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Ethel Smyth: The wild child of Frimley Green

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A woman conducts an orchestra outdoors

Composer Ethel Smyth wrote some of the greatest operas in the English language. She lived her life with a clear sense of purpose, as Martin Buzacott explains.

Early years at Frimley Green

The appointment of Major-General John Smyth to the command of the Royal Artillery at Aldershot in 1867 represented a major promotion, allowing his wife Emma Struth and their eight children to move into a large house with servants at nearby Frimley Green in Surrey. The picturesque village located about 50 kilometres south-west of London was a model of prim upper-class respectability. Or at least it was until the Smyths moved in. Their fourth child Ethel had a penchant for riding the local streets on her bicycle, cigarette in mouth, accompanied by a sheepdog. On one notorious occasion, she was observed writing a letter while doing so. The Smyth family themselves called her their "Stormy Petrel" and the Major-General himself was outraged by what he regarded as her preposterous ambition to become a composer. He sent her off to boarding school as soon as possible.

Education in Leipzig

Young Smyth had her future all planned out. She had no intention of undertaking her advanced musical training in England. One of her governesses in Frimley Green had been a graduate of the legendary Leipzig Conservatorium and so Smyth would accept no substitutes. It was to be Leipzig or bust. Her father preferred the latter option but eventually his daughter prevailed. Aged 19, Smyth relocated to Leipzig where the great names in classical music tended to congregate. Tchaikovsky encouraged her to pursue studies in orchestration, she also met Liszt, Grieg and Clara Schumann. Perhaps most decisively of all, for seven years she became a de facto member of the Herzogenberg household whose matriarch, Elisabeth ("Lisl") was an intimate friend and long-time muse of Johannes Brahms. Not that Smyth was overwhelmed by such illustrious company. Her sheepdog Marco once ran amok during one of Brahms’ rehearsals (much to Brahms’ delight) and Smyth herself found her classes at the Conservatorium to be so stuck in the past that she quit almost immediately, choosing to make her own way. Her first major works, including her String Quartet no 1, were premiered during her seven years in Leipzig.

Audiences with an Empress and a Queen 

Smyth returned to Frimley Green in 1885 aged 27, now an acclaimed composer with a spectacular list of professional contacts. These soon increased when she was introduced to the former Empress of France, Eugenie di Montijo, who, having moved to England following the overthrow of the Second Empire and the death of her husband Emperor Napoleon III, now lived in nearby Farnborough. Although a generation older than Smyth, Di Montijo had a similarly adventurous spirit and the two became close friends. In 1891, Di Montijo invited Smyth to accompany her on a courtesy-visit to Balmoral, where, at Queen Victoria’s request, Smyth sang through parts of her Mass in D. The Queen was impressed and with her seal of approval and Di Montijo’s financial backing, in 1893 the Mass was performed at Royal Albert Hall and published soon afterwards.

A black and white photo of a woman sitting at a desk with a pen in her hand.

Smyth's Opera

Smyth’s main musical interest, however, was in opera, and in 1898 when she was 40, her first opera, Fantasio, was premiered in Weimar, Germany. Her second, Der Wild, followed four years later in Berlin and was then re-produced at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. But the making of her operatic career occurred in 1906 when her third opera, The Wreckers, proved triumphant at its premiere in Leipzig. Smyth had refused to allow the producers to make any cuts, and when they wished to do so, she removed all the scores and parts from the theatre until curtain time. Back home in England, The Wreckers was presented at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London, in 1909 and then in the following year the Royal Opera House also presented it in a production conducted by Bruno Walter and Thomas Beecham. Smyth was now famous both in her home country and abroad. She bought a house in the town of Woking, just to the east of Frimley Green, and would remain there for the rest of her life, writing a further three operas including the hugely popular The Boatswain’s Mate, plus other purely instrumental works.

A stint at Holloway Prison

At the time of Smyth’s move to Woking, the Women’s Suffrage movement was at its height. She and the celebrated suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst became close-confidantes and Smyth wrote the movement’s anthem March of the Women. In 1912, Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lewis Harcourt, made a condescending remark about the women’s emancipation movement, so Smyth and Emmeline went to his residence and threw a rock through his window. Smyth was charged and sentenced to two months in Holloway Prison. There, she was visited by Sir Thomas Beecham, who found the inmates marching and singing, while Smyth conducted them from a window, using a toothbrush as a baton. Her transgression was quickly forgiven, however, and she was released after three weeks and a decade later became Dame Ethel Smyth.

The final years: Deafness but not silence

In her later years, Smyth went deaf (she attended but couldn’t hear her 75th birthday concert), so she turned her attention to writing her memoirs. They ran into multiple volumes, from which the following passage perhaps best sums up not just her life but her style too: "Because I have conducted my own operas and love sheep-dogs; because I generally dress in tweeds, and sometimes, at winter afternoon concerts, have even conducted them; because I was a militant suffragette and seized a chance of beating time to ‘The March of the Women’ from the window of my cell in Holloway Prison with a tooth-brush; because I have written books, spoken speeches, broadcast, and don't always make sure that my hat is on straight; for these and other equally pertinent reasons, in a certain sense I am well known."

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