Dame Ethel Mary Smyth 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 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. While at the Leipzig Conservatory, Smyth met Dvorak, Grieg and Tchaikovsky. Later 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 27 times between 1913 and 1947.
In 1910, Smyth joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which agitated for women’s suffrage, giving up music for two years to devote herself to the cause. Smyth argued in her memoirs that the disadvantages that women face in music stems from the lack of a political vote or voice. She developed a very close relationship with the charismatic leader of the WSPU, Emmeline Pankhurst, and accompanied her on many occasions. Soon after, Smyth composed her most famous, “The March of the Women” (1911) to words by Cicely Hamilton. The text was used to inspire women to unite and free themselves from patriarchal rule. This eventually became the anthem of the WSPU and the suffragette movement.
Smyth was one of the 109 members who responded to Pankhurst’s call, asking to be sent to attack the home of Colonial Secretary Lewis Harcourt. During the stone-throwing, Pankhurst and 100 other women were arrested, and Smyth served two months in Holloway Prison. When Thomas Beecham, her proponent-friend, went to visit her there, he found suffragettes marching in the quadrangle and singing, as Smyth leaned out of a window conducting the song with a toothbrush. In her book, Female Pipings in Eden, Smyth said her prison experience was of being “in good company” of united women “old, young, rich, poor, strong, delicate”, putting the cause they were imprisoned for before their personal needs.
