‘In a certain sense I am well known,’ wrote the composer Ethel Smyth in 1936, reflecting on her life as she approached her 80th birthday. It was an uncharacteristically modest understatement – Smyth was by this point a DBE (the first woman in Britain to be made a Dame for composition), holder of three honorary doctorates in music, and she had seen all six of her operas performed. Her name regularly graced the society papers, and she was friends with some of the most famous figures in Britain, including writer Virginia Woolf and suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst.

Yet Smyth’s muted tone was appropriate for, as she pointed out, most of her fame came from her celebrated personality rather than her music. She desperately wanted to be recognised primarily as a composer, but it was her choice of clothing (tweeds, always), love of dogs (of which she owned eight), and notoriety as a militant suffragette that excited a substantial amount of press commentary. Despite the fact that she was, in some ways, one of Britain’s leading composers, having written not only six operas but substantial quantities of choral music, chamber works, solo pieces and songs, her works were performed only occasionally and many remained unpublished. After her death in 1944, performances of Smyth’s music reduced even further, leading to her being remembered more often as a cautionary tale than as a serious composer. ‘The almost self-parodying Ethel Smyth is rarely taken seriously’, wrote one critic for The Times in 1978.

It is testament to Smyth’s conflicted position that her scores and letters were left in disarray when she died. Most of her correspondence is flung across the globe, usually housed in collections dedicated to her more famous friends: her unpublished letters to Woolf are in New York, to Edith Somerville in Ireland. The location of many of her manuscripts was unknown – including that of her 1891 Mass in D. Written for SATB choir, soloists and orchestra, the Mass was one of Smyth’s first major breakthrough works, premiered by the Royal Choral Society at the Royal Albert Hall in 1893.

The Mass is an important early work for understanding Smyth’s life and her attitude to composition. Like many of her later works, it was created in the throes of passion for a muse – this time a woman called Pauline Trevelyan, under whose influence Smyth was exploring religion more seriously than ever before. Securing a performance was also a formative experience. When conductors refused to take her seriously because she was a woman, Smyth turned to her personal contacts for support. Her friend and early patron Empress Eugénie secured her an audience with Queen Victoria, and the ensuing royal support resulted in the Mass being premiered at a high-profile venue. ‘The Mass was the first work that required Smyth to actively network and advocate for her music to mount a performance’, Smyth scholar Dr Hannah Millington says. ‘These skills would become paramount as she pursued her operatic career.’

For the best part of a century, the Mass manuscript was believed lost but this year it was spotted by Professor Lisa Colton in the University of Liverpool’s special collections, as part of a donation from Sir Adrian Boult in 1963. In the 1960s, Smyth’s dubious reputation meant that while the manuscript was duly catalogued, it was not highlighted as being of any particular significance. It is only now, with Smyth coming back into the spotlight, that this manuscript in Smyth’s own hand has been recognised as the lost Mass score, and an important historical document. It ‘can provide insights into Smyth’s creative process, her collaborations, and her relationship with the music industry of her time,’ Colton explains. It throws a particularly interesting light on her relationship with Boult. After the piece’s first performance, it had fallen into obscurity – it was not heard again until 1924, when Boult resurrected it. Smyth was devastated by the neglect of her Mass, and it seems that she was so grateful to Boult for his interest in her work that she gifted him the score in thanks. ‘As a conductor Boult was known for his patronage of composers’ work,’ says archivist Olivia Thompson, ‘so this manuscript is a key object to reintroduce female composers into this story.’

Smyth’s writing for choir offers a wealth of riches, from her unaccompanied choral works to the choruses in her operas. She wrote that she experienced a ‘strange, half physical pleasure’ from ‘beautiful’ voices, and her vocal works comprise some of her most distinctive and charismatic pieces. ‘Smyth’s choral writing is dramatic, evocative and powerful,’ enthuses Smyth expert Dr Amy Zigler. Her compositional career is bookended by two cantatas associated with her lover and collaborator Henry Brewster – The Song of Love (1888), written when she was embroiled in a love triangle with Brewster and his wife Julia, and The Prison (1930), composed as something like a requiem for Brewster, who died in 1908. In both, Smyth manages to achieve moments of searing intimacy; despite being enormous works within an extremely public genre, these are intensely personal pieces, and it’s partly this combination of grandeur and fragility that give these works their appeal.

Other muses inspired quite a different style. Smyth was a committed suffragette, and was jailed for her militant actions in 1912. While in love with Emmeline Pankhurst and lending all her energies to the Women’s Social Political Union (WSPU), she composed the Songs of Sunrise, a set of choral pieces on suffrage themes that included ‘The March of the Women’, which became something like the WSPU’s anthem. This is a bombastic, energetic piece, designed to be manageable for untrained singers – quite unlike The Prison or the Mass, both of which contain some formidable vocal challenges. All members of the WSPU were required to learn the March by heart, so that it could be sung en masse at rallies and protests. Smyth’s affair with the harpsichordist Violet Gordon Woodhouse, meanwhile, produced some of Smyth’s more erotic choral writing in ‘Sleepless Dreams’ and ‘Hey Nonny No’ – which one impressed but alarmed reviewer likened to being thrown into ‘the midst of a Stygian orgy.’

 
The original manuscript of Smyth’s Mass in D was discovered at the University of Liverpool

The reemergence of the Mass manuscript is a reminder of just how much music is still waiting to be explored. Luckily for Smyth, her Mass autograph was carefully and expertly preserved for the last 60 years by the team at Liverpool, and the piece was published in her own lifetime. Other women’s work has not been so fortunate as to accidentally land in an archive, or to have been published. Vast quantities of choral music written by women still lie in homes and archives, yet to be discovered or recognised – such as by Avril Coleridge-Taylor, whose work I have previously featured in this column. But this opens up a world of opportunity for singers, conductors, and listeners, as these works slowly reemerge and make their way into concert halls and on to disc. The 2021 world premiere recording of The Prison won a Grammy for the Best Classical Solo Album, and Der Wald a Presto award for Best World Premiere Recording in 2023. Smyth’s Song of Love has yet to be recorded, as has her first opera, Fantasio – to say nothing of the cantatas of her contemporary Alice Mary Smith, or the Catholic choral works of Dorothy Howell. And who knows what masterpieces we are yet to find, tucked away in a shoebox in somebody’s spare bedroom?

The manuscript of Ethel Smyth’s Mass will be on display at the University of Liverpool from September 2025 in the exhibition ‘Lightbulb Moments’ in the Tate Hall in the Victoria Gallery & Museum. A digitised copy of the score will be published in full on the Liverpool Special Collections and Archives’ Digital Heritage Lab

Leah Broad is an award-winning writer, and the author of Quartet: How Four Women Challenged the Musical World

This feature originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Choir & Organ – Subscribe today