Ethel Smyth (1858-1944)

“I feel I must fight for 'Der Wald' […] because I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs; not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea. Now I am neither afraid nor a pauper, and in my way I am an explorer who believes supremely in the advantages of this bit of pioneering...” - Ethel Smyth

Composer, suffragette, writer and dog-lover Ethel Smyth was one of the most extraordinary musicians Britain has ever produced. At a time when it was thought not just improbable but biologically impossible for women to be "great" composers, she wrote six operas - all of which were performed in her lifetime - held three honorary doctorates in music, and became the first woman to be made a Dame for services to music. 

Like the composer herself, Smyth's compositional style is strident, exuberant, and emotionally open. Her operas have a vast expressive range, from taught psychological intensity in Der Wald to witty, light-hearted suffrage comedy in The Boatswain's Mate, moving through the expansive philosophical drama of The Wreckers. Central to her style is a unique ability to treat deeply serious subjects with levity and humour, often shifting quickly between earnestness and parody.

Our recording of her second opera, Der Wald, is the world premiere recording. Both for Smyth personally and for British opera broadly, this is a historically significant work. At a time when British opera was not taken especially seriously and was struggling to find a figurehead, Der Wald was premiered in Germany before being performed in the United States and Britain. At its Covent Garden premiere, Der Wald was hailed by the British press as 'the thing that we have wanted so long — really fine opera by a native composer.' It was the first opera by a woman to be staged at both the Metropolitan Opera in New York and Covent Garden in London. It retained the dubious honour of being the only work by a woman to be given at the Met for over a century, until they staged Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin in 2016. 

Discover Ethel Smyth

'Women had been composing before her, but she was the first to really force musicial institutions to confront their gender problem. She demanded to be given the same rights as men and to be treated equally, and for her compositions not to be judged by a different standard because of her gender.'
Buy Leah's biography of Ethel Smyth here.

'Smyth wasn’t perfect, and she shouldn’t be idealised. She was just as problematic as many musical figures who are better known today. She was a flawed, complex and very real human being, and without acknowledging this we end up with a strange, whitewashed view of history, with our predecessors painted as heroes seen through 21st-century eyes – history as we want it, not as it was.'
Read about Smyth's place in music history for the Guardian here.

'She desperately wanted to be recognised primarily as a composer, but it was her choice of clothing (tweeds, always), love of dogs (of which she owned eight), and notoriety as a militant suffragette that excited a substantial amount of press commentary. Despite the fact that she was, in some ways, one of Britain’s leading composers, having written not only six operas but substantial quantities of choral music, chamber works, solo pieces and songs, her works were performed only occasionally and many remained unpublished.'
Read about Smyth's choral music in Choir & Organ here.

'When critics first heard Der Wald they were shocked by the score, saying that the opera belonged to ‘the most modern school’. We have to remember that when this opera premiered, Strauss’s Salome had not yet been written and Debussy’s Pélleas et Mélisande had only just been performed. Der Wald predates Schoenberg’s searing one-act monodrama Erwartung (1909, and not premiered until 1924) and Zemlinsky’s psychologically intense one-acters Eine florentinische Tragödie (1915-16, prem. 1917) and Der Zwerg (1919 prem. 1922). Both musically and dramatically, Smyth was at the forefront of opera developments in the early twentieth century.'
Read about Der Wald here.

'She starts with music that’s very tonal and in a recognisable folk idiom; there are dances, and even the initial forest music is in a luscious, Romantic style. But then the further you go into the forest, the darker it gets, the more expressionistic it becomes – the stranger the harmonies, the more angular the rhythms, the more experimental the orchestration.'
Read Gramophone's feature with John on Der Wald here.

'Rather than be deterred by the difficulties she faced, Smyth continually strove to overcome them... Her unapologetic individuality is arguably one of the reasons why Smyth has not been lost from history and why she continues to provoke interest.'
Read Hannah Millington's thesis on Smyth's early vocal works here.

'Ethel was notoriously brusque, loved the limelight, and enjoyed nothing more than a hearty debate. Virginia was aloof, private, and despised arguments. Nonetheless, their first tea-time meeting marked the beginning of a friendship that would last until Woolf’s death in 1941.'
Read about Smyth's relationship with Virginia Woolf in The London Magazine here.

'In later years, Smyth struggled with increasing difficulties with her hearing, which ultimately spelled the end for her musical activity. Never one to be defeated, she developed a secondary career as a writer of memoirs, biographical sketches, and polemical essays on the music profession (and on the status of women in the field), publishing a total of ten books in the last 25 years of her life.'
Read Christopher Wiley on Smyth's life here.

'Smyth led a life much stranger than fiction, and echoes of it are threaded all the way through The Wreckers. For a start, operatic love triangles usually feature two men fighting over one woman, but in this instance we’ve got two women wrangling over a man. It’s no coincidence, I think, that both Smyth and Brewster had been in a very similar triangle a few years before.'
Read about The Wreckers here.

Scores and Other Recordings

For publishing information about Smyth's scores, please visit the website dedicated to her. This website also has a full discography.

Many of Smyth's works have been recorded. Some select recordings include: