Music Richard Osborne
DAME ETHEL SMYTH
‘It’s Dame Ethel Smyth,’ barked Jeremy Paxman, mispronouncing her name as he tossed away his University Challenge question card. (‘The Y is long, Mr Paxman,’ I hear Dame Ethel remonstrating. ‘I’m not a newsagent.’)
If Dame Ethel is more than usually present at the moment, it’s not her musical prowess that’s the cue but her involvement with women’s suffrage. But, then, she’s long had an honoured niche in the feminist pantheon, thanks to her many ‘passionate attachments’.
These ranged from Brahms’s young confidante Lisl von Herzogenberg in Leipzig in the late 1870s, to Mary Benson, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Emmeline Pankhurst (whom Ethel, a superb writer, recalls more tenderly and more uproariously than any latterday advocate) and Virginia Woolf, whom she described in the early 1930s as ‘the centre of the one-horse life I have lived since deafness set in and music left me in the lurch’.
Ethel’s involvement with the suffragettes was largely fortuitous. It was while she was ‘wet but rapidly drying’ on the Venice Lido in 1910 that the Austrian writer Hermann Bahr, husband of the finest Isolde of her age, Anna Mildenburg, announced that Mrs Pankhurst must be accounted one of England’s greatest creations. Bahr’s claim that the suffragettes provided a small flame in England’s largely moribund political culture may have been wishful Austro-german thinking. But it was enough to cause Ethel to seek out Emmeline.
As Ethel’s great admirer Sir Thomas Beecham later put it, ‘She eventually distinguished herself by throwing a brick through the front window of the house of the Colonial Secretary,’ as a consequence of which she spent three weeks in the (for her) blissful surroundings of London’s all-female Holloway Prison.
The genes were apt. The daughter of a major general who had served during the 1857 Indian Mutiny, Ethel was as much at home socialising, golfing and riding to hounds with the army set in Frimley as she was hobnobbing with Brahms, Grieg and her beloved Tchaikovsky – ‘that polished, cultured gentleman, and man of the world’ – during her years as an apprentice composer in Leipzig.
While Beecham marvelled at her ‘fiery energy’ and ‘unrelenting fixity of purpose’, Virginia Woolf tried vainly to cope with her ‘great rush of life’. Caricatures of Ethel appear in two of Woolf’s late novels, though I suspect that a closer match might be Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia, a woman in whose presence no alabaster figure of the Infant Samuel at Prayer was ever entirely safe.
Smyth’s best-known work is The Wreckers, first produced in Leipzig in 1906 and eventually played in London in concert under Nikisch and in the theatre under Beecham and Bruno Walter. (Thanks to Walter, Smyth would become the first woman to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic.)
Set in 18th-century Cornwall at a time when Wesley’s Methodism was sweeping the county, The Wreckers concerns a closed fishing community that survives by luring ships onto the rocks for salvage rights. When the wife of the local preacher and her lover expose the evil, the community immures them in a sea cave where they drown.
Smyth probably planned The Wreckers as her Cornish Tristan. In practice, it looks back to Wagner’s The
Flying Dutchman (the orchestral writing is especially fine) and forward to Britten’s Peter Grimes, where enforced drowning is again the preferred punishment of a bigoted community beholden to the sea.
Curiously, Smyth’s later piece The Boatswain’s Mate – the tale of a retired boatswain who fancies a strong-minded pub landlady who doesn’t rate him – also looks forward to Britten, to the comic world of Albert Herring.
Both operas are newly available in handsomely produced 2-CD releases from Retrospect Opera: The Wreckers in a superlative 1994 Proms performance and The Boatswain’s Mate in a set that also includes extracts from the original cast recording which Smyth conducted for HMV in 1916, featuring Rosina Buckman and the great Irish baritone Frederick Ranalow.
Meanwhile, brace yourselves for the opening of this year’s Three Choirs Festival in Hereford on 28th July. The work is Smyth’s Mass in D, a setting which hit London like a planet when it was first performed under Sir Joseph Barnby at the Royal Albert Hall in 1893.
It was, to put it bluntly, the biggest kick in the balls the English musical establishment had yet received. Shaw thought the music bordered on the pagan, which is interesting. At the time of writing, Ethel was, in Spinoza’s phrase, ‘God-intoxicated’, yet the moment the ink was dry on the final page her faith vanished.
Not untypically, she moved the ‘Gloria’, the best and most upbeat of the movements, to the end. ‘Slashing stuff,’ cried one of her hunting pals.
And so it is.