Composer & Suffragette: Dame Ethel Mary Smyth
Need to Know
Ethel Smyth was a composer, suffragette, and writer, who historians are now recognizing as one of greatest British composers of the 19th century.
Ethel Smyth was born in 1858, the fourth of eight children, to John Hall Smyth, a major general in the Royal Artillery. Always independent and headstrong, Smyth defied her father’s wishes and pursued a career in music, first studying composition at the Leipzig Conservatory. There she met Clara Schumann, Brahms, Dvořák, and Tchaikovsky.
Early musical success include her Concerto for Violin and her Mass in D. Her opera, The Wreckers, is now considered her greatest work, but it was another opera, Der Wald, that would make history as the first opera from a female composer to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera in 1904. It would remain the only opera by a female to be performed at the Met until 2016.
Smyth struggled, like many female artists, to gain recognition for her compositions. She often was judged harshly on basis of gender rather than content. Here is a quote from her in a recent NYT’s article, “The exact worth of my music will probably not be known till naught remains of the writer but sexless dots and lines on ruled paper,” Ethel Smyth wrote in 1928.
Smyth had many affairs over her lifetime, mostly with women. She never married but did have a long term and long distance relationship with philosopher Henry Bennet Brester. From the Heroine Collective: Her sexuality remains a matter for debate: after meeting Virginia Woolf in 1930, the two forged an extremely close friendship that – on Smyth’s side at least – spilled over into infatuation and perhaps love. Whether they had a sexual relationship is unknown. Woolf was certainly frustrated with Smyth’s refusal to adopt an openly lesbian identity, and even claimed that Smyth had at one time shared the bed of Emmeline Pankhurst.
In 1922, Smyth became the first female composer and writer to be awarded a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Before her death, she also received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Durham and Oxford.
Activist and Suffragette
Smyth joined the Women’s Social Political Union (WPSU) in 1910, most likely after she met and became infatuated with the groups founder, Emmeline Pankhurst. The two formed a close friendship that may have also been romantic according to Virginia Woolf. Smyth dedicated two years of her life to the women’s suffrage campaign and composed a work for the cause. This work, The March of the Women, would be heard during the WPSU’s marches and even in Holloway Prison after she and 200 suffragettes were arrested for smashing windows in London in 1912.
The Suffragette movement would be interrupted by the start of World War I, but after the war in 1918, women over the age of 30 received the right to vote under The Representation of the People Act. This act would become more fair in 1928 when both women and men would receive the right to vote at the same age, 21 years.
A cocktail to pair with a cause!
In honor of Ethel Smyth and all the suffragettes that marched for the rights of women, we toast them with a “Suffragette” cocktail. Don’t be fooled by the floral notes, this cocktail, probably like the women it’s named after, packs quite the punch! Watch John build it here.
Ingredients: 1 1/2 oz Gin, 3/4 oz. Dry Vermouth, 1/2 oz. St. Germain Directions: Stir all the ingredients in a vessel filled with ice, strain into a chilled coupe. Enjoy!
Other interesting facts:
Smyth wrote a total of six operas and most of her major works were written before the start of World War I. After the war, she started to lose her hearing and eventually became deaf, her last major musical work was a symphony and chorus composed in 1931, The Prison. Beyond music, Smyth turned to writing and wrote 10 books before her death in 1944.
Smyth was a dog lover and kept a series of dogs for over fifty years. She even wrote a book about her love of dogs, Inordinate (?) Affection: A Story for Dog Lovers. Read more fun facts here.
Learn more about Smyth from Donne, Women in Music and Classical Nerd
Operas
The Wreckers
Considered Smyth’s masterpiece, the three act opera takes place in a Cornish fishing village in the nineteenth century. The villagers on stormy nights would lure passing ships onto their rocky Atlantic coast to ultimately loot and kill the ship’s crew.
Ethel Smyth: “Ever since those days I had been haunted by impressions of that strange world of more than a hundred years ago; the plundering of ships lured on to the rocks by the falsification or extinction of the coast lights; the relentless murder of their crews; and with it all the ingrained religiosity of the Celtic population of that barren promontory.”
Watch the opera and learn more about Ethel Smyth and the Wreckers from the Fisher Center at Bard
Der Wald
Smyth’s opera premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1903 and was the first opera composed by a female. It would remain the only opera composed by a female until 2016’s production of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin.
The Boatswain’s Mate
Smyth’s fourth opera centers around a humorous battle of the sexes, listen to it here.
Fête Galante
The fifth of Smyth’s six operas is about is about aristocrats and a commedia dell’arte troupe. Hear this opera about jealousy, desire, and mistaken identity from Retrospect Opera.
Additional Listening
Dame Ethel Smyth composed in multiple genres including, art song, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral, choral, and opera. Here are a few gems to start you down the rabbit hole of this amazing composer.
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra playing: The Wrecker’s Overture
Three Songs, sung by Melinda Paulsen: The Clown, Possession, and On the Road