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Ethel Smyth
b.1858 – d.1944
When Ethel Smyth arrived in Leipzig in November 1906 for the dress rehearsal of her third opera, The Wreckers, she was horrified to find that – contrary to her explicit instructions – Richard Hagel, musical director of the opera house, had made extensive cuts to the final act. Smyth was furious and threatened not to attend the premiere, but in the end couldn’t resist sneaking into the opera house and taking a seat in the gallery. Somewhat to her surprise the audience – despite the fact that this was a work by a foreigner and by a woman – was extremely enthusiastic. A second performance was due several days later and Smyth asked for the cuts to be restored. Hagel refused. Getting no reply to her threat to withdraw the opera, Smyth took the extraordinary and unprecedented step of marching into the orchestra pit, removing all the parts and the full score, and catching a train to Prague.
Smyth had been fighting – with characteristic energy and determination – for a performance of The Wreckers for two years. That she was prepared to forego further performances at one of Europe’s most important artistic centres, rather than compromise what she saw as the musical integrity of her work, tells us a great deal about her uncompromising character and her resolute belief in the importance and worth of her music.
Ethel Mary Smyth had shown this kind of grit and resolve throughout her life. Born in 1858, she came from a military family and had to fight hard with her formidable father to persuade him to allow her to study music in Germany. For fathers of Major-General Smyth’s class a daughter who trained as a professional musician was unthinkable. But Smyth eventually won the battle and spent most of the 1870s and 80s based in Germany, studying composition and moving in circles that included musicians such as Johannes Brahms, Edvard Grieg, Joseph Joachim and Clara Schumann. Much of her work from this time is chamber music, in a decidedly Germanic musical idiom.
In the 1890s, based back in England, Smyth achieved several high-profile performances of orchestral and choral works, such as the Serenade (1889) and Mass in D (1891). She also decided to concentrate her musical energies on composing opera. A comic opera Fantasio (1892-4) was followed by the one-act music drama Der Wald (1899-1901). Both works set German libretti written by Smyth with her close friend, Harry Brewster, and both were premiered in Germany.
At the turn of the century, Smyth turned her thoughts to a story set in 18th-century Cornwall, that had first come to her after a Cornish walking holiday with her sister and brother-in-law in 1886. As she was to write in her memoirs:
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…
She told the story to Brewster, who provided a libretto in French verse, Les Naufrageurs. Smyth worked on the opera from 1902 to 1904, arguing fiercely with Brewster over the libretto, visiting Cornwall to talk to elderly people there, and creating her commanding and passionate score. At the time she was to write: ‘I feel awfully full of power – deadly sure of what I am doing’.
It initially looked as if Les Naufrageurs would be premiered at Monte Carlo with the French soprano Emma Calve singing Thirza. But this production fell through and, with the libretto translated into German as Standrecht, Smyth turned her attention to Germany. After the fiasco in Leipzig in 1906, Smyth was hoping for better things from performances in Prague the following month. But the musical director Angelo Neumann had suffered a stroke and in the disorder that followed, despite Brewster’s gift of Ł1,000 towards the production, The Wreckers was decidedly under-rehearsed and the performances were a disaster. Smyth refused to abandon her opera and after trying – in vain – for performances at Vienna under Mahler, turned her attention to London.
The Covent Garden Syndicate rejected the opera, but in 1908 Artur Nikisch conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a concert performance of the first two acts. The first staged performances, with the libretto translated largely by Smyth herself into English, were heard in June 1909, conducted by the young Thomas Beecham at His Majesty’s Theatre and underwritten by Smyth’s reclusive millionaire friend, Mary Dodge. The Wreckers was finally heard at Covent Garden in 1910 in two performances, conducted by Thomas Beecham and Bruno Walter.
The story of Smyth’s struggle to get The Wreckers heard shows how hard it was for any British composer to achieve performances of grand opera. Covent Garden, the leading opera venue, would only accept new British opera once it had achieved some degree of success abroad. Smyth’s situation was made more difficult by her position as a woman composing large-scale musical works at a time when women were thought to be only capable of composing songs and small piano pieces. If it was not for Smyth’s determination, Beecham’s support and the financial help of Smyth’s wealthy friends, The Wreckers might well have remained unperformed.
Despite her relationship with Brewster, who had died shortly after the concert performances of The Wreckers, Smyth had never made a secret of her attraction to women. Shortly after the Covent Garden performances, she met and fell for the leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union, Emmeline Pankhurst. Smyth decided to dedicate two years to the radical suffragette campaign, spending a couple of weeks in Holloway after throwing stones through an MP’s window and composing music for the cause – including the rousing March of the Women. But her most substantial feminist work, her fourth opera The Boatswain’s Mate (1913-4) in which the feisty heroine outwits her shambolic suitor, was composed after she had taken a step back from the suffragette movement and refocused her energies on composition.
After the outbreak of the first world war, planned performances of The Wreckers and The Boatswain’s Mate in Germany had to be cancelled. Smyth was also forced to recognise that she was gradually loosing her hearing. But she continued to compose, writing among other works two more operas, and to fight for the things that she believed in – from a subsidised national opera for England to the rights of women orchestral musicians, and always, of course, for her own music. She also turned her creative energies towards writing a series of compelling memoirs. These proved very popular and provided a welcome source of income as her distorted hearing made music more and more difficult.
In 1922 Smyth was made a D.B.E. and during the 20s and 30s achieved notable performances of both old and new works, although her private diaries reflect her deep-rooted feelings of despondency and bitterness over her unjustified neglect by the British musical establishment. The neglect continued after her death in 1944 although in recent years her powerful and expressive music is beginning to be heard again. She herself believed in a future audience for her work. As she wrote in 1928:
… if something of the immense savour of life that hope deferred has been powerless to mar; if the sense of freedom, detachment and serenity that floods the heart when suddenly, mysteriously, the wretched backwater of a personal fate is swept out of the shadows and becomes part of the main current of human experience; if even a modicum of this gets into an artist’s work, that work was worth doing. And should the ears of others, whether now or after my death, catch a faint echo of some such spirit in my music, then all is well… and more than well. |
