Ethel Smyth

Dame Ethel Mary Smyth (22 April 1858 – 8 May 1944) was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas.

Smyth tended to be marginalised as a "woman composer", as though her work could not be accepted as mainstream. Yet when she produced more delicate compositions, they were criticised for not measuring up to the standard of her male peers. She was the first female composer granted a damehood.

Smyth was involved in the suffrage movement and spent time in Holloway Prison for breaking windows. She also composed the suffragette anthem The March of the Women.

Family background

Ethel Smyth was born at 5 Lower Seymour Street, Marylebone, London on 22 April 1858, the fourth of eight children. While 22 April is the actual date of her birth, Smyth habitually stated it was 23 April, the day that was celebrated by her family, as they enjoyed the coincidence with William Shakespeare's. Her father, John Hall Smyth, who was a major general in the Royal Artillery, was very much opposed to her making a career in music. The home of her early years was Sidcup Place in Sidcup, then in Kent. From 1867 her family base was Frimhurst, near Frimley Green; from 1894 she lived at One Oak, also in Frimley, before moving in 1910 to Hook Heath on the outskirts of Woking. Her youngest brother was Robert ("Bob") Napier Smyth (1868–1947), who rose to become a Brigadier in the British Army.

Musical career

Smyth was a child prodigy. She was a stellar pianist at a very young age and was able to compose her first hymn by the age of 10. She decided to study music at the age of 12. Smyth first studied with Alexander Ewing when she was 17. He introduced her to the music of Wagner and Berlioz. After a major battle with her father about her plans to devote her life to music, Smyth was allowed to advance her musical education at the Leipzig Conservatory, where she studied Brahmsian musical composition with Carl Reinecke. She left after a year, however, disillusioned with the low standard of teaching, and continued her music studies privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg. While at the Leipzig Conservatory, Smyth met Dvořák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky. Through Herzogenberg, she also met Clara Schumann and Brahms. Upon her return to England, Smyth formed a supportive friendship with Arthur Sullivan in the last years of his life; he respected her and encouraged her work.

Smyth's extensive body of work includes the Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra and the Mass in D. It was the latter's performance in London's Albert Hall in 1893 that helped her gain recognition as a serious composer. Her opera The Wreckers is considered by some critics to be the "most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten". Her best known work, she composed it to a French libretto by Henry Brewster. It premiered in 1906. In 2022 it received its first professional production in its original French text at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera. It was also performed at the BBC Proms, where its prelude or overture was presented 28 times between 1913 and 1994.

Another of her operas, Der Wald, mounted in 1903, was, for more than a century, the only opera by a woman composer ever produced at New York's Metropolitan Opera (until Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin in December 2016).

On 28 May 1928, the nascent BBC broadcast two concerts of Smyth's music, marking her "musical jubilee", The first comprised chamber music, the second, conducted by Smyth herself, choral works. Otherwise, recognition in England came somewhat late for Smyth, wrote the conductor Leon Botstein at the time he conducted the American Symphony Orchestra's US premiere of The Wreckers in New York on 30 September 2007:

On her seventy-fifth birthday in 1934, under Beecham's direction, her work was celebrated in a festival, the final event of which was held at the Royal Albert Hall in the presence of the Queen. Heartbreakingly, at this moment of long-overdue recognition, the composer was already completely deaf and could hear neither her own music nor the adulation of the crowds.

After her release from prison, Smyth composed her final major work, the hour-long vocal symphony The Prison, setting a text by Henry Bennett Brewster. It was first performed in 1931. The first recording was issued by Chandos in 2020. Smyth’s composing and conducting career came to a premature end before the 1920s as she started to develop hearing loss, which eventually led to her becoming completely deaf.[1] However, she found a new interest in literature and, between 1919 and 1940, she published ten highly successful, mostly autobiographical, books.

Critical reception

Overall, critical reaction to her work was mixed. She was alternately praised and panned for writing music that was considered too masculine for a "lady composer", as critics called her. Though Smyth’s four movement Serenade earned her orchestral and public debut in England, she had to use the pseudonym E.M. Smith to avoid biased criticism. Eugene Gates writes that:

Smyth's music was seldom evaluated as simply the work of a composer among composers, but as that of a "woman composer". This worked to keep her on the margins of the profession, and, coupled with the double standard of sexual aesthetics, also placed her in a double bind. On the one hand, when she composed powerful, rhythmically vital music, it was said that her work lacked feminine charm; on the other, when she produced delicate, melodious compositions, she was accused of not measuring up to the artistic standards of her male colleagues.

Other critics were more favourable: "The composer is a learned musician: it is learning which gives her the power to express her natural inborn sense of humour... Dr. Smyth knows her Mozart and her Sullivan: she has learned how to write conversations in music... [The Boatswain's Mate] is one of the merriest, most tuneful, and most delightful comic operas ever put on the stage."

Involvement with the suffrage movement

In 1910, Smyth joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), which agitated for women's suffrage, giving up music for two years to devote herself to the cause. Smyth argued in her memoirs that the disadvantages that women face in music stem from the lack of a political vote or voice. She developed a very close relationship with the charismatic leader of the WSPU, Emmeline Pankhurst, and accompanied her on many occasions. Soon after, Smyth composed her most famous, "The March of the Women" (1911) to words by Cicely Hamilton. The text was used to inspire women to unite and free themselves from patriarchal rule. This eventually became the anthem of the WSPU and the suffragette movement.

Smyth is credited with teaching Emmeline Pankhurst how to throw stones in 1912. After further practice aiming stones at trees near the home of fellow suffragette Zelie Emerson, Pankhurst called on WSPU members to break a window of the house of any politician who opposed votes for women. Smyth was one of the 109 members who responded to Pankhurst's call, asking to be sent to attack the home of Colonial Secretary Lewis Harcourt, who had remarked that if his wife's beauty and wisdom was present in all women, they would have already won the vote.

Smyth stood half the bail for Helen Craggs, who had been caught on the way to carry out the arson of the leading politician's home. During the stone-throwing, Pankhurst and 100 other women were arrested, and Smyth served two months in Holloway Prison. When Thomas Beecham, her proponent-friend, went to visit her there, he found suffragettes marching in the quadrangle and singing, as Smyth leaned out of a window conducting the song with a toothbrush.

In her book, Female Pipings in Eden, Smyth said her prison experience was of being "in good company" of united women "old, young, rich, poor, strong, delicate", putting the cause they were imprisoned for before their personal needs. Smyth revealed that the prison was infested with cockroaches, even in the hospital ward. She was released early, due to a medical assessment that she was mentally unstable and hysterical. Smyth gave written evidence in the November trial of Pankhurst and others for inciting violence, stating that she (Smyth) had freely engaged in activism. She continued to correspond with Pankhurst, and heard of her getting lost trying to find the safe house provided for her to avoid re-arrest in Scotland.

Smyth strongly disagreed with the support Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel gave to the war effort in 1914, but she did train as a radiographer in Paris. Her fractious friendship with Christabel ended in 1925, and Smyth conducted the Metropolitan Police Band at the unveiling of the statue to Pankhurst in London in 1930.