by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Two free events begin at 6 pm today. Piano Cleveland Live presents Cleveland International Piano Competition medalists Ran Dank & Soyeon Kate Lee at Forest City Brewery, and the Cleveland Museum of Art hosts young musicians from the Cleveland Institute of Music for Chamber Music in the Atrium.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Mike Telin
Today we honor the births of four musical luminaries. On this date in 1916, violinist, conductor, and teacher Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York City. In 1922, jazz bassist Charles Mingus entered the world in Nogales, Arizona, and 22 years later in 1944, conductor and musicologist Joshua Rifkin also made his personal debut in New York City.
However — today let’s turn our attention to a true maverick of the music world, Dame Ethel Mary Smyth.
Born on this date in 1858 in Sidcup, Kent, England, Smyth was a noted composer during her lifetime. Her catalogue includes songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestra, chorus, and operas. Still her compositions were often criticised for not measuring up to those of her male counterparts. In spite of being marginalised, she was the first female composer to be granted a damehood, the equivalent for women of a knighthood.
Smyth began studying composition with Alexander Ewing at age seventeen. After a long battle with her father, she was granted permission to further her studies at the Leipzig Conservatory, where she became a student of Carl Reinecke and later, privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg. While in Leipzig she was introduced to Antonín Dvořák, Edvard Grieg, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Clara Schumann, and Johannes Brahms.
Smyth’s compositions of note include a Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra, a Mass in D and two operas. The Wreckers is thought to be the “most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten,” and for more than a century, Der Wald was the only work by a woman composer to be produced at the Metropolitan Opera.
In 1910, Smyth put composing aside and joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WPSU), which advocated for women’s suffrage. Giving up music for two years to devote herself to the cause, she was often seen in the company of the movement’s leader, Emmeline Pankhurst. And Smyth’s The March of the Women became the anthem of the suffragette movement.
In 1912, Pankhurst incited WPSU members to throw stones at the windows of all politicians’ houses who opposed a woman’s right to vote, which led to the arrest and imprisonment of over 100 women.
Throughout her life Smyth was active in sports. An avid equestrian and tennis player in her youth, she was also a passionate golfer and a member of the ladies’ section of Woking Golf Club. After her death in 1944 at the age of 86, her brother spread her ashes in the woods near the club. Click here to watch The North American Co-Premiere of Dame Ethel Smyth’s The Prison (A Mini-Documentary). It’s well worth ten minutes of your time.
