Winter 2023

English composer and
suffragette Ethel Smyth
(1858-1944). Image from
the United States Library
of Congress’s Prints and
Photographs division
ETHEL SMYTH
Her Majesty’s Prison Holloway is perhaps London’s
most famous institution for women. In March 1912,
it was the venue for an exceptional performance
of the Suffragette anthem ‘The March of Women’.
The chorus was sung by inmates marching in the
quadrangle, while the anthem’s composer, Ethel
Smyth, leaned out of her prison cell window to
conduct them with her toothbrush. Smyth had
been arrested two months earlier, along with her
friend Emmeline Pankhurst, for throwing stones
at the houses of politicians who opposed votes
for women. Smyth herself took credit for teaching
Pankhurst how to throw stones and practiced with
her by aiming stones at trees near the home of a
fellow activist. At the age of 52, Smyth had joined
the Women’s Social and Political Union, founded
by Pankhurst in 1903, to campaign for women’s
suffrage. She took two years out from her musical
career, by then well-established, to devote herself
to the cause. This was typical of the passion and
fearlessness with which Smyth approached every
aspect of her life.
Her determination not to be bound by social
convention was apparent early on. Born in 1858
into a well-to-do family in Victorian England – a
time when it was unseemly for women of her class
to have their own profession – Smyth overcame
her father’s objections to her unshakeable desire
to study music by locking herself in her room and
refusing to eat or leave it until he relented. She
was admitted to the Leipzig Conservatory in 1887
and met some of the most renowned composers
of the day, including Johannes Brahms, Clara
Schumann, Antonin Dvorak and Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
The latter would eventually recognise Smyth as
“one of the few women composers whom one
can seriously consider to be achieving something
valuable in the field of musical creation.”
Tchaikovsky’s backhanded compliment typifies
the prejudice faced by female composers. Her
work was not evaluated on its own merits but as
that of a “woman composer”. While some critics
praised the “masculinity” of her more powerful
compositions, others complained that her work
was lacking in the feminine charm to be expected
of woman, whatever her other accomplishments.
Following her formal education, Smyth
travelled throughout Europe, mainly in Germany
and Italy, refining her style, falling in and out of
love and cultivating friendships with patrons,
musicians and other intellectuals who were part
of the artistic milieu of the time. She returned
to London in 1889 where she composed works
ranging from choral arrangements and chamber
music to orchestral pieces and operas. Her
first of six operas, ‘Fantasio’, debuted in 1898 in
Weimar, Germany. Despite the insidious prejudice
against women as composers, Smyth was able
to get many of her works performed, thanks to a
combination of talent, support from conductors
such as Sir Thomas Beecham, and her own
formidable ambition.
Smyth’s ‘Sonata for Violin and Piano in A
minor’, composed in 1887 and dedicated to her
friend, Lili Wach, the daughter of composer Felix
22 Restoration Conversations • Winter 2023