238 FEMALE COMPOSERS
Female conductors
Only in the 20th century did
women begin to conduct
orchestras. When the role
emerged in the 19th century,
it was monopolized by male
composers, with women
confined to conducting
choirs. In the 1930s, the
Dutch-American Antonia
Brico conducted the Berlin
Philharmonic, and the French
composer Nadia Boulanger
became the first woman
to conduct London’s Royal
Philharmonic. In the 1950s,
Margaret Hollis achieved
renown as a choral director,
founding the Chicago
Symphony Chorus in 1957,
and, in 1976, Sarah Caldwell
was the first female
conductor at the Metropolitan
Opera, New York.
It took another 30 years
for a woman, Marin Alsop,
to become chief conductor of
a major American orchestra,
the Baltimore Symphony
Orchestra. In 2013, Alsop
scored another first for a
woman when she conducted
the Last Night of the Proms
in London’s Albert Hall.Marin Alsop conducts the
Swedish Radio Symphony
Orchestra in 2009. She has led
orchestras in the UK, Brazil,
and the US.composer had better luck at the
next location, Vienna, where
Mahler was director of the opera
house. He expressed an interest in
seeing Smyth, but the person she
actually met was his second-in-
command, the conductor Bruno
Walter. He was impressed but
could not promise a production.
Back in London, Smyth’s
experiences were similarly
checkered. In 1908, a concert
version of the first two acts was
well received by many critics but
overshadowed by personal sadness.
Brewster, who was in the final
stages of liver cancer, had traveled
from Rome for the performance.
He died less than a month later.
The next year, The Wreckers—
now translated by Smyth into
English—was successfully staged
at His Majesty’s Theatre, London,
conducted by the young Thomas
Beecham. The conductor also
included it in his first season at the
Royal Opera House the year after,
although it suffered by comparison
with a new work being performed
at Covent Garden that season:
Richard Strauss’s Elektra.Many contemporaries were
generous in their praise of The
Wreckers. Writing in 1910 in the
second edition of The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
the British music critic John Fuller
Maitland observed: “It is difficult
to point to a work of any nationality
since Wagner that has a more
direct appeal to the emotions, or
that is more skilfully planned and
carried out.” The novelist Virginia
Woolf was more ambivalent. In
1931, she, her husband, Leonard,
and her lover, Vita Sackville-West,
accompanied Smyth to see The
Wreckers at the Sadler’s Wells
Theatre, London. She noted in her
diary that the opera was “vigorous
& even beautiful; & active &
absurd & extreme; & youthful: as if
some song in her had tried to issue
& been choked.” Beecham in his
memoirs, published in 1944, was a
whole-hearted enthusiast, judging
The Wreckers “one of the three or
four English operas of real musical
merit and vitality written during
the past forty years.”Blazing a trail
While Woolf’s judgment is perhaps
the one most modern critics would
come closest to, Smyth’s role in
opening up a path for later female
composers is beyond doubt. In
The Wreckers, she took on one
of the most ambitious forms of
composition. Through her talent,
perseverance, and sheer drive,
Smyth established herself as a
serious composer. She went on to
write three further smaller-scale
operas—two one-act comedies
and Fête galante (1922), a “dance-In 1911, Smyth wrote “The March of
the Women” as a Suffragette rallying
cry. An active protester, she was
sentenced to two months in Holloway
Prison, in 1912, for smashing a window.US_232-239_Dame_Ethel_Smyth.indd 238 27/03/18 4:49 PM