Anticipating the assertion that well-behaved women seldom make history, Dame Ethel Smyth was acting up from the start. When her father, a major general in the Royal Artillery, opposed her entering a career in music, she studied privately, and then attended the Leipzig Conservatory. Her travels brought her into contact with Dvořák, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Clara Schumann and Brahms.
Her “March of the Women” became the anthem of the women’s suffrage movement. When they locked her up for smashing out the windows of politicians who opposed the female vote, she led her comrades-in-arms in song, conducting them from between the bars of her cell with a toothbrush.
Later, in her mid-50s, she began to lose her hearing. Undeterred, she commenced a second career as a writer, producing ten books. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1922.
The always questing Leon Botstein revived Smyth’s most famous opera, “The Wreckers,” in a concert performance at Carnegie Hall in 2007. This summer, he will conduct a fully staged production at Bard College, as part of the school’s annual SummerScape festival.
Incredibly, Smyth’s opera “Der Wald,” written between 1899 and 1901, remains the only opera by a woman composer ever produced at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. That was in 1903.
Happy birthday, Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944)!
The overture to “The Wreckers”:
PHOTO: Smyth rocks the boat