ETHEL SMYTH
Dr David C F Wright
Ethel Smyth was born in London on 23 April 1858.
She was a formidable woman which, it
has to be said, is a polite way of describing
her excessive domineering attitude.
One wonders how her father, J H Smyth,
a Major-General in the Royal Artillery,
contributed to Ethel's personality.
On the other hand she could be hearty
and jovial. She was one of eight children
of which six were female.
She was headstrong all her life and interested in education.
When she displayed her interest in music her family were displeased.
In fact they stopped her music lessons because she became too
intense. She was always a rebel and unpredictable.
She did not care what her family thought. She announced that
she was going to be a professional musician when there was considered
no future in it especially for a teenage girl. Her parents were
very cross. She had had the best of education with a private tutor
and at a boarding school in Putney. When she was seventeen she
had lessons with Alexander Ewing and studied the works of Wagner
and read Berlioz's Treatise on Instrumentation. She regarded Leipzig
as the centre of musical excellence and wanted to study there.
She argued with her parents about her plans and was moody, sullen
and disruptive. She would not eat or come out of her room or go
to church or social functions and shouted and swore at everybody.
Eventually for the sanity of the home her father reluctantly allowed
her to go in 1877
But she was only there a year . She
was again a rebel. She said
that the standard of teaching and music
there was abysmal. And yet she had Carl
Reinecke as a tutor. He was the conductor
of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. But she
met some interesting musicians there
including Grieg, Dvořák and Tchaikovsky.
Her rebellious attitude and desire
for attention led her in 1878 to have
private tuition from Heinrich von Herzogenberg.
Through himshe met Brahms and Clara
Schumann.
Her first work was a String Quartet performed in 1884. A sonata
for violin and piano, Op. 4, appeared in 1887 and a Sonata for
cello and piano, Op. 5, in 1887. Her opus 3 and Opus 4 were sets
of German lieder which she took to the publishers Breitkopf and
Härtel. When she was told that there was no market for such
songs, she retorted that they had to be published but that she
would not accept a fee or royalties and called the publisher a
donkey.
It was Brahms who expressed the view that the songs had worth
and this pandered to Ethel's desire for attention. She responded
by admiring Brahms and beginning to write in his style. Her Seven
Short Chorale Preludes for organ display this.
She returned to England. No teacher
was good enough for her. She studied
orchestration on her own and composed
two works, the four movement Serenade
in D and the overture Anthony and Cleopatra
both premiered by August Manns at the
Crystal Palace in 1890. George Bernard
Shaw wrote about the overture that when
the composer was called to the platform
the audience were stupefied that a woman
could make so much noise. However, it
did have some success.
Despite her socialist and atheist/agnostic views she composed
her Mass in D in 1891 premiered by the Royal Choral Society under
Sir Joseph Barnaby at the Royal Albert Hall. Sir Donald Tovey
claimed it as a great work and to be compared with Beethoven's
Missa Solemnis, a remark which is unbelievable from a scholar
of Tovey's standing. It has some fine moments but it is rather
ponderous in a German tradition. The conductor Hermann Levi was
impressed with it and told Smyth that she should concentrate on
opera. She did.
What Smyth achieved was the support
of many women in the public eye. The
exiled Empress Eugene, the widow of
Napoleon III helped financially with
the premiere of the Mass as her sister
Mary Hunter and did the American Mary
Dodge who financed the first British
performance of The Wreckers. The assistance
was probably more for the advancement
of women rather than the music.
Smyth wrote six operas in quick succession. Fantasia, completed
in 1898 took about eighteen months to compose and was based on
a libretto by Henry Brewster adapted from a comedy by Alfred de
Musset. It was not a success. In 1902, her second opera Der Wald
appeared which was performed in Berlin and Covent Garden and it
was the first opera by a British woman staged at the Metropolitan
in New York which performance she attended.
In 1904 her opera The Wreckers appeared and it is her most well-known
opera to a libretto by Brewster. The British premiere was a concert
version in 1908 conducted by Beecham.
Two smaller works date from this time, the Four Songs of 1908
and Three Moods of the Sea (1913)
She allied herself to the suffrage movement after meeting Emmeline
Pankhurst in 1910 and for two years she supported what the movement
claimed: a right for women to vote. But it was not just that.
If it had been just that the movement would had been admired but
the movement was a terrorist organisation. Women smashed windows,
put burning rags soaked with paraffin into letter boxes destroying
letters to loved ones, carried bricks in their large handbags
and attacked policeman and clergymen in the street with these
heavy weapons. They would break up meetings including church services.
That they chained themselves to railings was one thing but they
made false accusations that policeman had groped them and when
they were arrested and in prison cells they were force-fed which
the women claim was assault.
Smyth was captivated by Pankhurst and
said that she would be her slave. She
became close to other women and was
able to indulge her lesbianism. Her
work The March of the Women from her
Three Songs of Sunrise became the anthem
of the suffragettes. Smyth was found
guilty of criminal damage of the property
of a cabinet minister and was sentenced
to two months in Holloway Prison.
Thereafter she went to Egypt in 1913 and wrote her comedy opera
The Boatswain's Mate which used The March of the Women material.
It was premiered in London's Shaftesbury Theatre in 1916. It had
a mixed reception and she conducted the overture at the 1921 Promenade
Concerts.
Now in her early sixties she was alarmed
at the fact that she was going deaf
and, to add to her malaise, heard strange
noises. She embarked on another career
as a writer and wrote ten books mostly
biographical dealing with Beecham, Brahms,
Queen Victoria, Emmeline Pankhurst and
Virginia Woolf. In these books she laboured
the point tenaciously that women were
superior in all things. Two of her book
titles tell it all ... Female Pipings
in Eden (1933) and Inordinate Affection
(1936). Her ranting and raving in her
letters including those published in
the broadsheets continued her sexism
and verbal abuse of men as inferior
creatures.
She was noted for her eccentricity.
She dressed like a man sinceshe took
that role in her relationships with
other women. She smoked cigars and wore
tweed suits. She loved sheepdogs and
lavished excessive affection upon them.
The 1920s saw her last two operas, Fete
Galante (1922) with a libretto by Maurice
Baring and Entente Cordiale (1925) described
as a post war comedy. But they have
not caught on.
She composed a rather anaemic Concerto for horn, violin and orchestra
in 1927 trying to imitate the lyrical Brahms and The Prison (1930)
to a text by Henry Brewster which was described as a symphony
for soprano, baritone and orchestra.
She was respected in some quarters,
or it may be that she was given consideration
to stem the flow of her attacks upon
the establishment. She had received
a honorary doctorate from Durham in
1910 and another from Oxford in 1926.
In 1922 she was made a Dame Commander
of the Order of the British Empire.
She died in Woking on 9 May 1944.
Copyright Dr David C F Wright 1999. This article or any part
of it must not be copied or used in any way nor stored in a retrieval
system or downloaded without the prior written consent of the
author.
