Ethel Smyth refused to accept that a woman’s place in music was a lesser one. She composed operas, orchestral and chamber works, songs and choral music, while confronting the conventions that judged her work by the standards of a “woman composer”. She also joined the Women’s Social and Political Union, went to prison for the suffrage cause and wrote the movement’s best-known anthem, The March of the Women. Her life joined artistic ambition to direct political action.
A musical education won against resistance
Ethel Mary Smyth was born in London on 22 April 1858, the fourth of eight children. Her family home in her early years was Sidcup, then in Kent. Her father, John Hall Smyth, was a major general in the Royal Artillery and opposed her ambition to make music her career. Smyth nevertheless decided, at 12, that she wanted to study music. At 17 she studied with Alexander Ewing, who introduced her to the music of Wagner and Berlioz.
After a major dispute with her father, she was permitted to continue her education at the Leipzig Conservatory. There she studied composition with Carl Reinecke, but left after a year, dissatisfied with the standard of teaching. She continued privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg. Her circle brought her into contact with musicians including Dvořák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky; through Herzogenberg she also met Clara Schumann and Brahms. On returning to England, she formed a supportive friendship with Arthur Sullivan, who respected and encouraged her work.
Smyth’s music ranged well beyond opera. Her works included songs, piano and chamber music, orchestral and choral compositions, among them the Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra and the Mass in D. The Mass’s performance at the Albert Hall in London in 1893 helped establish her reputation as a serious composer. Her first English orchestral and public debut came with the four-movement Serenade; she used the name E. M. Smith to avoid biased criticism.
Opera and the double standard
The Wreckers, written to a French libretto by Henry Brewster, premiered in 1906 and became one of Smyth’s most prominent works. Its standing has endured: some critics have called it the most important English opera composed between Purcell and Britten. The opera was performed at the BBC Proms, where its prelude or overture appeared 28 times between 1913 and 1994. In 2022, Glyndebourne Festival Opera gave the work its first professional production in its original French text.
Another opera, Der Wald, was mounted in 1903. For more than a century, it was the only opera by a woman composer produced at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, until the company staged Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin in 2016. Smyth’s career makes visible the constraints behind such distinctions. When she wrote forceful, rhythmically vigorous music, critics could call it insufficiently feminine; when she wrote more delicate music, they could say it failed to match the standards of male colleagues. Her work was often assessed as that of a “woman composer”, rather than on equal terms with that of composers generally.
Music in the suffrage campaign
In 1910, Smyth joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which campaigned for women’s suffrage. She set music aside for two years to devote herself to the cause and developed a close relationship with its leader, Emmeline Pankhurst. Smyth argued in her memoirs that women’s disadvantages in music stemmed in part from their lack of a political voice.
In 1911 she composed The March of the Women, with words by Cicely Hamilton. Adopted as an anthem by the WSPU and the wider suffragette movement, it gave the campaign a song to gather around. Smyth’s activism also involved direct action. In 1912, she was among the WSPU members who answered Pankhurst’s call to break the windows of politicians opposed to votes for women. Smyth was arrested and served two months in Holloway Prison. When her friend, the conductor Thomas Beecham, visited, he found suffragettes marching and singing in the prison quadrangle while Smyth conducted from a window with a toothbrush.
Her commitment did not mean agreement with every position taken by the movement’s leaders. Smyth opposed Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel’s support for the war effort in 1914, though she trained as a radiographer in Paris. Her relationship with Christabel later broke down. In 1930, Smyth conducted the Metropolitan Police Band at the unveiling of a statue to Emmeline Pankhurst in London.
Recognition, hearing loss and a second career in writing
Smyth’s work received recognition in Britain later than she believed it deserved. In 1928, the BBC broadcast two concerts of her music to mark her musical jubilee: one of chamber music and another of choral works, conducted by Smyth herself. At a festival for her 75th birthday in 1934, conducted by Thomas Beecham, the final event took place at the Royal Albert Hall in the presence of the Queen. By then Smyth was completely deaf and could not hear the music or the audience’s acclaim.
Hearing loss had brought her composing and conducting career to an end before the 1920s. She turned increasingly to literature, publishing ten books between 1919 and 1940, many of them autobiographical. Her writing and her music both record a struggle to be treated as a creator among creators, rather than as an exception to a male rule.
In 1922 Smyth became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the first female composer to receive a damehood. She also received honorary doctorates in music from Durham and Oxford universities. Her final major composition, the vocal symphony The Prison, was first performed in 1931. She died in Woking on 8 May 1944, aged 86. As she had requested, her ashes were scattered in woods near Woking Golf Club by her brother Bob.
Why Ethel Smyth deserves a place in British Legacy
Smyth’s British legacy lies in the substance of two connected achievements. As a composer, she created a wide-ranging body of work and secured a place for opera such as The Wreckers in Britain’s musical life. Its appearances at the Proms and its later production at Glyndebourne show that the work has continued to reach audiences. Her career also exposes the unequal critical standards applied to women composers: powerful music could be dismissed as unfeminine, while delicate music could be judged inferior to men’s. Smyth’s persistence and the recognition she eventually received make that history concrete, rather than abstract.
Her political work was equally direct. Smyth joined the WSPU, endured imprisonment for the campaign and gave it a song that became its anthem. The March of the Women joined her musical skill to collective action, while her account of women’s exclusion from music linked cultural opportunity to political voice. She did not simply symbolise the suffrage movement; she participated in it and accepted the consequences. Remembering Smyth in British Legacy means recognising a composer whose achievements crossed the concert hall, the opera house and the campaign for women’s votes—and whose example helps explain why access to artistic and political life matters.
Sources
Adapted in part from Ethel Smyth by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.
