Favourites, Ethel Smyth (1858-1944)

Last week saw the 80th anniversary of the death of the English composer, activist and author Ethel Smyth, composer of a wide range of works as well as a vanguard of the suffragette movement.

Born in Kent into a large family (she eventually had seven siblings), she showed considerable early talent, writing hymn-tunes by the age of ten and making up her mind to devote her life to music by the time she was twelve. Her father was not supportive, and Smyth’s determination caused a considerable rift between them. Despite his opposition she did in the end win out, and initially studied composition under Reinecke at Leipzig Conservatory - mingling with some of the most highly-regarded established composers of the time, including Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Dvořák. Although Leipzig itself was also highly thought of, Smyth found the teaching on offer uninspiring, and only completed a year at the Conservatory before moving to study with Herzogenberg on a private basis. Through him she also met Brahms and Clara Schumann.

Her output includes many single entries - one each of a large number of genres, from string trios and piano trios, via quintets and sonatas, to instrumental concertos. Her 1891 Mass in D is a huge and imposing work that makes particularly generous use of orchestral percussion. It would be wrong to identify any single genre as being Smyth’s area of focus, as she ranged freely across them all, but vocal music seems to have been one to which she returned often, with several sets of songs and Lieder.

Tragically, progressive hearing loss in later life put a premature end to Smyth’s compositional career - the last two decades of her life were spent totally deaf. This led to her developing an interest in writing, publishing ten successful books before her death in 1944 at the age of 86. In acknowledgement of her lifelong interest in golf, her ashes were scattered in the woods near the Woking Golf Club.

It is impossible to reflect on Smyth as merely a musician, isolated to some degree from political and social realities; nor would she have considered herself so. She was a passionate activist in the movement for women’s suffrage, and fully supportive of the Women’s Social and Political Union in its decision to take direct action and rely on deeds rather than words. Among other things, she is credited with having taught Emmeline Pankhurst how to throw stones in around 1912 - a surprising claim in some ways, since Pankhurst, at this point aged fifty-four, must surely already have had a grasp of the basics! But presumably Smyth was able to advise her fellow activists in some respect.

Although she does not seem to have thought of herself as a queer activist, she was remarkably open about her affairs with women in an age where bisexuality was almost universally met with hostility and social ostracism, as well as maintaining several overlapping relationships with both women and men throughout her life. In her seventies, she fell passionately in love with fellow activist Virginia Woolf (with whom she shared formative experiences of fighting for women’s rights), and while Woolf did not reciprocate her feelings, the two became close friends.

Smyth, like many other suffragettes, did time in prison for her activism - specifically, for her participation in a group vandalisation of the house of a particularly condescending political opponent of women’s suffrage, where those stone-throwing skills were put into practice. In 1937 Smyth re-told this story to fellow author Vera Brittain, and an archive recording of that interview is still available on the BBC website.

When Thomas Beecham visited her in Holloway Prison to show his support, he found her leaning out of a window, waving a toothbrush to conduct a group of suffragettes as they marched and sang in the courtyard. Her own composition, The March of the Women (No. 3 from a set collectively published as Songs of Sunrise), was already popular among her fellow suffragettes by this time and was eventually formally adopted as the anthem of the WSPU, so it’s quite possible that she was conducting her own work. An apocryphal story that may or not be true also holds that on one occasion she barged into the middle of a Cabinet session at 10 Downing Street and thumped out the March on Herbert Asquith’s piano.

Inevitably, much critical opinion in her own time placed Smyth’s music squarely in the crosshairs of a classic, age-old piece of hypocrisy: when her compositions aligned in mood with those of her male peers, her ‘feminine charm’ was questioned, and when they did not, she was dismissed as being limited to the delicate, the trivial, and the inconsequential. Still, some of her contemporaries recognised her gifts - Arthur Sullivan, Thomas Beecham and others - and her reputation was such that in 1922 she broke new ground by becoming the first female composer to be made a Dame, an honour awarded in recognition of both her composition and her writing.

Over the ensuing decades awareness and appreciation of Smyth’s music has gradually become more widespread as the walls of the ‘women composer’ pigeonhole have slowly grown more permeable. Even so, to this day many of her works remain unrecorded (and some still unpublished), and hardly any have received more than one recording. Of the ten books that she wrote - most of them to an extent autobiographical - all are, likewise, sadly out of print.