HebrideanUltraTerfHecate on Nostr: https://thecritic.co.uk/not-a-dull-phrase/ Ethel Smyth was a middle-class butch ...
https://thecritic.co.uk/not-a-dull-phrase/
Ethel Smyth was a middle-class butch lesbian from an English military family who went to jail for the Suffragette cause and was seen conducting fellow-inmates at Holloway Prison with a toothbrush. That, in sum, is the impression given by Thomas Beecham and other wary admirers. Virginia Woolf once said that being loved by Ethel was “like being caught by a giant crab”. The composer’s daunting physicality occluded whatever merit there was in her music, which faded out with her death in 1944.
Glyndebourne’s recent revival of her opera The Wreckers has been restorative and several German opera houses have taken it up. So what next?
Ethel Smyth was a middle-class butch lesbian from an English military family who went to jail for the Suffragette cause and was seen conducting fellow-inmates at Holloway Prison with a toothbrush. That, in sum, is the impression given by Thomas Beecham and other wary admirers. Virginia Woolf once said that being loved by Ethel was “like being caught by a giant crab”. The composer’s daunting physicality occluded whatever merit there was in her music, which faded out with her death in 1944.
Glyndebourne’s recent revival of her opera The Wreckers has been restorative and several German opera houses have taken it up. So what next?