Impressions That Remained - Memoirs of Ethel Smyth

Ethel Smyth

Description

These intimate memoirs of one of the greatest composers of classical music, Ethel Smyth, are first-hand accounts of the remarkable woman’s life in music and in the suffragette movement.

Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) was an English composer and the first woman in her field to be granted a damehood. First published in 1919, this autobiography highlights her wit and humour, while giving personal and reflective insights into her childhood and working life. Detailing her career journey, exploring her relationships with some of history’s biggest names, and disclosing information regarding her activism for women’s suffrage, Ethel Smyth’s memoirs are a fascinating and insightful read.

This volume is divided into three parts:

- The Smyth Family Robinson

- Germany and Two Winters in Italy

- In the Desert

PART I
THE SMYTH FAMILY ROBINSON
CHAPTER I. (. . . to 1867), CHAPTER II. (. . . to 1867), CHAPTER III. (. . . to 1867), CHAPTER IV. (My Father), CHAPTER V. (My Mother), CHAPTER VI. (A Retrospect), CHAPTER VII. (1867–72), CHAPTER VIII. (1867–72), CHAPTER IX. (1867–72), CHAPTER X. (1872 and 1873), CHAPTER XI. (1873–75), CHAPTER XII. (1875 and 1876), CHAPTER XIII. (1876 and 1877)
PART II
GERMANY AND TWO WINTERS IN ITALY
CHAPTER XIV. (Summer 1877), CHAPTER XV. (Autumn 1877), CHAPTER XVI. (Winter 1877–78), CHAPTER XVII. (Winter 1877–78), CHAPTER XVIII. (Early in 1878), CHAPTER XIX. (Early in 1878), CHAPTER XX. (Early in 1878), CHAPTER XXI. (Spring 1878), CHAPTER XXII. (Summer 1878), CHAPTER XXIII. (Autumn and Winter 1878), CHAPTER XXIV. (Brahms), CHAPTER XXV. (Spring 1879), CHAPTER XXVI. (Summer 1879 to Summer 1880), CHAPTER XXVII. (Summer 1880 to Summer 1881), CHAPTER XXVIII. (Autumn 1881 to Autumn 1882), CHAPTER XXIX. (Autumn 1882 to Christmas 1882), CHAPTER XXX. (Christmas 1882 to Summer 1883), CHAPTER XXXI. (Summer 1883 to December 1883), CHAPTER XXXII. (December 1883 to Spring 1884), CHAPTER XXXIII. (Spring 1884), CHAPTER XXXIV. (Spring 1884 to Spring 1885)
PART III
IN THE DESERT
CHAPTER XXXV. (A Retrospect of 1884–85 to Summer 1885), CHAPTER XXXVI. (Summer 1885 to Autumn 1886), CHAPTER XXXVII. (Autumn 1886 to Autumn 1887), CHAPTER XXXVIII. (Autumn 1887 to Spring 1888), CHAPTER XXXIX. (Summer 1888 to Summer 1889), CHAPTER XL. (Summer 1889), CHAPTER XLI. (Autumn and Winter 1889), CHAPTER XLII. (Winter 1889 to Spring 1890), CHAPTER XLIII. (Spring and Summer 1890), CHAPTER XLIV. (Autumn 1890 to January 1891), CHAPTER XLV. (Epilogue)

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Musician
• Individual Composer

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 23 mars 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781446545423
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

IMPRESSIONS THAT REMAINED
Memoirs
By ETHEL SMYTH
Introduction by ERNEST NEWMAN

The Author, aged about five
IN MEMORY OF
MEP
( THE HON. LADY PONSONBY )
AND OF OUR LONG FRIENDSHIP
1890-1916
I find Lady Ponsonby, the wise judge, the firm Liberal, more and more delightful; at last one feels she is getting old-she is eighty-two. She is like a fine flame kindled by sea-logs and sandlewood-good to watch and good to warm the mind at, and the heart too .
EDITH SICHELL (1914)
INTRODUCTION

R EVIEWING Ethel Smyth s Impressions That Remained when it was first published in England I expressed the opinion that this was one of the half-dozen best autobiographies in the English language. This estimate has been confirmed by a recent re-reading of it for the present American edition. But there are several other books by the same author equally worth reading, for Ethel Smyth was one of the most remarkable women of her epoch; and I am glad that a request from Mr. Alfred Knopf to furnish an Introduction to this new edition affords me an opportunity of telling the American musical public more about her than is contained in her first book.
The autobiography may be trusted to tell its own story so far as it goes. But it was issued in 1919, and a great deal happened between then and the author s death in 1944. The memoirs, apart from a brief reference in the Epilogue to friends or incidents of the years immediately following, carry us only as far as 1892. Writing as she did in 1918 her scope was necessarily restricted here and there by the fact that several people who had played a considerable part in her life-story were still alive. One of these was the Ex-Empress Eug nie of France, with whom she was on terms of close friendship for more than a quarter of a century from 1890 onwards, the Empress s English estate at Famborough Hill being close to the Smyth house at Frimley and to later residences of Ethel. It would obviously have been impossible for the author to write about the Empress at any length or with any freedom while she was still alive. She died, at the age of ninety-five in July 1920-a year or so after the publication of the Impressions ; and in her second book, Streaks of Life (1921), Ethel Smyth painted a portrait of her that is not only fascinating in itself but of value to students and historians of the Second Empire.
The passing of the Empress from the scene also placed the author at liberty to indulge in some amusing reminiscences of the old Queen Victoria, with whom she had come into contact through Eug nie: they include the rich story, told with rich humour, of the dreadful breach of etiquette of which Ethel was innocently guilty at an after-dinner reception at Balmoral. At one end of the large room was a fireplace, and in front of this a hearthrug on which, in remote dignity, the Queen was standing with the Empress. Leading up to the two august ladies, says Ethel,
was an avenue composed of royal personages-ranged, as I afterwards found out, in order of precedence, the highest in rank being closest to the hearthrug-which avenue, broadening towards its base, gradually became mere ladies and gentlemen of the Court, and finally petered out in a group of Maids of Honour huddled ingloriously in the bay-window.
What Court procedure prescribed was that Ethel should remain among the huddle until she caught the royal eye, curtsey, and await a command to come forward. Will it be believed, she chuckles,
that what I did was to advance unconcernedly up the avenue, with a polite intention to say How do you do? to the Queen?
The error was pardonable, for at that time she knew nothing of the quite necessary etiquette of Courts, and the Empress had obtained a royal command to her to join the party at Balmoral in order that the Queen might become interested in her big work of that period, the Mass in D, and perhaps use her influence to bring it to performance in London. Ethel s description of the scene that followed is typical of her gay humour in all the awkward situations, and they were many, of her life:
If a young dog strays up the aisle during church no one says anything, no one does anything, but none the less he soon becomes aware that something is wrong. Even so, as the distance between myself and the hearthrug diminished did I become aware that something was very wrong indeed; my cheerful confidence waned and my step faltered. I saw the Queen slightly turn her head, look at me for a second as if I were some strange insect, and resume her conversation with the Empress. If I had been a Brobdingnagian spider as big as a Newfoundland she would not have acted differently. Someone would remove the creature; that was enough. I did not catch the Empress s eye, but I now know that since she could not shriek Mon Dieu, n avancez pas! she must have wished the earth would open and swallow me up. At this moment dear, human Princess Christian, who had come more in contact with low life than the Queen, stepped forward and shook hands with me-and somehow or other, I know not how, I backed away into the obscurity from which I should never have emerged.
Obviously reminiscences of this kind could not be printed with propriety while the Empress was alive, and so, though many of them fall within the period covered by Impressions That Remained , they had to be reserved for a later book. So again with some rich stories about the last of the German Kaisers, whom Ethel saw at close quarters in Berlin before the war of 1914.
The Impressions of 1919 and the Streaks of Life of 1921 were followed in 1927 by A Three-Legged Tour in Greece , a delightful record of a tour, packed with physical hardships, through unfrequented Greece by the indomitable woman of sixty-seven in company with a great-niece of hers. The adventure is told with the infinite zest that had alone made it possible. One episode is Ethel Smyth in a nutshell. The pair had set out one day from Salonica to climb Mount Olympus. Taking what seemed to them the natural way to their goal they found themselves in what turned out to be the extensive grounds of a big sanatorium for the mentally afflicted. Between them and Olympus ran a seven-foot stone wall. Kindly nurses and attendants assured them that there was no way through-they would have to go back and try some other and more round-about route. But Ethel had observed a few gaps in the wall; and over these she scrambled, dragging her young companion after her, and leaving behind them a legend of two mad Englishwomen that is probably told with bated breath in Salonica to this day.
2
Her solution of that difficulty was typical of her: she always knew exactly where she wanted to go, and went straight for her goal regardless of obstacles and dangers. In a letter of 1902 she speaks of the grim unchangeableness of people like me, who, at the age of twelve, found out what my destiny had to be, made tracks for it, and have never swerved from it since. In the days when she was trying to float her music in Germany more than one opera director and conductor was made to feel the torrential force of this pocket Niagara, as one member of her family circle had described her as a child of fourteen. Always, as at Olympus, she would get where she wanted to be or perish in the attempt. At one time she had set her heart on making her friend Lady Ponsonby read Anatole France. When long persuasion failed she threatened to present Lady Ponsonby with a parrot trained to cackle Anatole France ad infinitum . She s quite capable of it, you know, said the Empress Eug nie, who knew her thoroughly; and her friend surrendered at discretion.
You passionate, stormy-hearted child was the description of her in 1894 by the man who knew her best, the only man she ever loved. She tells her life-story with such detachment and so much humour, so much comprehension of the souls of others as well as of her own, that it is only by building up a number of scattered hints from many sources into a connected picture that we can realise how greatly she must have suffered at times. The world in general, that knew her only as a passionate fighter for her own and other causes, had no conception of the depth of tenderness and the capacity for pain in her; it saw her, particularly in the final thirty years or so of her life, only as a woman with an obsessing grievance-the frustration of woman in a man-made world. 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. Even one of her most devoted friends, Julia Brewster-the sister of Lisl von Herzogenberg-confessed ruefully to her one day in 1884, One must be very well to enjoy you. On one occasion, after what Ethel calls some extra-fierce argument after dinner with one of the most dearly loved of her later friends, Lady Ponsonby, she left in a fury the house in which she had been invited to stay the night and bicycled through darkness and rain and storm to her own home, seven miles away. When I got back, Lady Ponsonby s daughter wrote next day to a common friend, Ethel had been gone half an hour, and the house was still rocking!
She made more than houses rock with the thunder of her polemic during the last quarter-century of her life. But underneath all the combativeness was a rare capacity for feeling and inspiring friendship and a passion for love and understanding on the part of others. Take, as a side-light on this aspect of her, her story of he