Guild in Melbourne presented her L’Amour Enchanté in 1950, and in 1954 staged her Mathinna, a tragic tale of the adopted Aboriginal child of the Tasmanian governor Sir John Franklin. Both were praised for their vivid scores.

Rofe returned to Melbourne occasionally for work and by 1960 had moved permanently to a house at Kew. The Lake, a ballet score for television featuring the Victorian Symphony Orchestra, was broadcast by the ABC on 25 December 1962, and a children’s ballet, The Giant’s Garden, was commissioned by Ballet Victoria in 1976. Responsibility for her sister Edith (d. 1987), who was in poor health from the 1970s, and then Rofe’s own failing eyesight, reduced her capacity to compose. In her later years she relied on assistance from fellow composers Stuart Greenbaum and Becky Llewellyn. A modest woman, Rofe faded from public view later in her life, but a revival of interest in her compositions coincided with her ninetieth birthday and included a concert performance of Terra Australis by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. In 1998 she was honoured with the Citizen of the Year award by the City of Boroondara and in 1999 the Esther Rofe Songbook was published by the Australian Music Centre. She died at Kew on 26 February 2000 and her ashes were scattered in Southport Bay, Tasmania. The University of Melbourne established an award for young composers in her name.