Ethel Smyth

Dates:

1858-1944

Themes:

A leading figure in the British suffrage movement. The first woman composer to have an opera (The Wreckers, 1906) performed at the Metropolitan Opera. Her activism was as important as her compositions, influencing both the suffrage movement and the acceptance of female composers in the classical world.

Notable Works:

Mass in D (1891)
The Wreckers (Opera, 1906)
March of the Women (1911, Suffragette Anthem)

About:

Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) was a British composer, writer, and suffragette whose dynamic life bridged the worlds of music and political activism. Born into a military family in Sidcup, England, Smyth defied her father’s wishes to pursue a musical career, enrolling at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1877. There, she encountered leading musical figures like Brahms, Clara Schumann, and Tchaikovsky. Smyth’s compositional voice emerged through large-scale works that fused German Romanticism with her own dramatic sensibilities. Her music, often ambitious in scale and vision, included orchestral works, chamber music, choral compositions, and six operas—uncommon achievements for a woman composer at the time.

Smyth’s most enduring compositions include her Mass in D (1891), the opera The Wreckers (1906), and The March of the Women (1910), which became the anthem of the women’s suffrage movement in Britain. A close collaborator of Emmeline Pankhurst, Smyth was a prominent member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), and even served time in prison for her activism. During her incarceration, she famously conducted fellow suffragettes in singing her anthem using a toothbrush as a baton. Her music and her public life were inseparable, as she viewed both as platforms to challenge gender norms and assert women’s creative agency.

In her later years, Smyth became nearly deaf but turned her energies to writing, producing a series of memoirs that offered sharp insight into the cultural and political world she had helped shape. She was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1922, the first woman composer to receive such an honor. Though her music fell into relative obscurity in the mid-20th century, it has since been rediscovered and celebrated for its originality and historical significance. Today, Ethel Smyth is recognized not only as a major British composer but also as a fearless voice in the fight for women’s rights.