Background
Ethel Mary Smyth was born on the 23rd of April, 1858 in London, United Kingdom, the fourth child in a family including six daughters and two sons of Major-General John Hall Smyth and his wife, Nancy (Struth) Smyth.
1877
Grassistraße 8, 04107 Leipzig, Germany
Ethel Mary Smyth was educated at the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig.
1901
Ethel Mary Smyth
1921
Ethel Mary Smyth
1922
Ethel Mary Smyth
1925
Ethel Mary Smyth
1925
Ethel Mary Smyth
1928
Ethel Mary Smyth
1943
Ethel Mary Smyth
1943
Ethel Mary Smyth
1943
Ethel Mary Smyth
1980
Ethel Mary Smyth
Ethel Mary Smyth as a child
Ethel Mary Smyth
Ethel Mary Smyth was born on the 23rd of April, 1858 in London, United Kingdom, the fourth child in a family including six daughters and two sons of Major-General John Hall Smyth and his wife, Nancy (Struth) Smyth.
Ethel Mary Smyth was educated by governesses. Later, she attended school at Putney where she studied music, drawing, French, German, astronomy, chemistry, literature, and "how to darn stockings" before undertaking a serious study of music under Carl Reinecke at the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig in 1877. Her father opposed the idea of her studying music formally, but she became such a terror to the household that he allowed her to move to Leipzig when she was 18. She left the conservatory after a year and began to study privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg.
Ethel Smyth was awarded an honorary doctorate in music from the University of Durham in 1910, as well as from Oxford University in 1926 and St. Andrews University in 1928.
Smyth began composing in the late 1870s when she was in her 20s, but by the mid-1880s, few of her works had been heard in public performance. In 1890, Smyth's circumstances began to improve. In 1890 she debuted in England at Crystal Palace with her Serenade in D. The following year, she composed her Mass in D which was presented by the Royal Choral Society at the Royal Albert Hall on January 18, 1893, under the direction of Sir Joseph Barnaby. Greater successes followed.
In 1898, her first opera, Fantasio, premiered in Weimar, Germany. A second opera, Der Wald, was produced in Berlin and Covent Garden in 1902, and in New York in 1903. Between 1892 and 1925, Smyth wrote six operas, all of which reached the stage, an extraordinary feat for any composer.
In 1910, Ethel stepped away from her work as a composer, which by then was flourishing, to work for the suffragist movement as a member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). In 1912, following a large scale Suffragette protest, she was sentenced to two months in Holloway prison for smashing a window of an anti-suffrage politician’s office. During World War I, she worked as an X-ray nurse in a French military hospital in Vichy.
Ethel Smyth’s hearing failed in later years and frustrated by composing, Smyth turned to writing, penning many brilliant portraits of notable people of the day, including Johannes Brahms, Queen Victoria, Emmeline Pankhurst, Violet Paget, and Maurice Baring. She wrote, "Impressions That Remained" in 1919, "As Time Went On" in 1936, "What Happened Next" in 1940, "The Memoirs of Ethel Smyth" in 1987 that contains Impressions That Remained, As Time Went On, and What Happened Next.
Quotations:
"I have found in women's affection a peculiar understanding, a mothering quality. It is a fact that the people who have helped me most at difficult moments of my musical career, beginning with my own sister, Mary, have been my own sex".
"People who have been much loved to retain even in old age a radiating quality difficult to describe but unmistakable. Even a stone that has been blazed on all day by a southern sun will hold heat long after nightfall; and Madame de Bülow, who was far from being a stone and not yet at the close of her day, had this warm radiance".
Ethel Smyth was a member of Women's Social and Political Union.
Ethel Smyth was dotty about her pet dogs and even wrote books about them. She was a boisterous, eccentric woman with lots of energy and determination.
Quotes from others about the person
"Miss Smyth is one of the few women composers whom one can seriously consider to be achieving something valuable in the field of musical creation". - P. Tchaikovsky
"This little woman writes music with a masculine hand and has a sound and logical brain, such as is supposed to be the special gift of the rougher sex. There is not a weak or effeminate note in Der Wald, nor an unstable sentiment". - The Telegraph
"Her work is utterly unfeminine. It lacks sweetness and grace of phrase. Wagner was never so ruthless in his treatment of the human voice". - The World
Smyth had several romantic passions, mostly with women, and described her sexuality as an "everlasting puzzle". Despite her proclivity for relationships, Smyth never married.