Ethel Smyth (1858 – 1944)
Ethel Smyth is one of the most famous and fascinating English women composers.
She was born in the Sidcup area of London to a proper Victorian family who gave her an early education in music but who would go no further. What she wanted was to study music at the Leipzig Conservatory, but this was adamantly opposed by her parents. Nevertheless, she persisted. She was eventually allowed to go there in 1877 but left about a year later. During her time in Leipzig, she met fellow students Grieg, Dvořák, and Tchaikovsky, as well as Brahms and Clara Schumann.
Ethel Smyth’s earliest compositions date from about 1877. Over the next half century she wrote music for orchestras, choruses, chamber ensembles (including six string quartets), piano, organ, and voice. She wrote six operas and about a dozen books, several of which are memoirs.
In the 1910s, Ethel Smyth became very active in the women’s suffrage movement in England. During an action involving throwing stones at the windows of politicians opposed to giving women the vote, she was arrested and served two months in prison. During that time, she led the other women in performances of her stirring choral work March of the Women.
In 1922, Ethel Smyth became the first female composer to be made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), and she is often known as Dame Ethel Smyth.
During her life, Ethel Smyth’s appearance and demeanor were often described as “mannish.” In modern terms, she presented butch, and there is no question that she was gay. Most of Ethel Smyth’s romantic relationships were with women, although some of them were unrequited. It is believed by some that one of her lovers was the famed suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst.
In February 1930, Ethel Smyth dropped by the home of Virginia Woolf, and despite the 24-year age difference and an even vaster difference in personalities, the two became close friends and correspondents. Over one-quarter of Virginia Woolf’s existing letters during the last 12 years of her life are to Ethel Smyth, and sometimes Woolf got two letters a day in return. “An old woman of seventy one … has fallen in love with me,” Woolf wrote her nephew. See this article for a full exploration of this extraordinary friendship.
Ethel Smyth’s most famous work is her 1906 opera The Wreckers, based on old stories of villages in Cornwall luring ships to crash on their shores, and then plundering them. The libretto was originally written in French because France was thought the best bet for a premiere. That didn’t work, so it was then translated into German for a premiere in Leipzig in 1906. In 1907 Gustav Mahler was considering a production at the Vienna State Opera, but he was driven out of his post there by anti-semitic agitation that same year. In an English translation, The Wreckers was finally premiered in London in 1910.
In recent years, more productions of The Wreckers have been mounted, including this one at Bard College. Here is — in English and with subtitles — the complete opera The Wreckers.