Dame Elizabeth Violet Maconchy LeFanu DBE (/məˈkɒŋkiː ˈlɛfænuː/; 19 March 1907 – 11 November 1994) was an Irish-English composer.

Elizabeth Violet Maconchy was born in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, of Irish parents, and grew up in England and Ireland.

Early compositions such as the violin sonata and Piano Concertino of 1927 already show the influence of European composers, especially Béla Bartók.

[10] This was followed on 30 August by a BBC Proms performance of her cantata The Land, conducted by Henry Wood,[11] which was inspired by the long poem of the same name by Vita Sackville-West.

[1][4] She returned to Ireland in 1939, living in Dublin for a brief period, during which she composed her Fifth String Quartet, which some critics consider her greatest achievement,[13] and gave birth to a daughter.

[16] Her work has been compared to that of Bartók, who was an acknowledged influence, and also to Beethoven and Mozart, as well as (favourably) to contemporaries such as Benjamin Britten.

[14] According to Ailie Blunnie, Maconchy was "a gestural composer, concerning herself with short musical fragments, as opposed to large-scale concepts or templates", at least in part because of her "ideology" as a composer, so that "she never planned anything out, musically speaking, in any great detail in advance of composition, [and by using shorter formats] she could afford to explore the possibilities implicit in the ideas themselves as they arose".

[18] A favoured "harmonic device" was the "simultaneous use of major and minor sonorities", which "came to denote episodes of heightened emotion".

[21] Historian of music Anna Beer has contended that "Maconchy loved the quartet form because it represented a debate, a dialectic between four balanced, individual, impassioned voices.