Music

Ethel Smyth

1858–1944 · English

Late Romantic — opera, and the music of the suffrage campaign

Dame Ethel Smyth was an English composer, memoirist and militant suffragette who forced her way into a profession that did not want her, beginning with a hunger strike against her father to be allowed to study in Leipzig. Her operas were staged across Germany, her Mass in D was performed at the Royal Albert Hall, and her suffrage anthem was sung by women in Holloway prison while she conducted them from a cell window with a toothbrush.

How to spot them

▸Big, Brahmsian, German-trained sound from an English composer — she studied at Leipzig and knew Brahms, Grieg, Dvořák and Clara Schumann
▸Six operas, most of them premiered in Germany before England would take them, and one set among Cornish shipwreckers
▸The biographical hooks: two months in Holloway in 1912, a lifelong friendship with Emmeline Pankhurst, and increasing deafness from about 1913 that ended her composing
▸She wrote ten volumes of memoirs and was, by her own account, as well known for her prose as her music

Key works — listen

A three-act opera about a Cornish village that lures ships onto the rocks, and the lovers who light warning beacons (1906)

The Wreckers — her best-known opera, premiered in Leipzig in German as Strandrecht; often called the finest English opera between Purcell and Britten

A marching song to words by Cicely Hamilton, sung by imprisoned suffragettes and conducted from a cell window with a toothbrush (1910)

The March of the Women — the anthem of the Women's Social and Political Union

A large-scale setting of the Latin Mass, premiered at the Royal Albert Hall in 1893 and then unheard for over thirty years (1891)

Mass in D — revived in 1924 under Adrian Boult

A one-act comic opera set in a Bavarian village post office, first staged in London in 1916 (1916)

The Boatswain's Mate — based on a story by W. W. Jacobs; it quotes her own suffrage anthem in the overture

A double concerto for violin and horn, written after her hearing had begun to fail (1927)

Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra

Her last major work, a symphony for soprano, bass-baritone, chorus and orchestra setting a philosophical dialogue by her friend Henry Brewster (1930)

The Prison — a setting of H. B. Brewster's dialogue between a condemned man and his soul

A one-act German opera of 1902 whose Metropolitan Opera staging was not matched by another woman's opera there for 113 years (1902)

Der Wald ('The Forest') — given at the Met in 1903; the next opera by a woman staged there was Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin in 2016

Quick-fire facts

•She was born in Sidcup, Kent, on 22 April 1858, the daughter of an artillery general who opposed her studying music
•She won her way to the Leipzig Conservatory in 1877 by refusing to eat or attend church until her father relented
•In Leipzig she met Brahms, Grieg, Dvořák, Tchaikovsky and Clara Schumann
•Her opera Der Wald was staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1903, and remained the only opera by a woman ever performed there until Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin in 2016
•She joined the Women's Social and Political Union in 1910 and gave up music for two years to work for the suffrage campaign
•In 1912 she served two months in Holloway for throwing a stone through a cabinet minister's window; Thomas Beecham found her conducting fellow prisoners in the exercise yard with a toothbrush
•She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1922, the first woman composer to be so honoured
•She received honorary doctorates from Durham and Oxford, and was the first woman composer elected an honorary member of the Royal Philharmonic Society
•Her ten volumes of memoirs include Impressions That Remained (1919) and As Time Went On (1936)
•She became almost totally deaf and died at Woking on 8 May 1944

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources

Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press) — Ethel Smyth
Ethel Smyth — The Memoirs of Ethel Smyth
Encyclopaedia Britannica — Ethel Smyth