She was bisexual, served a prison sentence and was so outraged by cuts to her opera The Wreckers that she stormed the orchestra pit. Finally, this summer, it will be heard as its extraordinary composer intended
‘She was a stubborn, indomitable, unconquerable creature. Nothing could tame her, nothing could daunt her,” said conductor Thomas Beecham, speaking in 1958 about the composer Ethel Smyth. “She is of the race of pioneers, of path-makers,” agreed her friend Virginia Woolf. “She has gone before and felled trees and blasted rocks and built bridges and thus made a way for those who come after her.”
“She’s badass. I’d love to have met her,” says Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts. The tenor sings in a new production of Smyth’s 1906 opera The Wreckers, which makes its debut at Glyndebourne on 21 May, and will be performed at the Proms this summer. Her music is “incredible”, the conductor Robin Ticciati says. “She uses the brass and the timps as weapons, blades!”
