Spotlight on: Ethel Smyth’s Three Songs
Full of fleas, flags, and flowers.
Among all of Ethel Smyth’s many and varied achievements, she is perhaps still most famous for her two-year period as a suffragette. The stories are just too good to be forgotten — she wrote the suffrage anthem ‘The March of the Women’, taught Emmeline Pankhurst how to throw stones accurately, was then jailed alongside Emmeline for throwing stones at the window of an anti-suffrage MP, and proceeded to conduct her anthem from the window of her cell using a toothbrush as a baton. And like most things Ethel did, her involvement with the Women’s Social and Political Union came with a good deal of self-publicity. Controversially, she wrote in support of the destruction of Velázquez’s Venus by suffragette Mary Richardson, and fired off numerous articles about women’s suffrage that caused heated debates in the newspapers. (She also relieved herself on Cairo train platform in the name of women’s rights, and you can read about that story here.)
Between protests and prison Ethel also managed to find the time to compose a substantial quantity of works on the theme of women’s suffrage. The most obvious of these were the Songs of Sunrise (after which this blog is named), which included ‘The March of the Women’, and her fourth opera, The Boatswain’s Mate, whose protagonist was modelled on Emmeline Pankhurst. My favourites, though, are her more personal pieces — the Three Songs from 1913: ‘The Clown’, ‘Possession’ (dedicated to Emmeline Pankhurst), and ‘On the Road’ (dedicated to Christabel Pankhurst). Together, they throw different, musical lights on Ethel’s time with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU).
Possessing Emmeline
On paper, Ethel and Emmeline were not obviously suited. Both were extremely opinionated, determined to get their own way, and convinced they were usually right. They both dedicated their life to their very different lines of work — Ethel composing, Emmeline fighting for women’s suffrage. And until 1910, when she signed up to the WSPU, Ethel viewed the suffrage campaign with ‘indifference tinged with distaste’. Fighting so hard to be accepted in the male-dominated musical world, she didn’t want to be associated with anything that separated women from men, and emphasised difference rather than similarity.
And yet it was precisely their shared single-mindedness that drew Ethel and Emmeline together when they met in 1910. By this point, from Ethel’s perspective she was established enough as a composer to risk aligning herself publicly with women’s rights groups. And from Emmeline’s perspective, Ethel was a useful ally. She was a famous figure in England who brought prestige to the WSPU. And beyond that, as one of the very few successful women composers of large, “masculine” works, Ethel was a great example of an “exceptional” woman who proved that women could do anything men could if given the opportunity. Provided they were aligned to the same cause, Ethel and Emmeline could get along splendidly. Shortly after meeting, the pair had become inseparable.
One of the questions that I get asked most often is: were Ethel and Emmeline lovers? And the answer is — maybe. It’s just not possible to know for sure. There are certainly indications that their relationship was physical. As Rachel Lumsden has pointed out, the way that Ethel writes about Emmeline in her memoirs is certainly suggestive. The most powerful, sensual passage describes the two women retiring together to their hotel bedroom after the suffragette census boycott in 1911. Quite different from Ethel’s usual, brusque style, she speaks poetically about the two of them watching the dawn in their dressing gowns, ‘standing on the spot in a madly spinning world where nothing stirs, where there is eternal stillness.’ But focusing on physicality perhaps risks obscuring a broader truth: whether or not their relationship was physical, it was passionate, romantic, intimate, and all-consuming. Ethel loved Emmeline fervently — and continued to, even after they parted ways. Her death prompted Ethel to an outpouring of emotion in her diary, pages and pages of anger and despair.
But the most revealing documents about Ethel’s feelings for Emmeline aren’t her letters, diaries or memoirs. Her music tells us more than words ever could. Ethel composed unusually autobiographically, very much wearing her heart on her staves. Unlike some composers, where there’s no immediately obvious connection between musical works and life events, it’s possible to trace almost all of Ethel’s life through her scores. Her love triangle with Henry and Julia Brewster? It’s right there in her unpublished cantata, Song of Love. Her infatuation with the actress Marie Geistinger? It provided the unwritten programme for her Piano Sonata No. 2. And her love for Emmeline is directly linked to two works: The Boatswain’s Mate, and ‘Possession’.
Set to a poem by writer and activist Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, ‘Possession’ describes having to let somebody go, because it is the only way that both can be free. In 1913, this was a particularly poignant message for Ethel. She cared for Emmeline during her hunger strikes, and found it impossible watching the woman she loved wasting away knowing that there was nothing she could do to stop her. So after her promised two years with the WSPU she travelled to Egypt to work, putting herself as far away from Emmeline as she could.
The song is one of Ethel’s most intimate, heartfelt pieces. If you know her from her barnstorming Overture to The Wreckers, ‘Possession’ might be a bit of a surprise. It’s cautious, gentle, and completely mesmerising. She gives the piano a lilting, rocking part that only partially supports the singer — at first it feels as though the two hands of the piano are working against each other rhythmically and harmonically, making the song slightly unsettled from the start. It seems as though Ethel is telling the story of her relationship with Emmeline in microcosm. When the poem talks about meeting ‘A friend I had waited for long, / And the deep chilly silence lay stricken and dead, / Pierc’d to death by our love and our song’, material with a more militaristic feel breaks through the texture, perhaps evoking ‘The March of the Women’. And even though the song retains its mood of melancholy throughout, it ends peacefully, resolved in the conclusion that ‘By the holding I lose; by the giving I gain’.
Given how much she promoted her work in general, Ethel spent surprisingly little energy on these three songs. Perhaps this was because she was focused on her operas, and on conducting her large-scale works. But also maybe she saw these songs as being less public or commercial, intended first and foremost for the people for whom they were written; other audiences were something of an afterthought. Because nowhere else is Ethel so honest and revealing about her feelings for Emmeline, her passion, friend, and muse.
‘O, to fight to the death’
Ethel’s relationship with Emmeline’s daughter, Christabel, was far more tempestuous. Christabel was the driving force behind the WSPU’s militant policies, leading the charge by getting arrested in 1905 for disrupting a political meeting. The composer deeply admired Christabel’s forthright, fighting attitude — until, that is, they disagreed. She found it difficult to support Christabel’s willingness to use her mother as a political pawn, and was completely baffled by her later evangelism. In 1913, however, Ethel and Christabel were still on good terms. She tended to take Christabel’s side in family disputes, favouring her over her more left-wing sister, Sylvia. (It’s telling that Ethel penned a song for Christabel but not Sylvia.)
Where ‘Possession’ is like a confession, ‘On the Road’ is both a character portrait and a call to arms. Again the text is by Carnie, and it is a true battle song, declaring a wish ‘to fight to the death, / With a hope through the strife / That the freedom we seek shall be ours’. No wonder Ethel associated this text with Christabel. You couldn’t ask for a more combative poem, and Ethel sets it with gusto. She gives us a march full of dotted rhythms, trills, and tremolos, creating percussive effects with the piano that are evocative of a military band. This is a declaration of solidarity from one woman of ‘fighting spirit’ to another.
There are also unmissable echoes of an earlier song cycle by Vaughan Williams, Songs of Travel. The opening song in his set, 'The Vagabond’, has a similar bass line to Ethel’s, and his text also has its protagonist traipsing along an English road. But where Vaughan Williams's walker ambles along the open road under the stars out of choice, Ethel’s wandering woman is compelled by necessity, marching because she 'can wait now no more’ to be granted her rights. By quoting Vaughan Williams, Ethel nods to a distinctly male tradition of songs populated by aimlessly wandering men, before sweeping it away with a rousing quotation from her own 'March of the Women’ at the song’s close. Ethel’s message is that thanks to Christabel’s leadership, women are here to stay — both in politics and in music.
Ethel, Maurice, and captive fleas
These two songs are directly and obviously linked to women’s suffrage — but what about the first song, ‘The Clown’? It has no dedication, and sets a poem by Maurice Baring. He was one of Ethel’s closest friends, but was nonetheless, in her own words, among the ‘anti-suffragists.’ What on earth, then, is this doing in a set with the Pankhurst songs, and what has it got to do with women’s suffrage?
Again, Ethel’s biography gives us an answer. Maurice was a significant figure in Ethel’s life — she afforded Maurice a place of particular honour as the only person about whom she wrote a full-length biography. (She wrote a half-autobiography, half-biography of the conductor Thomas Beecham, but she herself admitted that the biographical half involved ‘a strong infusion of fantasy’.) Ethel first met Maurice at the premiere of her Mass in 1893, and he went on to become ‘one of the two or three supreme friends I have possessed.’ He was a prolific writer, and Ethel frequently consulted him on artistic matters. She trusted his judgment implicitly, and he would eventually provide the libretto for her fifth opera, Fête Galante.
Nevertheless, when it came to matters of suffrage, Ethel and Maurice found themselves completely unable to agree. In the biography Ethel described how ‘a grim conflict arose between Baring and myself. […] In fact, a friendship I greatly valued, and which otherwise — of that I was certain — would stand firm to the end of my life, was tottering.’
Ethel took it upon herself to bring him round to her cause. Which is where ‘The Clown’ comes in. I think she saw a metaphor about the suffragettes in Maurice’s poem, and setting one of his songs in such a way was part of her attempt to ‘convert’ him. The text depicts a clown dancing in chains, longing for a freedom that they know will never come. In an obvious and overt way, Maurice’s clown could be read as a suffragette, fighting for freedom. The poem opens with a particularly striking image: ‘There was once a poor clown all dressed in white / And chained to the dungeon bars’. White was one of the WSPU’s colours, and images of suffragettes chained to railings were well-known by 1913. Suffrage literature frequently invoked prison metaphors, referring to women as being ‘chained’ and ‘imprisoned’. For Ethel and her friends there was additional personal meaning in the poem’s images of prison cells, given that she was jailed alongside Emmeline in 1912.
Ethel sets the text to a lilting accompaniment, and overall the song has a distinctly ambiguous and melancholy tone. Put frankly, ‘The Clown’ is one of Ethel’s weirder songs. The speaker’s perspective changes throughout the text: the first half is in the third person, narrated in destabilising rhythms that place the emphasis off the beat, creating a sense of laughter and mockery, poking fun at the clown. But the third verse shifts to the first person, encouraging empathy and identification with the clown, and modulating to a major key for the move into the clown’s interior world. This is much more empathetic and untroubled music, sounding almost like a lullaby when the singer says ‘In my heart there’s a dancing spark’.
Possibly, then, this song has both public and private meanings, as did so many of Ethel’s works. Publicly, ‘The Clown’ allows listeners to hear from a suffragette’s perspective, and it provides thematic continuity within the song set, linking to the images of chains and freedom that recur in ‘On the Road’. Privately, this song can also be read as a personal plea to its librettist, inviting him to see in his own words a stance empathetic to women’s suffrage. If so, the cryptic message to have worked — by January of 1914, Maurice had finally come round to Ethel’s point of view. She delightedly reported her success to Emmeline, writing that she took such trouble over Maurice because she had a plan to increase support for women’s suffrage by converting influential individuals within largely anti-suffrage communities: in this case, England’s Roman Catholics.
Ethel’s Three Songs give us a snapshot of her life in 1913, transformed lovingly and candidly into sound. I think this is why they’re among my favourites of her works. Ethel was (and sometimes still is) caricatured as a gruff, blustering, comic character. But these multi-faceted songs show her to be a woman of nuance, full of passion, companionship, love, sadness, frustration — and just a little bit of gruffness too.
If you want to find out more about ‘Possession’, Rachel Lumsden has written an analysis of the song which you can access here. And if you want to read more about Ethel’s music more broadly, I’ve written about the history of her opera The Wreckers here and reviewed Glyndebourne’s production of it here.