Ethel Smyth

I don't feel we spoke enough about Ethel Smyth a week or so ago in class. I'm posting an essay I wrote for Histo II and hope you'll find it interesting! Her Mass in D is definitely worth a listen - the library has a decent recording of it. (Bibliography is at the bottom, below the essay.)

Hiding in the Closet: Smyth’s Mass in D

            Dame Ethel Mary Smyth was born in Woking, a suburb of London on April 23, 1858. Her father was a Major-General in the Royal Artillery, and her mother kept busy caring for Ethel and her seven siblings. Smyth notes in her memoirs that she was “proud to be a ten months’ child [because] in pre-Suffragette days…[she] heard that such children [were] generally boys and always remarkable” (Crichton, 23). When Smyth was nine, her family moved to Frimhurst and she lived there until her father died in 1894. It was a town full of sophisticated people and social gatherings that the Smyth family enjoyed. She began her earliest musical training while living in Frimhurst much to the dismay of her parents, most notably her father.

As her interest in music grew, she traveled to London, and nearby concert venues to hear the music of great composers. One of her “half-milestone” journeys was her first trip to hear Brahms (56). The performance was of the Liebeslieder Walzer and Smyth immediately fell in love with the music of Brahms. She eventually knew she had to be in an environment where she could meet and work with composers similar to Brahms. After a hunger strike in her own house, her father finally allowed her to travel to Leipzig and study at the conservatory there. Ethel began her studies with Carl Reinecke though after a year at the conservatory she dropped out feeling she was not being taught properly.

Finding herself in a foreign country, and no longer in school, Smyth began private studies with Heinrich von Herzogenberg. While studying with von Herzogenberg, Smyth became very close with his wife Elizabeth (Lisl). Smyth had always lived her life not feeling as though she was the most feminine woman and felt most comfortable wearing suits and ties. It was not until she met Lisl and became entangled in a love-triangle that she truly realized her sexual passion and desires for women.

            One of Smyth’s largest and most well-received works is her Mass in D, first performed on January 18, 1893. It is written for full chorus, and four soloists along with full orchestra including full woodwind and percussion sections. Smyth arranges the movements differently than standard choral masses, most likely because she grew up an Anglican, attending the Church of England. Ergo the final movement is the Gloria as opposed to the Agnus Dei.

            Smyth was quite a critic of her work, and leading up to the first performance, she constantly found new sections that she was not pleased with and also felt some of her orchestration was poor:

I realized various mistakes I had made – for instance, scoring the solo parts of the Sanctus for a quartet of soft brass. When the poor contralto, emerging from a welter of choral and orchestral billows, attacked one of her solo passages, I perceived that a brass curtain ring flung to an overboard passenger in the mid-Atlantic would be about as adequate a ‘support’ as my four lonesome instrumentalists, who in that vast empty hall sounded like husky mosquitoes (194).

After listening to a recording of the Mass in its entirety, the passage that Smyth speaks about was not the most balanced between the brass and contralto soloist. It seems that the best way to resolve the situation is not to change what instruments are accompanying the soloist at this specific section, but to employ a singer with a solid, and strong voice that cuts through the orchestra easily.

            In Sydney Grew’s 1924 review of the Mass, he goes into great detail praising the genius of Dame Smyth bringing attention to the fact that she was only 33 years old when she completed the work (Grew, 140). Grew continues to rave about how incredible this work truly is, stating that “it is made clear that the young composer had made music a sort of native language: she composes as easily as a good organist plays, and her declamation is excellent” (141). This mention of excellent declamation holds true to the entire Mass. Smyth writes in a way that the text is always heard clearly and understood well by the audience. After just one listening of the Mass, it is difficult to not share Grew’s enthusiasm for Smyth’s fantastic composition.

            Another 1924 article by an author under the name C praises Smyth’s work as well. C states that the “Mass corresponds, in point of time, in Ethel Smyth's career to the second Symphony in Beethoven's, or The Flying Dutchman in Wagner's” (C, 256). This statement is incredible considering when it was written, claiming that this work of a young, woman composer in England has already reached the level Beethoven and Wagner. Though most thoroughly enjoyed and praised the Mass in D, Smyth did not feel she received enough notoriety as a composer from it, and turned to composing operas for a large portion of her life. This also is quite remarkable, as England was not known for operas at this time, and hers ended up being quite successful (256).

            The aforementioned lesbian relationship of Smyth’s comes into play in Elizabeth Wood’s “Lesbian Fugue”. Wood claims that Smyth composes in fugal style when she is somehow attempting to expose her lesbian tendencies. The most striking fugue in the entire Mass in D is in the Credo movement, where the text is speaking of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. “[A] baroque trumpet announces the theme of a mighty fugue scored for massed chorus and full orchestra” (Wood, 182). When Smyth composed her Mass, she was at odds with Lisl. She had taken too much liberty entering a sacred marriage, and essentially lost not only someone she felt passionately about but a wonderful friend. “Perhaps this passage [suggests reconciliation] with Lisl in another life” (182). 
            While relatively unknown and rarely performed, Smyth’s Mass is a monumental work that deserves to be among the great works of Beethoven and Wagner and no longer hidden in the closet.

Bibliography

Smyth, E. (1991). British Composers, Ethel Smyth [Audio CD]. Minneapolis: EMI Classics.

Smyth, E. Mass in D. London, 1925.

C. (1924). Dame Ethel Smyth’s Mass at Birmingham. The Musical Times, 65(973), 256.

Crichton, R. (1987). The Memoirs of Ethel Smyth. Middlesex, UK: Viking.

Grew, S. (1924). Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D. The Musical Times. 65(972). 140-141

Wood, E. (1993). Musicology and Difference R. A. Solie, (Ed.). Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.