Dame Ethel Smyth
Kate Kennedy celebrates the British composer who devoted herself tirelessly to winning votes for women
O n a cold morning in 1911, thousands of women assembled, snaking slowly through the main streets of London with mounted police poised threateningly at the sides of the road. It was a scene typical of the huge, carefully choreographed demonstrations organised by Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, or WSPU. These were suffragettes and their supporters. Banners in every colour flapped past, representing unions and societies, newly formed to represent women’s interests in the professional world. Many of the women marching wore white dresses with sashes of coloured ribbon: green for hope, white for purity and violet for dignity. Placards were waved: ‘who would be free must strike the blow’ and ‘votes for women’. At the very head of the women musicians’ column, which included a marching band, a tall, equinefeatured woman, energetic and with a rather eccentric peaked cap, passed her banner to a comrade and raised her arms to conduct. The band began. It was the suffragettes’ official anthem, and all the many women there knew it and were stirred by it. It had given courage in moments of violence and threat and to those struggling in ★olloway Prison. It united the suffrage movement and had quickly become their battle cry. The March of the Women had been written for them by Ethel Smyth, and she herself was conducting it.
If there’s one word that springs to mind to describe Smyth, it’s passionate. Passionate about friendship, about intellectual stimulation, about having her voice heard (and rightly so), and about the power of her music to communicate emotion. She could be overwhelming, perhaps sometimes brash, but never insipid.
Yet Smyth wasn’t always as neglected as she is now. Just before the turn of last century, when she and Elgar were both in their early forties, she was the name on everyone’s lips, and he was merely up and coming. The premiere of his Enigma Variations in 1899 changed all that, but it is a reminder that while we are diligently rediscovering Smyth and forgotten composers like her, we are only rectifying a memory loss that spans a handful of decades.
Smyth wrote six operas, a mass and a great deal of chamber music. ★er most famous opera, The Wreckers, owes a debt to the grand German tradition, but she was also partial to Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, one of the few examples of a successful British opera composer before Benjamin Britten.
But it was by no means easy to be taken seriously as a female composer, and despite her formidable temperament Smyth struggled, along with her other female counterparts.
She understood how hard life was for female musicians, with few performances and often patronising reviews. ★er dramatic Violin
Sonata in A minor, written in the early years of her career, had fallen foul of critics for being ‘deficient in the feminine charm that might have been expected of a woman composer’. Many assumed that women would write only decorous chamber works and nothing too ambitious, and it was very rare for any woman to earn a living
‘‘Smyth’s dramatic Violin Sonata fell foul of the critics for EHLQJ ËGH FLHQW in the feminine charm expected of a woman’
’’
as a musician, even if they were not limited by marriage and children. As Smyth became more successful and influential, she began to feel a public responsibility to stand up for her sex, and realised that she had to take a view on women’s struggle for the vote. She joined the WSPU, giving up composition for two years in 1910 to devote herself entirely to the cause: ‘It became evident to me that to keep out of the movement, to withhold any modicum it was possible to contribute to the cause, was as unthinkable as to drive art and politics in double harness.’
A year after she joined, she wrote The March of the Women. The suffragettes had previously been singing a version of the Marseillaise to their own words, but Smyth provided them with their own battle hymn, a stirring tune taken from her opera The Boatswain’s Mate. ★er March became the anthem of the women’s suffrage movement. The words were by another suffragette, the prodigious writer Cicely ★amilton:
‘Shout, shout, up with your song,
Cry with the wind, for the dawn is breaking; March, march, swing you along,
Wide blows our banner and hope is waking. Song with its story, dreams with their glory Lo! They call, and glad is their word!
Loud and louder it swells,
Thunder of freedom, the voice of the Lord!’
In 1912, when Pankhurst called on members to break a window in the house of any politician who opposed votes for women, Smyth responded to her call and enjoyed the escapade immensely. Taking pains over selecting the best stones for the job, she chose the window of a specific MP, ‘because of an infuriating remark he had made to the effect that if all women were as pretty and as wise as his own wife, we should have the vote tomorrow.’ On 4 March, Smyth, Pankhurst and 100 other women were arrested. Smyth served two months in ★olloway Prison, in the cell next to Pankhurst. On Sundays Smyth played the organ in the prison chapel, which was much appreciated by the other women, as even a church service in ★olloway was miserable in the extreme. The women were packed together with no ventilation, and some, particularly those who had been on hunger strike and were starving themselves, would faint in the heat. Smyth was more robust. One inmate remembered her in the exercise yard: ‘Whenever in thought we re-enter that yard, within its high, grim walls we see each as we knew her there: our revered Leader, Mrs Pankhurst, courageous, serene, smiling; Dr Ethel Smyth, joyous and terrific, whirling through a game of rounders with as much intentness as if she were conducting a symphony.’
It was claimed that the conductor Sir
Thomas Beecham, coming to visit Smyth in her incarceration, was amused to see her conducting a rendition of her hearty march with a toothbrush from an upper floor cell window, with suffragettes marching around the yard below, engaged on their daily exercise. There was no stopping her.
Smyth gave up composition for two years to devote herself to the WSPU cause
Smyth had been born to an upper-class military family in Sidcup in 1858. She did not find her family to be sympathetic with her wild, determined character and uncompromisingly piercing intellect. She grew up at a time when many people insisted that if women went into higher education their reproductive organs would shrivel up, and that they had far less brain capacity than men anyway. She had a governess who had studied piano in Leipzig, and something of the glamour and exotic nature of it, as well as the chance to escape the restricted role proscribed for her by her family, appealed to Smyth to the point of obsession. ★er father would not entertain the idea of her studying, let alone in a foreign country. So she went on strike – refusing to do various activities and staying in her room – and made such a nuisance of herself that her father finally relented. She began studying in Leipzig aged 19. She only studied at the Conservatory for a year, preferring to learn privately with ★einrich von ★erzogenberg.
★er String Quintet in E major, Op. 1 is typical of these early studies. Written in 1884, it is not pushing any tonal boundaries, but has plenty of character. The first movement has a hint of Bohemia, with gestures towards Dvo ák.
By the time she came to write her String Quartet in E minor between 1902 and 1912, her harmonic idiom had expanded to embrace elements of Bartók or even a pre-empting of Shostakovich. Smyth had a particular feel for counterpoint, and we can imagine her diligently ploughing her way through JS Bach’s Preludes and Fugues at her piano, before turning back to her manuscript paper. In fact Brahms was so
‘‘Brahms genuinely believed one of Smyth’s contrapuntal exercises really was by Bach
’’
taken with her ability to absorb influences that (allegedly) he genuinely believed one of these contrapuntal exercises really was by Bach.
Smyth began her Mass in D in 1890, when she had settled back in England. It was her first work to explore her natural dramatic potential. Six operas later, she had certainly made up for lost time. She played the work on the piano to Queen Victoria, singing as many parts as was humanly possible, an energetic one-woman band.
In 1911 Smyth became one of the earliest members of a new venture to support female musicians: The Society of Women Musicians. It was founded in connection to the Royal College of Music by the singer Gertrude Eaton, the composer Katharine Eggar and the musicologist Marion Scott. It aimed to provide a focal point for women composers and performers to meet and enjoy the benefits of mutual cooperation. The 37 women at the inaugural meeting included composers such as Ethel Barns, Rebecca Clarke and Liza Lehmann, who became the society’s first president. Among subsequent honorary vice-presidents were Nadia Boulanger, Imogen ★olst, Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy and Fanny Waterman. By the end of its first year the society had formed a choir and a library, given several private concerts and a public concert of members’ works – including the premiere of the first two movements of Smyth’s String Quartet in E minor – hosted a variety of lectures, held a composers’ conference and attracted 152 female members and 20 male associates. In the 61 years of its existence, the society campaigned vigorously for the rights of women musicians, especially as members of professional symphony orchestras, and awarded prizes to composers and performers, as well as continuing to organise concerts and meetings. Smyth became honorary vice-president in 1925, three years after she was made DBE, and was to hold the title for nearly 20 years, until her death.
Severely deaf in later life, Smyth could often only communicate by writing, but her indomitable spirit was never quenched. She remained dignified and proud, with a glint of battle in her eyes when crossed or challenged. Perhaps we might remember her in the words of her friend, the poet and gardener Vita Sackvillewest, who wrote a poem dedicated to Ethel on the day she died in 1944. It begins:
‘Wild welcomer of life, of love, of art, Your hat askew, your soul on a dead level. Rough, tough, uncomfortable, true, Chained to the iron railings of your creed…’