"Possession" by Ethel Smyth | Gracyn Blu, Ellen Rissinger

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Words and Music by Ethel Smyth (1858-1944)

Gracyn Blu, mezzo-soprano
Ellen Rissinger, piano


TEXT:

There bloomed at my cottage door,
A rose with a heart scented sweet;
O so lovely and fair that I plucked it one day,
Laid it over my own heart’s swift beat;
In a moment its petals were shed,
Just a tiny white mound at my feet.

There flew through my casement low,
A linnet that richly could sing;
Sang so thrillingly sweet, I could not let it go,
But must cage it the wild happy thing;
But it pined the cage I had made,
Not a note to my chamber would bring.

There came to my lonely soul,
The friend I had waited for long;
And the deep chilly silence lay stricken and dead,
Pierced to death by our love and our song,
And I thought of the bird and the flow’r
And my soul in its knowledge grew strong.

Go out when thou wilt, O friend,
Sing thy song, roam the world glad and free;
By the holding I lose, by the giving I gain,
And the gods cannot take thee from me.
For a song and a scent on the wind,
Shall drift in thro’ the doorway from thee.
By the holding I lose…
By the giving I gain.


PROGRAM NOTES:

Ethel Smyth was an English composer who forged a career for herself in a time when women were deemed inferior to men. She was part of the women’s suffrage movement and experienced relentless criticism as a woman composer.

Her opera, Der Wald, was, for more than a century, the only opera by a woman composer produced at the Metropolitan Opera (until Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin in December 2016). The Metropolitan Opera’s premiere of Der Wald was record-breaking at the box office as “the only night of the year that the house total reached five figures.” While it was extremely well-received, reviews still could not help but to comment on Smyth’s sex:
The Telegraph: "This little woman writes music with a masculine hand and has a sound and logical brain, such as is supposed to be the special gift of the rougher sex. There is not a weak or effeminate note in Der Wald, nor an unstable sentiment."*

The World: "Her work is utterly unfeminine. It lacks sweetness and grace of phrase. Wagner was never so ruthless in his treatment of the human voice."*

The Daily Mail dissented: "The charm and quaintness of it will appeal more than its attempt to mirror intense human emotion and to this extent it is feminine, according to all tradition."*

The Commercial Advertiser thought Der Wald fell between stools: "It has been often and truly said that whenever a woman composer strives to take the sex element out of her work if she succeeds she surpasses in masculinity anything that a man might do. Miss Smyth seems to have worked chiefly with this end in view, but, while she has eliminated the feminine element from her music, the gentleness and sentimentality which one would expect to find in the work of a woman, her substitute is far from having the real masculine flavor. Her moments of passion become moments of blatant noise…."*

Needless to say, it didn’t matter how amazing of a composer Ethel Smyth was. She was completely at the mercy of sexist critics.

Written in 1913, Smyth dedicated “Possession” to Emmeline Pankhurst, a British political activist who organized the UK suffragette movement, and Smyth’s “intimate friend.” Women were not open about their intimate relationships with one another in this time period, but Smyth wrote about their relationship in the memoirs she published.**

*http://archives.metoperafamily.org/im...
**Lumsden, Rachel. “‘The Music Between Us’: Ethel Smyth, Emmeline Pankhurst, and ‘Possession.’” Feminist Studies, vol. 41, no. 2, 2015, pp. 335–70. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.15767/feministstud.... Accessed 11 Mar. 2023.


Recorded March 24, 2023.