1858–1944 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) was an English composer and conductor, the author of operas, choral, chamber and piano music, and a campaigner for votes for women. Her March of the Women, written in 1911, became the anthem of the suffragettes. The site offers her sheet music for The Clown, for voice and piano, at advanced level.
Ethel Smyth came into the world in 1858 as one of eight children, the fourth in line. Her father, John Hall Smyth, held the rank of major general in the Royal Artillery. Her earliest years were spent at Sidcup, at that time part of Kent. In 1867 the family moved to Frimhurst, close to Frimley Green.
Even as a child she stood out: a very capable pianist, she composed her first hymn by the time she was ten. At twelve she made up her mind to study music. At seventeen she started lessons with Alexander Ewing, who opened up Wagner and Berlioz to her. Her relatives tolerated her enthusiasm, yet they objected to music as a profession, and her father objected hardest.
She won permission to study music only after a hard quarrel with her family. In 1877–1878 Smyth studied at the Leipzig Conservatory, where one of her teachers was Carl Reinecke. After a year she left the conservatory, disappointed by how the teaching was organised. She also took lessons from Heinrich von Herzogenberg.
Leipzig brought her important acquaintances. At the conservatory she met Dvořák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky, and through Herzogenberg she met Clara Schumann and Brahms. She was also deeply impressed by her contact with Engelbert Röntgen and his family.
Heinrich's wife, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, known as Lisl, became a close friend and mentor to Smyth. She is also the subject of an unfinished musical portrait for solo piano called Aus der Jugendzeit!! E. v. H. Lisl died in 1892.
Through Lisl, Smyth met Henry Brewster, known as Harry, the husband of Lisl's sister Julia. Brewster wrote works of philosophy and later wrote the libretti for several of her operas. They exchanged many thousands of letters and remained close until his death in 1908.
Back in England, Smyth became friends with Arthur Sullivan, who in his final years esteemed her and backed her work.
Her strongest feelings were most often for women. At 71 she fell for the writer Virginia Woolf; Woolf felt both alarmed and entertained, and the two ended up as friends. While travelling in Ireland Smyth met Willie Wilde, Oscar Wilde's brother. They agreed to marry on the railway journey back from Holyhead to Euston, but she called it off in under three weeks.
Critics responded to her music in mixed ways, sometimes praising her and sometimes finding the work too masculine for a woman composer. Her Serenade in four movements brought her an orchestral and public debut in England, though she put the name E. M. Smith on it to dodge prejudiced reviews.
She was noticed as a serious composer after the Mass in D was performed in London's Albert Hall in 1893. In 1903 her opera Der Wald was staged. For more than a century it remained the only opera by a woman composer produced at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, until Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin was staged there in December 2016.
In 1910 Smyth became a member of the Women's Social and Political Union, a body campaigning for women's right to vote, and for two years set music aside for its cause. She became very close to its leader, Emmeline Pankhurst, and went with her on many occasions. In her memoirs Smyth wrote that women's disadvantages in music stem from having no political voice.
The March of the Women, which she wrote in 1911 to words by Cicely Hamilton, became the anthem of the Union and of the suffrage movement. Marchers often just shouted the lyrics instead of singing Smyth's tune.
Pankhurst urged the Union's members to smash windows at the homes of politicians who opposed women's suffrage, and Smyth was one of 109 women who took part. She asked to be sent to the house of Lewis Harcourt, the Colonial Secretary. She served two months in Holloway Prison. Thomas Beecham called on her there and saw suffragettes circling the yard in ranks, singing, while Smyth, leaning from her cell window, beat time with a toothbrush.
In 1914 Smyth was against the war effort that Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel supported, yet she trained as a radiographer in Paris. Her stormy friendship with Christabel came to an end in 1925. At the London unveiling of Pankhurst's statue in 1930, Smyth directed the Metropolitan Police Band.
Smyth gradually lost her hearing and in the end became totally deaf. Composing and conducting tapered off, but she turned to writing: from 1919 to 1940 she brought out ten mainly autobiographical books. Her last major work was the vocal symphony The Prison, to a text by Brewster, first performed in 1931.
In 1922 she was honoured as a Dame Commander of the British Empire order, the first woman composer to receive a damehood. Durham and Oxford universities gave her honorary doctorates. On 28 May 1928 the BBC broadcast two concerts of her music for her musical jubilee, with Smyth herself conducting the choral works in the second. A festival of her music took place in 1934 under Beecham; its closing event was at the Royal Albert Hall, attended by the Queen. By that time she was totally deaf.
Smyth died in 1944 in Woking, aged 86. In line with her wishes she was cremated, and her brother Bob scattered the ashes in the woodland by Woking Golf Club. Sport mattered to her throughout her life: she rode and played tennis when young, and was an enthusiastic golfer later.
In 2021 Smyth was posthumously awarded a Grammy for the recording of The Prison. A statue by Christine Charlesworth showing Smyth conducting was unveiled in Woking in March 2022. The 1974 BBC television film Shoulder to Shoulder featured her as a character, and Judy Chicago's artwork The Dinner Party gives her a place setting.
Smyth's output is varied: songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral and choral works, and operas. She also wrote symphonies and operettas. Her notable works include the Mass in D, the Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra, the Piano Trio, Fête Galante, the operas The Wreckers, Der Wald and The Boatswain's Mate, the vocal symphony The Prison and The March of the Women.
Her most famous piece is the opera The Wreckers, written to a French text by Harry Brewster and premiered in 1906. Several critics consider it the most significant English opera since Purcell and before Britten. Its overture was heard 28 times at the Proms from 1913 to 1994, and Glyndebourne gave it a first professional staging in the original French in 2022. The hour-long vocal symphony The Prison was first recorded by Chandos, with the release in 2020.
Smyth wrote more than music. Her books include the memoirs Impressions That Remained (1919), A Three-Legged Tour in Greece (1927), Inordinate (?) Affection: A Story for Dog Lovers (1936) and Maurice Baring (1938), a memoir of Maurice Baring. In Female Pipings in Eden she also described her time in prison, which she called being in good company with united women. She argued that the female element in music is built into the male one, that both matter and that women needed greater representation.
Critics often judged Smyth's music first of all as the music of a woman composer. Powerful, rhythmically driven works were faulted for lacking feminine charm, while delicate, melodious ones were said to fall short of the standard of her male colleagues. In her memoirs Smyth herself argued for being seen simply as a composer among composers.
Smyth also turns up in fiction. In E. F. Benson's Dodo books (1893–1921) she appears as Edith Staines, and she later served as a model for the invented Dame Hilda Tablet in Henry Reed's radio plays of the 1950s. Kathleen Dale, a composer, musicologist and close neighbour, was her musical executor. An abridged edition of The Memoirs of Ethel Smyth, edited by Ronald Crichton, came out in 1987.
At present the site carries a single Smyth edition: The Clown, for voice and piano, advanced level. Among her piano pieces is an unfinished musical portrait for solo piano titled Aus der Jugendzeit!! E. v. H.