Dame Ethel Smyth (22 April 1858 – 8 May 1944) 
 

Dame Ethel Smyth was the first female composer in England to be honored with damehood. She composed songs, operas, chamber music, and works for piano, orchestra, chorus, and organ. 

Ethel Mary Smyth was born on April 23, 1858 in London as the fourth of eight children of Major-General John Hall Smyth and Emma Struth Smyth. Ethel made music with her sisters and mother; they played and transposed by ear. A governess introduced Smyth to Beethoven’s piano sonatas and was a catalyst for Smyth’s musical passion. 

She began composing church music at age twelve and studied harmony as a young adult. Against her father’s wishes, she enrolled in the Leipzig Conservatory at age nineteen. Dissatisfied with the quality of teaching at the Conservatory, she studied with Heinrich von Herzogenberg and met many of the most significant composers of the day, including Johannes Brahms, Antonín Dvořák, Clara Schumann and Tchaikovsky. Later she wrote that she learned in Germany “the necessity, and acquired the love, of hard work, as well as becoming imbued with a deep passion for Bach, which I think is in itself an education” (Smyth, Impressions that Remained, Vol. 1, 273). Her love for Bach led her to organ lessons while visiting her family in England in the summer of 1885. She describes herself as being “bitten with organ playing, which, as a sort of athletic exercise, appealed to me far more than the violin, not to speak of the prospect of tackling Bach on his own instrument” (Smyth, Impressions that Remained, Vol. 2, 111). In England, she studied with Sir Walter Parratt, the first professor of organ at the Royal College of Music, and Sir Frederick Ouseley, a professor of organ at Oxford University. 

Smyth composed five chorale preludes for the organ, most likely between 1882 and 1884. They were published by Novello in 1913 (now available in the public domain). Smyth’s chorale preludes drew on the German Lutheran chorale tradition, a tradition that was initiated by Martin Luther’s translation of Latin hymns into the vernacular. In “The Organ Music of Ethel Smyth: A Guide to Its History and Performance Practice,” Sarah Moon explains that Smyth composed in the three primary forms of Baroque chorale preludes (52-75). Her “Du, o schönes Weltgebäude,” the first setting of “O Gott, du frommer Gott,” and “Erschienen ist der herrlich’ Tag” are cantus firmus or melody chorales in which the chorale tune appears in one voice with little embellishment; Johann Pachelbel cultivated this form. Smyth’s second setting of “O Gott, du frommer Gott” is a short chorale canon. Her “Schwing dich auf zu deinem Gott” and prelude on “O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid” are ornamental chorales in which the chorale tune appears in one voice with extensive ornamentation; this form was developed by Heinrich Scheidemann and Dieterich Buxtehude and employed by Bach and Brahms. Listen to Angela Kim play Smyth’s "O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid," her best known organ piece today.  Moon concludes that Smyth’s chorale preludes “reference stylistic elements of the Baroque era and the effects of the Bach revival through her choice of text, use of counterpoint, and conservative harmonic structure” (2). Smyth also composed “Prelude on a Traditional Irish Air” for organ which was published in 1939. Her unpublished organ works, including several unfinished fugues, are now archived at the British Library. 

Smyth returned to England in 1890 and made her orchestral debut in London with her Serenade in D and Overture to Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra.’ She devoted the next two decades to writing operas, which were performed in Europe and North America.  The opera that received the most acclaim was The Wreckers; it premiered in Leipzig in 1906 and three years later in England. 

In 1910 Smyth joined the Women's Social and Political Union, a suffrage organization led by Emmeline Pankhurst. Like many suffragettes, Smyth was arrested and jailed in her efforts to win the right to vote. Smyth composed  "The March of the Women" in 1911, and it became the anthem of the women's suffrage movement.  

With her many ties to Germany, Smyth was devastated by World War I. She served as an assistant radiologist in a French military hospital in Vichy from 1915 to 1918. After the war, Smyth received many honors in recognition of her compositions. She became a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1922, and she was the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate in music from Oxford University in 1926.

Her last major piece, “The Prison” (1931), was recorded for the first time this year by Chandos. Hearing loss gradually impeded composing, and she turned to writing memoirs.  

Smyth resisted conforming to social and musical expectations; she particularly despised being characterized as a “lady composer.” She exclaimed, “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 in 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.”