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Christ Church Cathedral
August 11, 2021
"I feel I must fight for [my music], because I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs; not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea."
If, in 1887, one had to pick a single young English composer as the most likely to make their mark on the musical life of their own country, there is a tolerably good chance that the name most knowledgeable music lovers would have nominated would be Ethel Smyth; this was the year in which the twenty-nine year old produced her sonatas for cello (the second such) and violin. Few would have then imagined that an obscure violin teacher from Worcester, born in 1857, the year before Smyth, would ultimate take the crown. But then Edward Elgar was a special case.
Smyth, who outlived Elgar by a decade, was notably successful during her lifetime: her second (of five) operas,Der Wald remains the only opera composed by a woman ever to have been performed by the Metropolitan Opera; Mahler considered conducting her masterpiece, The Wreckers, in Vienna and Smyth considered it "one of the small tragedies of my life that just when he was considering The Wreckers at Vienna they drove him from office.
Despite her unconventional life — she was active in the suffragette movement, even spending time in prison, and most of her love life involved other women — she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1922.
All of which begs the question: given her considerable success and public recognition during her lifetime, why is the music of Ethel Smyth less well known than that of, for example, Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn? I do hope that it is not because she lacked a famous musical male relative, but I cannot help but wonder...
Any notion that there was something lacking in the music itself was rapidly dispelled on Wednesday evening, as David Stewart and Jane Coop opened the (second performance of the) first VSMF concert in two years with a fine performance of Smyth's Violin Sonata in A minor, Op.7.
The opening movement's rhapsodic mood was superbly conveyed, and if the second subject had something of a Brahmsian feel, well, I strongly suspect that, from a twenty-first century perspective, any late nineteenth century composer who resisted the chromatic blandishments of Wagner would sound "Brahmsian" to our ears. It was a shame, although hardly unexpected, that the cathedral acoustic tended to smear the piano's more complex passages, but the conviction displayed by the performers made this almost irrelevant.
The short second movement was playful and busy — and a delight. The third movement was surprisingly full of regret, considering that Smyth was not yet thirty when she wrote it, and even the more outgoing passages had an underlying sadness.
The finale seems to find the composer trying to escape the demons summoned up in the slow movement, exuberantly whistling in the dark. Exuberant, yes, but somewhat less than joyful.
This was a first-rate performance of a first-rate sonata; the next time anybody programmes music by Smyth in Victoria, I shall be in attendance.
In 1785 published Franz Anton Hoffmeister commissioned Mozart to compose three piano quartets. After receiving the first, which was probably the first such work to treat the four instruments as equals, Hoffmeister, believing the work to be too difficult for public tastes, told the composer "write more popularly, or else I can print or pay for anything of yours!"
Mozart, who, whatever his other faults, was never guilty of false modesty released Hoffmeister from the rest of the commission: "then I will write nothing more and go hungry, or the devil take me!"
Despite the lack of financial incentive, Mozart proceeded to write a second quartet, which he finished on June 3, 1786. The publisher Artaria, which in 1778 had expanded its business from art and maps to include music, published both quartets in 1787.
The performance of the E flat quartet, K.493, which closed the programme was pure delight from beginning to end.
Coop adopted a lighter tonal palette — entirely appropriate for Mozart, it would not have worked for the Smyth — which enabled balances to be far better than one might have expected and most lines were clearly audible from all four players.
The opening movement, complete with exposition repeat, was supremely elegant, the slow movement positively gorgeous and the finale, a gently lilting combination of rondo and sonata form, based on what Einstein (Alfred, not Albert) called "the purest, most childlike and godlike melody ever sung", brought this delectable programme to a joyful close.
I should also note, parenthetically, that this year not only marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first Victoria Summer Music Festival (in which, if memory serves, both Yariv Aloni and Pamela Highbaugh Aloni took part), but that, because of the pandemic, this is also the twenty-fifth season of the festival.
May it continue to go from strength to strength.
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