Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)

Ethel Smyth seems to be one of those names that has not endured on lists of great women, great composers, or even the short list of great women of music which is unfortunate as this book remains one of the few remaining accounts of what must be one of the most interesting women of classical music, the suffragette movement or life at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Fortunately Ethel Smyth is as good a writer and biographer as she was a composer and this little volume is filled to capacity with fascinating accounts of her relationships with some of history’s most fascinating names.

Not to say that the stories of her life minus the more recognizable names are nothing short of unforgettable. There’s the fight that she put up to get her father to send her to music school, her early academic life and career in Liepzig Germany and her modest success in music of the day, in spite of being the only woman pursuing a career in the field. Then there’s her work as a suffragette and the act of vandalism with a brick through a window that saw her charged and imprisoned at Holloway during which she was to write the unforgettable anthem of the movement, the March of the Women. Sir Thomas Beecham visited her in prison to find her teaching her fellow inmates the song, enthusiastically conducting the choir with a toothbrush. A later story has a reporter visiting her post release from prison at home for an interview to find that she had tied herself to a tree to practice conducting without moving her body so as to become more subtle a conductor.

In addition to the suffragette anthem Smyth wrote some six operas (including the Wreckers which seems to have been dusted off in recent years and is enjoying a new audience on both sides of the Atlantic) and a Mass in the key of D that is quite unforgettable and which places her amongst the most competent of her contemporaries. And they included Brahms, Schumann (and his wife Clara) and Grieg. Her circle and many of the stories in Impressions that Remained included Emeline Pankhurst, the empress Eugénie and Virginia Woolf. This little book is not easy to find, but if you do, you will be tempted to lock yourself up and read it in one sitting!
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