Today is the birthday of Dame Ethel Smyth.
By coincidence, I am getting close to the end of Smyth’s memoirs (abridged from nine volumes). While I don’t find her the most compelling writer, she does offer some fun glimpses of Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Mahler, Arthur Nikisch, and Sir Thomas Beecham, among others. Also, she was a great lover of dogs.
However, too often the narrative, such that it is, devolves into a blur of name-dropping. Fine for a diary; not so much for a reader. After a while, I just gave up trying to keep everyone straight. It’s all the same anyway. Whether or not this “shortcoming” was exacerbated by editorial decisions, I don’t know.
That’s not to say the book is not worthwhile. Smyth’s personality definitely comes through. She was indefatigable, I’ll say that for her, and spirited. Often almost giddy. This is a person who would never take no for a definitive answer, but kept looking for new solutions, and when she couldn’t find any, she picked herself up, and peddled her music elsewhere.
Though she regrets that her pieces hardly ever get programmed, it seems she managed to have her operas and orchestral works played all over Germany and, to a slightly lesser extent, England. Her opera “Der Wald” was picked up by New York’s Metropolitan Opera (though she deemed the performances less-than-satisfactory). Gabriel Fauré even helped to organize a concert of her chamber music in Paris.
What is striking is how impromptu the concert programming seemed to be back then. In Leipzig (at the Gewandhaus, no less), in Weimar, Berlin, and Prague, it seems like one could get an opera picked up fairly quickly, on a whim, almost. Of course, the commitment could just as rapidly fall through.
While history, and, to some extent, even her contemporaries, may have undervalued her, I’d say, all in all, she did pretty well – if having to wait 30 years for some of her works to be revived is tolerable. Happily, she never seemed to let it get her down, and she was always writing new things. Now her music is being performed again.
I wrote more about her, only just last month. If you’re interested, you can read it here, with plenty of links to her music:
Happy birthday, Dame Ethel!
