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Ethel Smyth
Dame Ethel Mary Smyth DBE (/smaɪθ/; 22 April 1858 – 8 May 1944) was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas.
Smyth tended to be marginalised as a "woman composer", as though her work could not be accepted as mainstream. Yet when she produced more delicate compositions, they were criticised for not measuring up to the standard of her male peers. She was the first female composer granted a damehood.
Smyth was involved in the suffrage movement and spent time in Holloway Prison for breaking windows. She also composed the suffragette anthem The March of the Women.
Ethel Smyth was born at 5 Lower Seymour Street, Marylebone, London on 22 April 1858, the fourth of eight children. While 22 April is the actual date of her birth, Smyth habitually stated it was 23 April, the day that was celebrated by her family, as they enjoyed the coincidence with William Shakespeare's. Her father, John Hall Smyth, who was a major general in the Royal Artillery, was very much opposed to her making a career in music. The home of her early years was Sidcup Place in Sidcup, then in Kent. From 1867 her family base was Frimhurst, near Frimley Green; from 1894 she lived at One Oak, also in Frimley, before moving in 1910 to Hook Heath on the outskirts of Woking. Her youngest brother was Robert ("Bob") Napier Smyth (1868–1947), who rose to become a Brigadier in the British Army.
Smyth was a child prodigy. She was a stellar pianist at a very young age and was able to compose her first hymn by the age of 10. She decided to study music at the age of 12. Smyth first studied with Alexander Ewing when she was 17. He introduced her to the music of Wagner and Berlioz. After a major battle with her father about her plans to devote her life to music, Smyth was allowed to advance her musical education at the Leipzig Conservatory, where she studied Brahmsian musical composition with Carl Reinecke. She left after a year, however, disillusioned with the low standard of teaching, and continued her music studies privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg. While at the Leipzig Conservatory, Smyth met Dvořák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky. Through Herzogenberg, she also met Clara Schumann and Brahms. Upon her return to England, Smyth formed a supportive friendship with Arthur Sullivan in the last years of his life; he respected her and encouraged her work.
Smyth's extensive body of work includes the Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra and the Mass in D. It was the latter's performance in London's Albert Hall in 1893 that helped her gain recognition as a serious composer. Her opera The Wreckers is considered by some critics to be the "most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten". Her best known work, she composed it to a French libretto by Henry Brewster. It premiered in 1906. In 2022 it received its first professional production in its original French text at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera. It was also performed at the BBC Proms, where its prelude or overture was presented 28 times between 1913 and 1994.
Another of her operas, Der Wald, mounted in 1903, was, for more than a century, the only opera by a woman composer ever produced at New York's Metropolitan Opera (until Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin in December 2016).
On 28 May 1928, the nascent BBC broadcast two concerts of Smyth's music, marking her "musical jubilee", The first comprised chamber music, the second, conducted by Smyth herself, choral works. Otherwise, recognition in England came somewhat late for Smyth, wrote the conductor Leon Botstein at the time he conducted the American Symphony Orchestra's US premiere of The Wreckers in New York on 30 September 2007:
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Ethel Smyth
Dame Ethel Mary Smyth DBE (/smaɪθ/; 22 April 1858 – 8 May 1944) was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas.
Smyth tended to be marginalised as a "woman composer", as though her work could not be accepted as mainstream. Yet when she produced more delicate compositions, they were criticised for not measuring up to the standard of her male peers. She was the first female composer granted a damehood.
Smyth was involved in the suffrage movement and spent time in Holloway Prison for breaking windows. She also composed the suffragette anthem The March of the Women.
Ethel Smyth was born at 5 Lower Seymour Street, Marylebone, London on 22 April 1858, the fourth of eight children. While 22 April is the actual date of her birth, Smyth habitually stated it was 23 April, the day that was celebrated by her family, as they enjoyed the coincidence with William Shakespeare's. Her father, John Hall Smyth, who was a major general in the Royal Artillery, was very much opposed to her making a career in music. The home of her early years was Sidcup Place in Sidcup, then in Kent. From 1867 her family base was Frimhurst, near Frimley Green; from 1894 she lived at One Oak, also in Frimley, before moving in 1910 to Hook Heath on the outskirts of Woking. Her youngest brother was Robert ("Bob") Napier Smyth (1868–1947), who rose to become a Brigadier in the British Army.
Smyth was a child prodigy. She was a stellar pianist at a very young age and was able to compose her first hymn by the age of 10. She decided to study music at the age of 12. Smyth first studied with Alexander Ewing when she was 17. He introduced her to the music of Wagner and Berlioz. After a major battle with her father about her plans to devote her life to music, Smyth was allowed to advance her musical education at the Leipzig Conservatory, where she studied Brahmsian musical composition with Carl Reinecke. She left after a year, however, disillusioned with the low standard of teaching, and continued her music studies privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg. While at the Leipzig Conservatory, Smyth met Dvořák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky. Through Herzogenberg, she also met Clara Schumann and Brahms. Upon her return to England, Smyth formed a supportive friendship with Arthur Sullivan in the last years of his life; he respected her and encouraged her work.
Smyth's extensive body of work includes the Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra and the Mass in D. It was the latter's performance in London's Albert Hall in 1893 that helped her gain recognition as a serious composer. Her opera The Wreckers is considered by some critics to be the "most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten". Her best known work, she composed it to a French libretto by Henry Brewster. It premiered in 1906. In 2022 it received its first professional production in its original French text at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera. It was also performed at the BBC Proms, where its prelude or overture was presented 28 times between 1913 and 1994.
Another of her operas, Der Wald, mounted in 1903, was, for more than a century, the only opera by a woman composer ever produced at New York's Metropolitan Opera (until Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin in December 2016).
On 28 May 1928, the nascent BBC broadcast two concerts of Smyth's music, marking her "musical jubilee", The first comprised chamber music, the second, conducted by Smyth herself, choral works. Otherwise, recognition in England came somewhat late for Smyth, wrote the conductor Leon Botstein at the time he conducted the American Symphony Orchestra's US premiere of The Wreckers in New York on 30 September 2007: