Dilys Elwyn-Edwards
1918 - 2012
Dilys Elwyn-Edwards (née Roberts; 19 August 1918 – 13 January 2012) was a Welsh-language composer, lecturer and accompanist.
Dilys Roberts was born on 19 August 1918 in Dolgellau, Wales. She attended Dr Williams' School for Girls, a grammar school which educated girls ages 7–18 from 1878 to 1975. She was offered the Turle Music Scholarship at Girton College, Cambridge and the Dr. Joseph Parry Scholarship, from Cardiff University. She elected to study at Cardiff University and received her BMus degree. She taught music at her old school, Dr Williams', Dolgellau, for the next three years. She then received the Open Scholarship in Composition from the Royal College of Music in London and studied composition with Herbert Howells and piano with Kathleen McQuitty there.
She married David Elwyn Edwards, a Methodist minister and theological scholar, in 1947. She moved to Oxford while her husband attended Mansfield College. She taught music from 1946 to 1972.
In the 1960s they moved back to Wales, where Elwyn became minister for the Calvinist Methodist chapel in Castle Square, Caernarfon. In 1973 she became a piano tutor at Bangor Normal College and Bangor University in North Wales, where she proved to be a popular, effective and much-respected teacher of the instrument. She was also an Eisteddfod adjudicator, and appeared and performed on radio and television. The BBC commissioned a number of works from her. She died on 13 January 2012, in a nursing home at Llanberis, Gwynedd, aged 93.
Biography taken from Wikipedia.
