When I was growing up in the 1960s, a geeky, classical music-obsessed teenager, I had heard of Ethel Smyth and her opera The Wreckers and was given the impression that she was a bit of a freak – the only female composer who ever got anywhere. It didn’t occur to me to reflect on this much and I don’t remember ever hearing a note of her music.
How different the climate is now. Women composers such as Sally Beamish, Judith Weir and many others are mainstream. We hear Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn on Radio 3 and Classic FM almost every day along with many others such as Florence Price, Emilie Mayer and Amy Beech whom few of us had encountered until quite recently.
Leah Broad’s argument is that this change has come about thanks, largely, to the work of four women who kicked, in their different ways, against the sexist prejudice and were heard: Ethel Smyth, who finally achieved a damehood and other honours, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen. Between them they span 145 years and three centuries from Ethel’s birth in 1858 to Doreen’s death in 2003.
This book is fascinating because it’s a chronological, group biography which means that Broad switches continually from one woman to another. Doreen, for example, was the child of musical parents growing up in Haddenham in the 1920s when Dorothy, who had shot to fame at the Proms in 1919 was disappointed by the reviews of her Koong Shee – a ballet based on the Willow Pattern legend. Ethel, in her sixties was struggling with worsening deafness but wrote Fete Galante. Rebecca, meanwhile, a violist was playing chamber music at the Wigmore Hall with friends including Myra Hess. And in 1922 The British Broadcasting Company launched and suddenly there were lots of opportunities in broadcast music. Broad handles these interwoven stories with unpretentious clarity so that we never lose track of who is who.
Among many unexpected things we learn that Doreen had a secret twenty year affair with her music tutor, William Alwyn. When he finally left his wife and married her, she renamed herself Mary Alwyn and suppressed her career for his. Nonetheless she was one of the first British women film score composers (Man Trap. Boys in Brown and the official film of the Queen’s Coronation).
Ethel was a colourful, tactless character and probably what we would now call “non binary” or bisexual. There were certainly passionate affairs with both men and women including Emmeline Pankhurst and Virginia Woolf. The quality and strength of her music, which largely disappeared from the repertoire for decades, is no longer in doubt. The Wreckers was performed at Glyndebourne this year and her Mass was performed at the 2022 Proms – both to huge acclaim.
Rebecca Clarke’s music is widely appreciated too, especially her viola works and how lovely to read that she eventually found married happiness with American musician James Friskin. And Dorothy Howell’s piano concerto (1923) is a delight. She composed actively for over 40 years.
It is strange and regrettable that the work of these four women tended to fall out of favour as soon as they were dead but they have undergone a renaissance and become posthumous influencers in the 21st century as Broad’s detailed and very readable book argues convincingly. If they failed to change the musical world in their own day, they are certainly doing it now.
Susan Elkin