Dame Ethel Smyth, Life and Works

Dame Ethel Smyth, DBE, was one of the most celebrated British composers of her time when women were still considered amateur musicians. Aside from being a respected woman opera composer, she was also a suffragette and a writer. Smyth is best known for her operas The Wreckers and The Boatswain's Mate.

During her career she travelled through Europe, something that influenced her become an eclectic composer. She became friends of Grieg, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Clara Schumann, and Brahms, among other leading composers.

Early Life of Ethel Smyth

Ethel Mary Smyth was an English composer and leader of the Women's Suffrage Movement. She was born on April 23, 1858 in London, of middle-class English background who had the typical upbringing of having private tutors. She began her formal music training at the age of 17. Two years later, she studied at the Leipzig Conservatoire, and the following year, took private lessons with Austrian composer Heinrich Herzogenberg.

Acclaimed Woman Composer

On returning to England, April 26, 1890, Smyth made her orchestral debut, followed by the premiere of overture to Antony and Cleopatra six months later. In 1891, she completed two of her most important works, Serenade in D performed at the Crystal Palace in 1890, and Mass in D, premiered at the Albert Hall in 1891, where she gained recognition as the most important woman composer of her time.

German conductor Hermann Levi was impressed with her work and insisted that she write an opera. She then devoted to musico-dramatic works. Her first opera was Fantasio (1898). Her second opera, Der Wald, made history as the first opera by a woman to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Her third opera, The Wreckers, is considered by many as her masterpiece.

The composer-Suffragette

In her early 50s, in 1910, she became a friend of Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the British Women's Suffrage Movement and leader of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Smyth actively took part in the women's suffrage movement in England. She used her music to support the movement. In 1912, she herself was arrested and imprisoned for her efforts toward securing the women's right to vote. She served two months in Holloway Prison for smashing the windows of a cabinet minister.

Her greatest contribution to the suffragette cause was her lively and colourful music, March of the Women, which became the battle song of the movement. One day, while the prisoners were taking their outdoor exercise, Smyth appeared at a window overlooking the prison yard, and conducted their singing of the suffrage battle anthem she composed by waving her government-issued toothbrush.

More Operas

In 1913 she composed her fourth and most popular opera, The Boatswain's Mate. Smyth realized that she was gradually going deaf. Despite this, she composed two more operas. Her other major works were a Concerto for violin, horn and orchestra and The Prison, a symphony for soprano, bass-baritone and orchestra.

World War I put an end to performances of her compositions, so she embarked on a second career as a writer. She wrote many essays and ten books, mostly of an autobiographical nature, which remain an invaluable source on her own life and offer brilliant portrayals of notable contemporaries. Among her friends were leading British writers Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

Ethel Smyth's Legacy

Smyth ranks easily with contemporaries like Arthur Sullivan, C.V. Stanford and Hubert Parry. Among her other awards, Smyth was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1922. She died in the UK aged 86 on May 8, 1944.

Sources:

The Grove concise Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie, Macmillan, 1994.

The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, edited by Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel, 1994.

The Oxford companion to Music, edited by Alison Latham, OUP, 2002.

Dame Ethel Smyth

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