The indomitable Ethel Smyth

Synopsis

In his autobiographical sketch, A Mingled Chime, British conductor Thomas Beecham offered this assessment of British composer Ethel Smyth: “Ethel Smyth is without question the most remarkable of her sex that I have been privileged to know,” and added that he admired her “fiery energy and unrelenting fixity of purpose.”

Born in 1858, she became a composer against her family’s wishes, and it took dogged determination to get her large-scale choral and operatic works performed in an era when most in the music business did not take female composers seriously. That was before they met Smyth, who convinced legendary conductors like Arthur Nikisch, Bruno Walter and Beecham, who realized her music had merit.

Her opera The Wreckers had its premiere performance in Leipzig on today’s date in 1906 and was championed in England by Beecham, who thought it her masterpiece. It remains, wrote Beecham in 1944, the year of her death, “one of the three or four English operas of real musical merit and vitality written in the past 40 years.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Ethyl Smyth (1858-1944): The Wreckers; Soloists and BBC Philharmonic; Odaline de la Martinez, conductor; Conifer 51250

On This Day

Births

• 1872 - German-born American conductor of the Chicago Symphony (and occasional composer) Frederick Stock, in Jülich

Deaths

• 1936 - English composer Sir Edward German, 74, in London

• 1945 - American songwriter, Jerome Kern, 60, in New York City

• 1979 - Ukranian-born American film music composer Dimitri Tiomkin, 85, in London

Premieres

• 1727 - Handel: opera Riccardo Primo, re d’Inghilterra (Richard the First, King of England), in London at the King’s Theater in the Haymarket (Gregorian date: Nov. 22)

• 1866 - Brahms: String Sextet, in Boston, at a concert by the Mendelssohn Quintet Club. The European premiere occurred in Zürich, Swizterland, a few days later, on November 20.

• 1889 - R. Strauss: tone-poem Don Juan, in Weimar, with the composer conducting

• 1890 - Brahms: String Quintet No. 2, in Vienna, by the Rosé Quintet

• 1898 - Coleridge-Taylor: oratorio Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, in London

• 1899 - Leslie Stuart: operetta Floradora in London. This operetta was tremendously popular in England and America for many seasons, but is seldom heard today.

• 1906 - Ethel Smyth: opera The Wreckers (under its German title Strandrecht) in Leipzig

• 1923 - Bloch: Piano Quintet, in New York, with Harold Bauer piano, at the first concert of the League of Composers

• 1952 - Stravinsky: Cantata, by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra conducted by the composer

• 1999 - Corigliano: Vocalise, for soprano, electronics and orchestra, by Sylvia McNair, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Kurt Masur

• 2004 - Augusta Read Thomas: Dancing Galaxy for wind ensemble, in Boston, by the New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble

Others

• 1898 - Shortly after it was finished, the painting Nevermore by Gaugin is purchased by the English composer Frederick Delius. The painting was inspired by Poe’s famous poem and is now in the collection of London’s Cortland Gallery.

  1922 - The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) begins daily radio transmissions. The BBC had been formed on Oct. 18, 1922, broadcast its first orchestral concert on Dec. 23, 1922, and on Dec. 24 its first radio play, “The Truth About Father Christmas.”