Christopher Wiley

Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) was one of the leading composers of English opera of her generation. Born into a military family and growing up in Surrey, she determined to train as a composer in Continental Europe, relocating to Leipzig in 1877. Returning to her home country over a decade later, she turned her attentions to large-scale compositions, including a total of six operas: Fantasio (1892–4), Der Wald (1899–1901), The Wreckers (1902–4), The Boatswain’s Mate (1913–14), Fête Galante (1921–2), and Entente Cordiale (1923–4). Other works include her Mass in D (1891), Concerto for Violin and Horn (1927), her oratorio The Prison (1929–30), and sundry orchestral, chamber, vocal, and keyboard pieces. Increasing deafness towards the end of her life led her to develop a parallel career as a writer of memoirs, biographies, and polemical essays on the music profession.

Originally issued on the Conifer Classics label, this CD release represented the first – and until recently, the only – of Ethel Smyth’s (1858–1944) six operas commercially available in a modern recording. It is eminently fitting that it should be The Wreckers that was afforded the distinction, at the BBC Proms in 1994, of commemorating the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death: arguably the greatest of her operas, it was certainly her most ambitious and monumental, having been her only three-act stage work and requiring significantly larger musical resources than any of the others.

Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) was a pathbreaking composer of immense importance to the revitalisation of British traditions of music composition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Boatswain’s Mate is one of six operas she wrote between the 1890s and 1920s, which collectively stand at the pinnacle of a sizeable output that also includes her Mass in D, double concerto for violin and horn, her oratorio The Prison, and other orchestral, chamber, and vocal works. In later years she increasingly struggled with deafness, leading her to develop a ‘second string’ as an author of several books of memoirs, biographical sketches, and polemics on the music profession.