vAlthough the understatement that has been practiced for decades has only been carefully concealed, bitterness erupts from Ethel Smyth when, shortly after her 75th birthday in 1933, she sums up her life: “Well, that’s one thing about being famous. Yes, it’s true, I’ve conducted my own operas and love bobtails; I always wear only tweed clothes, and on cold winter afternoons I have even given concerts in them; I was a militant suffragette and beat the beat of my March for the Women from the window of Holloway Prison with my toothbrush, I wrote books, made speeches, made radio broadcasts, and I don’t always keep my hat on just sitting. I’m actually famous. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been doing my job, so to speak, for over forty years, and I haven’t managed to become even a tiny cog in the English musical machine. My fame didn’t help get my name on the program list either.”
With a grim grin, she attributes the fact that she was awarded an honorary doctorate twice and was raised to the nobility by the English king as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire to her achievements in lawn tennis and her good contacts with influential men at the Woking Golf Club – not but their musical merits. Ethel Smyth, born in southern England in 1858 and died in 1944, achieved more in the field of music than any woman of her time. She managed to get the Berlin court opera Unter den Linden to premiere a stage work of hers; She was the first woman ever to have a work performed at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London and also at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
A fun of spirit and style
She had to wrest her desire to study music from her father, a major general in the British artillery, with a domestic hunger strike and a refusal to speak for several weeks. In 1877 he allowed her to go to Leipzig, where she trained as a composer first at the conservatory and then with Heinrich and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, who were friends of Johannes Brahms. The seriousness of her studies also convinced her father.
Smyth wrote a total of six memoirs between 1919 and 1940, according to his own statements, out of dual necessity: once the Argentine bank that had managed her assets had gone bankrupt; On the other hand, her hearing problems increased – to the point of almost complete deafness – so that she could hardly do any musical work. That’s why Smyth, she writes, tried herself as an entertainment writer, with noticeable success. The Berlin English major Heddi Feilhauer has created a compilation of these six books and translated them into German. The title “Timpani Beats from Paradise” is Feilhauer’s own invention, but alludes to Smyth’s 1933 lecture “Female Whistles in Eden,” in which she traces the suppression of female creativity in music back to Adam and Eve with angry wit.
In the high society of old Europe
Feilhauer’s book is fun in spirit and style, a refreshing enrichment of our knowledge of music history. She brings Smyth’s pointed, sometimes biting, sometimes tender English into wonderfully readable German. The open-heartedness of the information is always balanced by an unfailing tact – in a language that combines discretion and clarity.
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