Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D

This March, the Daily Classical Music Post will introduce you to some of the most wonderful music ever composed—and, yes, it will all be by women composers!

https://youtu.be/jAUvwQ-k6KE

The English composer and suffragist Dame Ethel Mary Smyth (1858–1944) had enormous fights with her father regarding her desire to study music. Eventually he relented, and she attended Leipzig Conservatory, studying composition with Carl Reinecke. She left the Conservatory after a year and studied privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg, through whom she met Clara Schumann.

Smyth composed in many different genres. Her opera The Wreckers has been called the "most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten." In 1903, her opera Der Wald was the first opera composed by a woman to be performed by the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Leon Botstein said of Smyth: "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" (shades of Beethoven!).

Smyth’s Mass in D by Ethel Smyth is set for soloists, chorus, and orchestra. Composition of the Mass came after Smyth renewed her High Anglican beliefs. Queen Victoria and Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh heard part of the Mass and asked the Royal Choral Society to premiere the entire work, and this happened on 18 January 1893 in the Royal Albert Hall. Linda J. Farquharson says, "The Mass in D is an extension of Smyth's personality—powerful, colorful, and gifted."

My classical music post for today is Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D.

 


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