Ethel Smyth Serenade in D 

Ethel Smyth Serenade in D
Live November 2018, Colorado Springs, CO
Program Notes Mark Arnest
#EthelSmyth
Overview: Dame Ethel Smyth
Born April 23, 1858, Sidcup, United Kingdom; died May 8, 1944, Woking, United Kingdom
Work Composed: 1889
Why It Matters: A major early work from a composer well worth knowing.
Numerous neglected composers have been resurrected in recent years. Many are worthwhile, but few are as fascinating as Ethel Smyth, a larger-than-life figure whose friendships ranged from Johannes Brahms to Virginia Woolf, who was jailed for her activities as a suffragette, and who was - until 2016 - the only woman to have had an opera performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Smyth was well trained in Germany, though she had to fight her father to get there. The critic and musicologist Ernest Newman left a marvelous sketch of Smyth:
She never flinched from combat, never minced her words. Her immense physical vitality and the exuberance of her temperament must in her younger years have made her company sometimes trying even for the people who loved her most. She had been inured from childhood to strenuous outdoor sports. She was used to breaking in fractious horses and subduing big dogs. (For the smaller specimens of the dog tribe she never had much liking.) She became a hardy rider to hounds, a mountaineer with nerves of steel, and quite late in life an ardent golfer. Every company she came into in her young days she went through like a hurricane.
As for her music, Newman wrote that “Her quality as a composer was high, certainly the highest ever achieved by a woman.” (He wrote this in 1946.) But in Great Britain, her sex worked against her, and when her opera Der Wald was performed at the Met in 1903, she had to endure such reviews as this from The Telegraph: “This little woman writes music with a masculine hand and has a sound and logical brain, such as is supposed to be the especial gift of the rougher sex. There is not a weak or effeminate note in Der Wald, nor an unstable sentiment.” (Imagine praising a work by a woman for not being “effeminate”!) She had more success in Germany, where she had made numerous connections during her student years; but the 1914 outbreak of World War I largely put an end to her career there.
In addition to her compositions - which include six operas and a Mass in D that inspired George Bernard Shaw to write her that “it was your music that cured me forever of the old delusion that women could not do man’s work in art and in all other things” - she wrote copiously on a variety of subjects, revealing a curious, immensely energetic, and unflinchingly honest personality.
The Serenade will remind you of Brahms, but that’s more of a compliment than a criticism: Of all the great composers, Brahms - with his supple phrase structures, his mastery of harmony and counterpoint, and his rhythmic quirkiness - is one of the most difficult to imitate. Smyth acquired her deep knowledge of Brahms’s style not from Brahms himself, but from her teacher Heinrich von Herzogenberg, Brahms’s close friend.
The Serenade is symphonic in scope and style. It’s missing only a proper slow movement to be a symphony; perhaps Smyth’s energy at this time in her life was simply too torrential to allow for one.
The opening movement is in sonata form, with three main themes that are developed and recapitulated. The opening theme is yearning yet energetic; the flute introduces the second theme; and the third theme, in a wonderfully Brahmsy touch, doesn’t fulfill the traditional closing theme function of grounding the musical tension, but instead pushes us forward. The development section is vigorous, but the transition to the recapitulation is gently reminiscent of Mendelssohn. The ending marvelously toys with our expectations - will it be loud or soft?
The second movement begins as a fugal gigue. This kind of counterpoint didn’t come naturally to Smith, and she recounts her first meeting with Brahms, where he responded to the introduction by saying, “as I then thought by way of a compliment, but as I now know in a spirit of scathing irony, ‘So this is the young lady who writes sonatas and doesn't know counterpoint!’” She eventually mastered the subject, as this movement, composed eleven years later, demonstrates. The second theme is jollier - and less contrapuntal.
There’s a hint of pensiveness in the third movement, which like the first movement is a sonata form but much smaller in scale. The energetic finale’s opening theme features one of Brahms’s favorite rhythms. Another sonata form, it features multiple tempos and meters as well as multiple themes, giving it an epic quality.