Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, DBE (23 April 1858 – 8 May 1944) was an English composer and a leader of the women's suffrage movement.
She was born in London. J H Smyth, her father, was a Major-General in the Royal Artillery. She was one of eight siblings two of whom were male, the rest girls. Her family was opposed to her making a career in music. She studied with Alexander Ewing when she was seventeen and took an interest in Wagner and Berlioz. After a...
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Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, DBE (23 April 1858 – 8 May 1944) was an English composer and a leader of the women's suffrage movement.
She was born in London. J H Smyth, her father, was a Major-General in the Royal Artillery. She was one of eight siblings two of whom were male, the rest girls. Her family was opposed to her making a career in music. She studied with Alexander Ewing when she was seventeen and took an interest in Wagner and Berlioz. After a major battle with her family about it, she was allowed to study music in Leipzig, with Carl Reinecke, amongst others, and then, after leaving the conservatoire, privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg. While at the conservatory she met some important composers including Dvořák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky, but she considered the tuition substandard and left after a year. Through Herzogenberg she met Clara Schumann and Brahms. Later she would write her Mass in D in 1891 (in spite of being an atheist), which is very much in the style of Brahm's Ein...
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