Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, DBE
(1858 – 1944 /86세) was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Smyth was born in London, as the fourth of a family of eight children. Her father, J. H. Smyth, who was a Major-General in the Royal Artillery, was very much opposed to her making a career in music.[1]
* Serenade in D Major (1889/30세)
I. Allegro Non Troppo - 00:00
II. Scherzo - Allegro Vivace - Allegro Molto - 14:32
III. Allegretto grazioso - Molto vivace grazioso - Allegretto grazioso - 20:42
IV. Finale - Allegro Con Brio - 26:28
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* String Quartet in E Minor (1902/33세)
I. Allegretto Lirico - 00:00
II. Allegro Molto Leggiero - 12:51
III. Andante - 18:43
IV. Allegro Energico - 31:56
Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) was no longer young when she finished her only string quartet in 1912. It is very different from her string quintet of 1884. In the nearly 30 years which intervened, much had happened in
the musical world and Smyth, in this work, shows that she had kept abreast of modern trends. The British critic, Katharine Eggar describes the quartet as follows:
The opening Allegro lirico is a movement of great freshness and thought. The part-writing and rhythmical resource are of a high order of musicianship. The second movement, Allegro molto leggiero, deliberately lacks any lyrical quality. Its angularity an original effect of pleasing uncouthness. The slow movement, Andante, has a nobility of emotion. The finale, Allegro energico, begins with a fugue. The rhythmically unusual main subject is quite striking.
Ethel Smyth overcame the constraints of her middle-class English background by open rebellion. Taught piano and theory as ladylike accomplishments, she became so concentrated in her studies that her family deemed them unsuitably intense, and stopped her lessons. The teenaged Ethel went on a protracted and progressively more severe strike, finally confining herself to her room and refusing to attend meals, church, or social functions unless her father would send her to Leipzig to study composition. After two years the embattled Mr. Smyth gave in, and Ethel went to Leipzig where she studied with Heinrich von Herzogenberg and got to know Brahms, whom she admired greatly, Grieg among others.
Back in England, she obtained recognition mostly for her public works such as her Mass in D and her opera The Wreckers. Eventually she was raised to the rank of Dame, not only for her musical work but also for her political activities; she was one of Britain's leading suffragettes during the first part of the 20th century.
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* Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra (1927/ 69세)
1.Allegro moderato.
2.Elegy (in memorian): Adagio.
3.Finale:Allegro.
Sophie Langdon, violin.
Richard Watkins, horn.
BBC Philharmonic.
Odaline de la Martinez, conductor.
Dame Ethel Smyth wrote her Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra with Aubrey Brain in mind. He and Jelly d'Arányi premiered the work under Sir Henry Wood on 5 March 1927. He also played it in Berlin with Marjorie Hayward.
Ethel Smyth
(b. 1858, London, England; d. 1944, Woking, England)
Ethel Smyth was a twentieth-century British composer and a champion of women's rights and female musicians. During her lifetime, she composed symphonies, choral works (musical pieces written for a choir), and operas including The Wreckers,1906, and is most well known for The March of Women, an anthem for the women's suffrage movement. In 1922, she was named a Dame of the British Empire.
She studied Brahmsian musical composition (the romantic style of lyrical and classical music developed by the German composer Brahms) and music theory at Leipzig Conservatory in Germany beginning in 1877 and her sophisticated music elicited rave reviews. In 1889, she returned to London and developed talents in multiple areas of composition, culminating in an oeuvre that included orchestral pieces, choral arrangements, chamber music, and six operas. She earned acclaim for her performance of Mass in D, which was enthusiastically received in London in 1893
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* Violin Sonata Op.7 A Minor (1887/ 28세)
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* Cello Sonata in A minor
Giovanna Lelis playing at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY: 바이올린 소나타를 첼로소나타로 바꿔 연주
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Undeterred, Smyth was determined to become a composer, studied with a private tutor, and then attended the Leipzig Conservatory, where she met many composers of the day. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral and concertante works, choral works, and operas.
She lived at Frimhurst, near Frimley Green[2] for many years, but from 1913 onwards, she began gradually to lose her hearing and managed to complete only four more major works before deafness brought her composing career to an end.[1] However, she found a new interest in literature and, between 1919 and 1940, she published ten highly successful, mostly autobiographical, books.[1]
In recognition of her work as a composer and writer, Smyth was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1922.[1] She died in Woking in 1944 at the age of 86, and was cremated there.
Her life in music
She first studied privately with Alexander Ewing when she was seventeen. He introduced her to the music of Wagner and Berlioz. After a major battle with her father about her plans to devote her life to music, Smyth was allowed to advance her musical education at the Leipzig Conservatory, where she studied composition with Carl Reinecke. She left after a year, however, disillusioned with the low standard of teaching, and continued her music studies privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg.[1] While she was at the Leipzig Conservatory, she met Dvořák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky. Through Herzogenberg she also met Clara Schumann and Brahms.[1]
Smyth's extensive body of work includes the Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra and the Mass in D. Her opera The Wreckers is considered by some critics to be the "most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten."[1] Another of her operas, Der Wald, remains the only opera by a woman composer ever produced at New York's Metropolitan Opera.[1][3]
Recognition in England came somewhat late for Ethel Smyth, noted conductor Leon Botstein at the time he conducted the American Symphony Orchestra's US premiere of The Wreckers in New York on 30 September
2007:
On her seventy-fifth birthday in 1934, under Beecham's direction, her work was celebrated in a festival,
the final event of which was held at the Royal Albert Hall in the presence of the Queen. Heartbreakingly,
at this moment of long-overdue recognition, the composer was already completely deaf and could hear
neither her own music nor the adulation of the crowds.[4]
Overall, critical reaction to her work was mixed and, as noted by Eugene Gates:
Smyth's music was seldom evaluated as simply the work of a composer among composers, but as that of a "woman composer." This worked to keep her on the margins of the profession, and, coupled with the double standard of sexual aesthetics, also placed her in a double bind. on the one hand, when she composed powerful, rhythmically vital music, it was said that her work lacked feminine charm; on the other, when she produced delicate, melodious compositions, she was accused of not measuring up to the artistic standards of her male colleagues.[5]
Other critics were more favorable: "The composer is a learned musician: it is learning which gives her the power to express her natural inborn sense of humour... Dr. Smyth knows her Mozart and her Sullivan: she has learned how to write conversations in music... [The Boatswain's Mate] is one of the merriest, most tuneful, and most delightful comic operas ever put on the stage."[6]
Involvement with the suffrage movement
In 1910 Smyth joined the Women's Social and Political Union, a suffrage organisation, giving up music for two years to devote herself to the cause. Her "The March of the Women" (1911) became the anthem of the women's suffrage movement. When the WSPU's leader, Emmeline Pankhurst, called on members to break a window in the house of any politician who opposed votes for women, Smyth was one of the 109 members who responded to Pankhurst's call. She served two months in Holloway Prison for the act.[7] When her proponent-friend Thomas Beecham went to visit her there, he found suffragettes marching in the quadrangle and singing, as Smyth leaned out a window conducting the song with a toothbrush.[8]
Personal life
Smyth had several passionate affairs in her life, most of them with women. Her philosopher-friend and the librettist of some of her operas, Henry Bennet Brewster, may have been her only male lover. She wrote to him in 1892: "I wonder why it is so much easier for me to love my own sex passionately than yours. I can't make it out for I am a very healthy-minded person."[9] Smyth was at one time in love with the married suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. At age 71 she fell in love with writer Virginia Woolf, who, both alarmed and amused, said it was "like being caught by a giant crab", but the two became friends.[7]
Representations
Dame Ethel Smyth featured, under the name of Edith Staines, in E. F. Benson's Dodo books (1893–1921), decades before the quaint musical characters of his more famous Miss Mapp series. She "gleefully acknowledged" the portrait, according to Prunella Scales.[10] She was later a model for the fictional Dame Hilda Tablet in the 1950s radio plays of Henry Reed.[11]
She was portrayed by Maureen Pryor in the 1974 BBC television film Shoulder to Shoulder
Works
Writings
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* 출처: 영어위키백과
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