Guildhall questions: Lucy Stevens answers

Ethel Smyth: Grasp the Nettle from contralto Lucy Stevens and pianist Elizabeth Marcus, weaves together music, anecdotes from her confidants, letters and writing from Dame Ethel Smyth (composer, writer and suffragette), including her greatest opera The Wreckers.

This Faculty Artist Series performance takes place on Wednesday 3 October in Milton Court Concert Hall.

We caught up with Lucy Stevens to find out more about Dame Ethel Smyth and the process behind creating Grasp the Nettle.

How did you go about researching and selecting the anecdotes, writing and excerpts to include in the production?

I immersed myself in Ethel’s world, reading her ten published books as well as the published works of her friends Emmeline Pankhurst, Virginia Woolf and Bruno Walter. I researched and familiarised myself with her vocal music, including her opera The Wreckers and started to piece together the most illuminating, entertaining and poignant moments of her life and music, finding the text in her own writing. The audience is introduced to her music, her life, personal passions and her indomitable spirit. Ethel was overlooked, even ridiculed, in her lifetime. Ethel Smyth: Grasp The Nettle celebrates this extraordinary talented English woman.

What can you tell us about the production itself? What can audiences expect?

Audiences have told us, “I felt like I had met Ethel”. We tell Ethel Smyth’s story using her own words, taken from her autobiographies and letters, this gives an authenticity to the performance and immediately places Ethel in her time, they hear her thoughts, opinions, passions and music.

Elizabeth Marcus is at the piano, on stage with me, underscoring the text with Ethel’s music which often leads to a sung passage, and seamlessly into the next scene. Ethel Smyth: Grasp The Nettle weaves the story of her greatest opera, The Wreckers, with her battle to have her work recognised and performed, and her involvement and friendship with Emmeline Pankhurst and the militant Suffragettes.

Your last performance at Guildhall was 'Kathleen Ferrier: Whattalife!', also written with Elizabeth Marcus – do you feel there are similarities behind the two productions (and between the two women)?

The two productions share the same model of storytelling. I embody the women, in costume and accent, and I only use their words to tell their story. Elizabeth plays music from their repertoire and accompanies sung extracts of song between the text. Although Kathleen Ferrier and Ethel Smyth were very different women, they both had music at the centre of their lives and were passionate, strong, independent women who relied on their own talent and endeavour to succeed.

What’s one aspect of the production of which you’re most proud?

Ethel toured Europe with her scores under her arm, ever ready to sing to anyone with connections or influence. She would sit at a piano and play and sing the whole of her operas, singing every role from bass to soprano. I decided that I should attempt to perform her opera The Wreckers in this manor, because it would give the audience a flavour of the opera as well as the eccentricity of her character and the extraordinary lengths to which she went to publicise her work. I am very proud that my contralto voice allows me to sing from bass to soprano in quick succession, night after night.

Why Ethel is so special?

Ethel Smyth was the living embodiment of the courage and passion with which Victorian women challenged the “male machine”. As an activist, she joined the Suffragette movement, taught Emmeline Pankhurst to throw stones and was imprisoned for militant action in Holloway.

As a composer, she wrote the anthem for the suffrage movement, The March of the Women, as well as composing 6 operas and many sonata’s, quartets and song cycles. Ethel was the first female composer to be made a Dame for her contribution to music. The first female composer to have an opera at Covent Garden Royal Opera House 1902 (the next was 2012). The first female composer to have an opera at The Met, New York 1903 (the next was 2016). She studied music in Leipzig and associated with among others, Clara Schumann, the Griegs, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak and Brahms. As a writer, she published 10 books (8 autobiographical).

Why did you chose to write about her?

Most people today have never heard of Ethel Smyth, although when she died in 1944, she was a well known celebrity. Ethel Smyth's music, writing and relevance as a women campaigning for women's voices, has been allowed to fall off our collective consciences. She struggled, throughout her life, to get her work performed and recognised. 

Ethel was very clear that her main obstacle, was her sex. As a female performer, I want to celebrate our extraordinary women and their achievements and in so doing, reveal the relevance that Ethel’s words and struggles have for women in 2018, one hundred years after women achieved the vote. Today there are still very few women composers and conductors in main stream classical music. 

Why is she an unsung heroine?

To quote Ethel; “after being on the job, so to speak for 40 years, There is still a disbelief that woman can turn out first-class work... I know now that I shall never reap my reward during my lifetime, but I can go on turning out good work all the same. Yet not as good, I fear, as if I could have stood in the sunlight, and have heard my work all these years.”

Ethel Smyth is an unsung heroine, literally, she fought for every performance of her work in her lifetime, after which, up until this year, her music has rarely been sung or played. When researching for musical scores for the play, I could not find Smyth’s music on the shelves of any library, but hidden in the basements in the original, fading editions.

Ethel Smyth triumphed in her own lifetime but faced insurmountable odds, she refused to bow down to convention and chose to follow her unassailable desire to compose, fuelled with courage, determined energy and infamous wit and humour.

To quote Ethel again “in literature, nobody could prevent Jane Austen, the Bronte’s and George Elliot from writing novels on the sly. The chief difficulty woman musicians have to face is that in no walk of life do men like to see us come barging in on their preserves.”

Ethel Smyth: Grasp the Nettle takes places on Wednesday 3 October in the Milton Court Concert Hall. Tickets are available via Barbican Box Office. Book your tickets now.

The event is part of the City of London's Women: Work & Power season, examining the struggle for gender equality through the ages while celebrating a number of significant anniversaries in 2018.