Smyth, Ethel (EN)

Smyth Dame Ethel Mary, *22 April 1858 London, †8 May 1944 Woking, English composer and writer. Despite her family’s objection, she came to Leipzig in 1877 to study composition at the conservatory with C. Reineck, S. Jadassohn and L. Maas and later to take private lessons with H. von Herzogenberg. She met, among others, J. Brahms, E. Grieg and C. Schumann. Her early compositions were performed there – songs, piano and chamber pieces. After returning to England, she debuted in London in 1890 with Serenade and overture Antony and Cleopatra. Soon she became interested in opera; she devoted several years to working on  Fantasio, Der Wald and Les naufrageurs, craving for them to be staged in Britain and other European countries. In 1910, she actively engaged in the suffrage movement, to which she dedicated, among others, The March of the Women. During World War I, she started writing witty essays and memoirs that became very popular (e.g. England, Music, and – Women; Impressions That Remained; Beecham and Pharaoh). Progressive hearing loss in the last ten years of her life prevented her from composing. She received honorary doctorates from the universities of Durham (1910) and Oxford (1926) and the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1922).

Smyth’s musical language shows features typical for the German composers of the end of the 19^th century; the influence of J. Brahms is especially visible in her songs and chamber pieces from the Leipzig period. Smyth’s orchestral works are characterised by great melodic inventiveness and effective orchestration. The composer gained fame primarily as the author of operas, including both one-act comedies (The Boatswain’s Mate, Entente cordiale) and the most famous, lyrical drama in three acts Les naufrageurs. Smyth referred mainly to the late Romantic style (Der Wald), but also to neoclassicism (Fête galante). She reached, among others, to such means as spoken dialogue (Entente cordiale) or English folklore (The Boatswain’s Mate).

Literature: J.A. Bernstein „Shout, Shout, Up with your Song!”. Dame Ethel Smyth and the Changing Role of the British Woman Composer, in: Women Making Music. The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, ed. J. Bowers and J. Tick, Urbana 1986; E. Wood Lesbian Fugue. Ethel Smyth’s Contrapuntal Arts, in: Musicology and Difference, ed. R. Solie, Berkeley 1993; E. Smyth The Memoirs of Ethel Smyth, London, 2008; Women’s Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, Stage and Screen The Making of a Movement, ed. Ch. Wiley, L. E. Rose, Abingdon, Oxon 2021; L. Broad Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World, London 2023; A. E. Butler Two paths to equality Alice Paul and Ethel M. Smith in the ERA debate, 1921–1929, Albany 2002; E. Wood On Deafness and Musical Creativity: The Case of Ethel Smyth, “The Musical Quarterly” 2009, vol. 92 (1–2); E. Wood Performing Rights: A Sonography of Women’s Suffrage, “The Musical Quarterly, 1994, Vol. 79 (4); E. Wood Women, Music, and Ethel Smyth: A Pathway in the Politics of Music, Amherst, “The Massachusetts Review” 1983, Vol. 24 (1); Ch. Wiley Music and Literature: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and “The First Woman to Write an Opera”, “The Musical Quarterly” 2013, vol. 96 (2); S. Robinson Smyth the anarchist: fin-de-siècle radicalism in ‘The Wreckers’, “Cambridge Opera Journal” 2009, vol. 20 (2); J. Lebiez The Representation of Female Power in Ethel Smyth’s ‘Der Wald’ (1902), “The German Quarterly”, vol. 91 (4), Music and German Culture, 2018; E. Gates Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don’t: Sexual Aesthetics and the Music of Dame Ethel Smyth, “Journal of Aesthetic Education”, vol. 31 (1), 1997; P. Gillett Musical women in England, 1870–1914, New York 2000; L. Parsons, B. Ravenscroft Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers, Oxford University Press, 2022; M. Hoffmann “Wie ich Suffragette wurde.”: künstlerisches und politisches Selbstverständnis der englischen Komponistin Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), “GENDER – Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft” 4(1), 2012; R. Lumsden “The Music Between Us”: Ethel Smyth, Emmeline Pankhurst, and “Possession”, “Feminist Studies”, vol. 41 (2), 2015; S. Fuller Smyth, Dame Ethel (Mary), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 23, 2001.