“By a Linden Tree”: The Leipzig Lieder of Composer Ethel Smyth

by Noelle | Aug 6, 2025 | Composer

Sheepdogs, Tweeds & Bicycles

Ethel Mary Smyth (1858-1944) was a trailblazing queer English composer, conductor, author, and suffrage activist, whose decades-long musical career spanned two centuries. She engaged with a variety of musical forms, including songs, chamber works, opera, and symphonic and choral works.

Despite the prejudice that Smyth faced as both a woman composer and a suffragist, she refused to adhere to the repressive Victorian social mores of British society. Famed Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) wryly described Smyth as “a serious and gifted composer… [not] without her peculiarities and eccentricities.” [1]

Smyth continually defied Victorian gender stereotypes – wearing tweed suits and men’s hats, riding bicycles, golfing, mountaineering, hunting, and keeping Old English sheepdogs as her constant companions. Single by choice, Smyth had passionate affairs with both women and men.

She composed six operas, published nine memoirs, fought for women’s suffrage in Great Britain with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), and was jailed in the process. Smyth worked as a radiographer during World War I, was the first woman composer awarded Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1922, and was the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate in music from Oxford University in 1926.

As an homage to Smyth’s intrepid spirit, it may be most fitting to begin with an introduction from the composer herself. In The Memoirs of Ethel Smyth, a 1987 anthology edited by Robert Crichton, Smyth explained to the reader why her reputation may have preceded her.

Because I have conducted my own operas and love sheep-dogs; because I generally dress in tweeds, and sometimes, at winter afternoon concerts, have even conducted in them; because I was a militant suffragette… because I have written books, spoken speeches, broadcast, and don’t always make sure that my hat is on straight; for these and other equally pertinent reasons, in a certain sense I am well known. [2]

Smyth the Composer

Over four decades, Smyth composed in a wide array of musical genres – orchestral works, a mass, operas, sacred and secular choral music, song repertoire, piano works, organ works, and chamber music, including trios, string quartets, and sonatas. Smyth’s compositional style would initially be influenced by the mid-19th-century German Romantic tradition, particularly by the music of composer, conductor, and pianist Johannes Brahms (1833-1897).

Her orchestral works, such as Overture to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1889), Serenade in D (1889), and Mass in D (1891) exhibit hallmark traits of the late Romantic era: vivid melodies, rich chromatic harmonies, and an overwhelming sense of drama.

The composer was also inspired by the music of her English childhood, and she incorporated elements of Anglican sacred music and English folk melodies into her compositions, such as the orchestral song cycle Three Moods of the Sea (1913) and Variations on Bonny Sweet Robin (Ophelia’s Song) (1927) for flute, oboe, and piano.

Dramatic storytelling was a particular focus for Smyth, whether via programmatic elements in the orchestral tone poem On the Cliffs of Cornwall (1908), or as a composer of six operas. From the 1890s to the 1920s, Smyth contributed significantly to the 20th-century operatic repertoire, composing Fantasio (1894), Der Wald (1901), The Wreckers (1904), The Boatswain’s Mate (1914), Fête galante (1922), and Entente cordiale (1924).

In 1903, Smyth’s one-act opera Der Wald (The Forest) was the first opera by a woman composer to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. More than 100 years would pass until another opera by a woman composer appeared on the stage at the Met – the 2016 US premiere of L’Amour de Loin (Love from Afar) by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023).

The Vagaries of Freelance Musicianship

Smyth tirelessly promoted the publication and performance of her music in a male-dominated field, gaining an ally in conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-1961), founder of the London Philharmonic, who championed Smyth’s opera The Wreckers for its London premiere in 1909.

Smyth’s musical career benefited from her social standing as the daughter of a prominent Major-General in the Royal Artillery, John Hall Smyth (1815-1894). She also befriended aristocrats, such as the ex-Empress Eugénie of France (1826-1920) and the Princesse Edmond de Polignac Winnaretta Singer (1865-1943), both of whom promoted Smyth’s music.

Despite the support of powerful friends, the composer’s career was constricted by both gender prejudice and the difficulties of freelance musicianship. Smyth had to secure funds and convince conductors, impresarios, and opera house directors to present her newest works.

To illustrate the lengths to which Smyth would go to secure a premiere, we can briefly visit the tale of Smyth’s pitch for the 1903 Metropolitan Opera debut of her opera Der Wald, summarized by John Yohalem in his 2011 article, A Woman’s Opera at the Met: Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald in New York.

After performances in Berlin, London, and Strasbourg, Smyth set her sights on an American premiere of Der Wald. Learning that the Met’s impresario, Maurice Grau (1849-1907), would be in Paris, she traveled across the English Channel before sunrise. Smyth telephoned Grau’s hotel room at 8am and convinced him to meet her as soon as possible. Smyth hoped to catch the boat home at 11am, leaving her with a three-hour window to persuade Grau to include her one-act opera on the Met’s upcoming season; it would be the first opera by a woman composer in the company’s history.

Ready to make her case, Smyth arrived at Grau’s hotel room armed with reviews from past performances and box office statements from its London premiere. According to Smyth’s re-telling of their meeting to The Evening Sun, a New York City newspaper, she successfully won Grau over in the allotted time; he apparently remarked to Smyth, “You are certainly a businesslike woman.” [3]

On its opening night at the Met, Der Wald would generate $10,390.60 at the box office, the highest proceeds of any opera that season. With her tenacity and resolve at the helm, Smyth ultimately witnessed the premieres of most of her compositions, including all six of her operas.

The “Double Bind” of 19th-Century “Sexual Aesthetics”

Critical reception of Smyth’s music was influenced by 19th-century “sexual aesthetics,” a term coined in the 1970s by musicologist Judith Tick. [4] “Sexual aesthetics” used gendered criteria to judge a composer’s musical aptitude, style, and ability. [5]

Large-scale forms, such as operas and orchestral works, were viewed as “masculine” works of potential genius for performance in public settings. Small-scale forms, such as songs and chamber music, were “feminine” musical genres, often performed in private spaces and considered more appropriate for women composers. These biases were further fueled by the fact that women of Smyth’s generation were often denied music education in harmony and counterpoint, the very tools necessary to compose large-scale works.

Smyth refused to compromise in the face of gendered musical expectations. She famously stated about her 1901 opera Der Wald in a letter to close friend and collaborator Henry Bennet Brewster (1850-1908), “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.” [6] 

Smyth & Her Critics

 Critics, however, gladly placed the value of Smyth’s music in a gendered “double bind.” In Eugene Gates’ “Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don’t: Sexual Aesthetics and the Music of Dame Ethel Smyth,” the author charts the pervasive “hostility and alarm” of late-19th-century music critics as women composers, like Smyth, entered the public realm with their newest works. [7]

For example, Gates illustrates the biased appraisal of Smyth’s large-scale orchestral works by Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950).  In his reviews, Shaw revealed the overwhelming influence of “sexual aesthetics” in 19th-century music criticism – with his use of gendered descriptors like “neat and dainty” for Smyth’s orchestral music, as well as his argument that “heroic,” “brassy,” and “noisy” works couldn’t possibly be composed by a “lady.”

For the 1890 premiere of Smyth’s orchestral Serenade at London’s Crystal Palace, Smyth attempted to avoid this “double bind” – she had her name printed in the program under the un-gendered pseudonym E.M. Smyth. As she later stepped forward to receive the audience’s applause, Smyth’s gender as a composer was revealed. In response, Shaw wrote,

… I am convinced that we should have resented the disappointment [of Smyth’s gender reveal] less had we known that our patience was being drawn on by a young lady instead of some male Smyth. It is very neat and dainty, this orchestral filigree work; but it is not in its right place on great occasions. [8]

Six months later, Shaw was once again in the audience for the premiere of Smyth’s Overture to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, noting, “When E. M. Smyth’s heroically brassy overture to Anthony and Cleopatra was finished, and the composer called to the platform; it was observed with stupefaction that all that tremendous noise had been made by a lady.”[9]

The Songs of Ethel Smyth

Smyth was often drawn to large-scale instrumental and vocal works, which comprise the majority of her compositional output. However, she did compose three collections of songs for voice and piano: Lieder & Balladen, Op. 3 (1886), Lieder, Op. 4 (1886), and Three Songs (1913). [10]

Musicologist Rachel Lumsden notes, “… most research on Smyth has focused either on her literary endeavors or her compositions. What is missing is a thoroughgoing analysis of the connections between the two.” [11]

I find that tracking one of Smyth’s German songs (Lieder) through her memoir, Impressions That Remained (1919), is an excellent means of better understanding both her music and her life writing.

Impressions That Remained was the first of Smyth’s nine memoirs, originally published in two volumes in 1919. It reflects on Smyth’s early childhood in Surrey in the late 1850s and concludes with her experiences in Germany and Italy as a young composer from 1877 to 1891. Smyth also includes heavily edited excerpts from her personal correspondence with various family, friends, and colleagues.

Amidst Smyth’s recollections in Impressions That Remained, I would like to center one particular song, “Bei einer Linde” (By a Linden Tree) from Lieder & Balladen, Op. 3. In the 1880s, Smyth composed  “Bei einer Linde” as a student in Leipzig, today the largest city in the German eastern state of Saxony.

Smyth’s time in Leipzig was formative, both musically and personally. It was there where she studied composition seriously for the first time, situating her nascent musical style within the mid- to late 19th-century German Romantic tradition.

Smyth and her songs were welcomed into the salons of Leipzig’s elite “musical society,” where she would meet Austrian composer and pianist Elisabeth von Herzogenberg (1847-1892), one of the great loves of Smyth’s life.

“Bei einer Linde” from Lieder & Balladen, Op. 3

The Loves of Ethel Smyth

Smyth engaged in queer romantic relationships with women throughout her lifetime. Within certain societal circles, Smyth’s sexuality was acknowledged, but it wasn’t publicly revealed until the composer began to author her memoirs in the early 1920s.

In these books, Smyth examines her relationships with women as friends, companions, and lovers, while also discussing complex aspects of her own sexuality. In Impressions That Remained, she acknowledged her lasting bonds with the women in her life, whose support (in various forms) had been like “shining threads.”

Let me say here, that all my life… I have found in women’s affection a peculiar understanding, mothering quality that is a thing apart…. And further it is a fact… that the people who have helped me most at difficult moments of my musical career, beginning with my own sister Mary, have been members of my own sex. Thus, it comes to pass that my relations with certain women, all exceptional personalities I think, are shining threads in my life. [12]

Smyth fell in love passionately and often. In “The Smyth-Brewster Correspondence: A Fresh Look at the Hidden Romantic World of Ethel Smyth,” musicologist Amanda Harris observes that “[Smyth’s] tendency to love a number of people, both women and men, was sometimes difficult for the main loves of her life to understand.” [13]

Her relationships with women included Maid of Honour to Queen Victoria and women’s rights advocate Lady Mary Ponsonby (1832-1916), suffrage activist and founder of the WSPU Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), and keyboard player Violet Gordon-Woodhouse (1872-1948). 

Smyth’s ability to become instantly infatuated continued into her later years. In 1930, at the age of 71, she met 50-year-old English author Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Smyth had admired Woolf’s groundbreaking 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, and she soon fell in love with the much-younger author. In a letter to a friend, Woolf bluntly described Smyth’s interest as “…an old woman has fallen in love with me. It is like being caught by a giant crab.” [14]

They soon formed an intimate, decade-long friendship, discussing literature, music, autobiography, women’s rights, and personal topics in their letters. [15] For a fascinating analysis of the relationship between “polar opposites” Woolf and Smyth, as well as their philosophies on writing autobiography, check out Christopher Wiley’s 2004 article When a Woman Speaks the Truth About Her Body’: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and the Challenges of Lesbian Auto/Biography.

Henry Bennet Brewster (1850-1908)

Although musicologist Amanda Harris observes that  “the sheer number of women Smyth fell in love with… testifies to the centrality of women in her romantic life,” she had a singularly important relationship with a man – British-American writer and philosopher Henry Bennett Brewster (1850-1908). [16]

Born in Paris, Brewster was the son of an American dental surgeon, who had built his career tending to wealthy European clientele. He ultimately bequeathed a sizable inheritance to Henry, who was then able to support both a family and his literary aspirations. [17]

Henry was bilingual, and he wrote philosophical treatises in English, as well as poetry in French. In 1887, he published The Theories of Anarchy and of Law, although none of his books became particularly well-known. [18] Smyth and Brewster would meet for the first time in 1882, and their relationship would last for over twenty-four years until his death in 1908. 

They nurtured their connection over lively debates on art, literature, philosophy, and politics. Brewster also co-wrote the librettos for Smyth’s first two operas, Fantasio and Der Wald, as well as the original French libretto for The Wreckers.

In 1930, 22 years after Henry’s death, Smyth set an orchestral cantata to his poem The Prison (1891). In this philosophical debate, the Prisoner and the Soul discuss how imprisonment, both physically and metaphorically, indelibly alters the human condition. [19] Ninety years after its premiere, conductor James Blachly’s recording of The Prison won a 2021 Grammy for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album, making Smyth the first historic woman composer to ever win such an award. [20]

The Battle for Leipzig

Smyth’s childhood was spent in Frimley, Surrey. As one of eight siblings in a military family, she discovered her life-long passion for musical composition as a child. Ethel’s father, a conservative military officer, fiercely disapproved of his daughter’s musical interests.

With the enduring support of her mother Emma Struth Smyth (1824-1891), Ethel never lost sight of her goal: to study composition at the famed Konservatorium der Musik in Leipzig, which had been founded in 1843 by composers Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) and Robert Schumann (1810-1856) and was the oldest public conservatory in Germany.

However, Smyth’s father refused to allow his daughter to travel to Leipzig. In retaliation, she waged a campaign to wear down his defenses. After years spent arguing, locking herself in her room, and refusing to attend social gatherings, nineteen-year-old Smyth prevailed.

In 1877, she arrived at the Leipzig Konservatorium to study composition. Smyth’s stubborn determination to pursue a German conservatory education, expressly against her father’s wishes, represents one of many instances in which she would refuse to bend under societal pressure.

The Victorian Era (1837-1901)

Smyth’s dedication to an authentic life in music, which she exhibited from an early age and nurtured until her death, was no small feat. Born in 1858 into Victorian British society, Smyth faced a future of limited possibilities.

The Victorian era, which roughly aligned with the reign of Queen Victoria (1819-1901), was marked by industrialization, economic growth, and the violent, colonial expansion of the British Empire. By the end of the 19th century, the British Empire encompassed parts of Europe, North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, overtaking close to one-quarter of the world’s land and subsuming more than one-quarter of the global population into its orbit. [21]

The Doctrine of “Separate Spheres”

For Victorian Brits like Smyth, daily life was rigidly defined by constructs of gender, class, and race. The so-called doctrine of “separate spheres” assigned biologically-determined and distinct societal roles to both men and women. Men were considered stronger, independent, and more rational beings, whose work was remunerated.

Women were viewed as inherently weaker, dependent, emotional, and more moral. As devoted daughters, wives, and mothers, their work was unsalaried and confined to the domestic sphere. Women could not vote, were prohibited from studying at public universities, and were barred from entering many professions. 

Marriage was all but an inevitability in the life of a Victorian woman. In doing so, the wife became a legal extension of her husband – her property, physical body, and the custody of their children were under her husband’s total control. Since husbands dominated the legal aspects of their wives’ lives, married women had little recourse to bring about lawsuits, draft their own will, or sign a contract. Strict divorce laws made it extremely difficult for women to end their marriages, even in cases of abuse. [22]

Despite their higher social status and vicinity to wealth, it was most often middle- and upper-class Victorian women who experienced an inability to work outside the home in marriage. Working-class women, whose families could not survive on the salary of a single breadwinner, had more freedom to work and earn money, although they were consistently siloed into lower-income jobs.

“Spinsters” & “Cat Ladies”

In Victorian society, if a woman remained unmarried (either by choice or circumstance), she risked being labelled  a “spinster.” It was a term with stark gendered and socio-economic connotations.

Originating in the mid-1300s, “spinster” denoted a person who spun wool. Since lower-paying professions in the Middle Ages, like spinning, were often relegated to unmarried women, the “spinster” as a single, poorer working woman was born. And, the label endured, so much so that by the 17th Century in England, “spinster” had become the legal term for a single woman; it remained so until the Civil Partnership Act of 2005. [23]

By Smyth’s birth in 1858, “spinster” had morphed into the derogatory insult that we recognize today: a single, childless woman – unwanted, lonely, and past “her prime.” Victorian society viewed “spinsters” with suspicion and derision. Not only did their lifestyles seemingly threaten established gender hierarchies, but they also disrupted Victorian views on sexual identity. As author Erin Blakemore cites in Original Spin: On the History of the Spinster, single women were often “suspected of lesbianism and accused of suppressing frustrated sexuality.” [24]

A Victorian-Era Woman’s Education

Despite the rigid socio-cultural hierarchies that defined Smyth’s coming-of-age at the height of the Victorian era, societal change was on the horizon, remaining most accessible to middle- and upper-class white women.

With the founding of girls’ schools and women’s colleges throughout the century, and the passage of the 1880 Elementary Education Act that mandated primary schooling for all five to ten year-olds, women began to access institutionalized education at an early age. The results were transformative. In Britain, around 51% of women were illiterate in 1840, 18 years before Smyth’s birth. [25] By the end of the century, literacy rates for women were higher than 90%. [26]

By 1878, the University of London admitted female students into the same degree programs as male students; it was the first time in Britain’s history that women had any access to a university education. It would take other institutions, like Oxford, until 1920 to fully open their doors to women.

With this increased access to education, paired with rapid industrialization that created new (yet still unequal) jobs for women in the workforce, some Victorian women chose to remain single. They had a diverse set of motivations – some identified as LGBTQ+, others were not willing to settle for subpar relationships with men, and others still valued their economic independence more than the assumed societal privilege(s) offered by marriage.

“Why Am I A Spinster?”

For a window into the perspectives of Victorian single women, we can look to an 1889 article from Tit-Bits (meaning “tidbits”), a British weekly society magazine that was founded in 1881. Originally unearthed by historian Dr. Bob Nicholson, the editor of Tit-Bits asked readers to write in with answers to the question – why am I a “spinster”?

The competition was meant to mirror the paper’s very-successful “Why Am I A Bachelor?” series. However, the editor received so many witty replies from single women that the magazine published 21 of them, awarding “The Spinster’s Prize” to each applicant.

Check out the 1889 Tidbits article below, or read on for three of my favorite responses. [27]

Why am I a “spinster”?

• Because I have other professions open to me in which the hours are shorter, the work more agreeable, and the pay possibly better.
  Miss Florence Watts, 29, High Street, Fulham, S.W.
  
  
• Because (like a piece of rare china) I am breakable, and mendable, but difficult to match.
  Miss S.A. Roberts, The Poplars, Ocker Hill, Tipton, Staff.
  
  
• Because matrimony is like an electric battery, when you once join hands you can’t let go, however much it hurts; and, as when embarked on a toboggan slide, you must go to the bitter end, however much it bumps.
  Iss Laura Bay, 29, Pelham Road, Wood Green, London, N.
  

While “spinster” as a slur no longer carries quite the same weight as it once did, retrograde ideas still endure in contemporary clothing.

As we learned this past year of then-Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance’s 2021 comments about Democratic officials as “childless cat ladies” and the rise of the pro-natalist movement in the United States, the fear of those who choose to build their lives without marriage and/or children, or have defined what family and partnerships mean on their own terms, carries on to this day.

For a fascinating history of the “cat lady” trope from NPR, check out this 2024 article by Rachel Treisman (spoiler alert: “cat lady” is a term that originates from the persecution of so-called witches in the Middle Ages). For a recent summary of the pro-natalist movement in the US and its political agenda, check out this April 2025 NY Times article from Caroline Kitchener.

A Single Woman Composer With Her Own Income

Smyth remained relatively unbothered by these toxic labels. Despite her father’s conservative politics, she was never pressured by her family to marry. While she considered matrimony at various times throughout her life, Smyth ultimately chose to remain single.

Smyth’s single status was further buoyed by her financial situation, since she received a modest, annual allowance from her family to pursue composition. In this regard, Smyth’s single-hood was a boon to her career aspirations. She could manage her own funds without relinquishing legal control to a husband.

In A Final Burning of Boats (1928), Smyth wrote of the three main factors that she believed to be instrumental in her musical success – her good health, her resilient attitude, and her financial independence.

…may I say with all the emphasis at my command, that but for possessing three things that have nothing whatsoever to do with musical genius: (1) an iron constitution, (2) a fair share of fighting spirit, and (3), most important of all, a small but independent income, loneliness and discouragement would have vanquished me years and years ago. [28]

Smyth & The Herzogenbergs

Within a year of Smyth’s matriculation at the Konservatorium in Leipzig, she encountered another setback. After dealing with sub-par instruction from her teachers, Smyth disappointedly left the school.

Ever resilient, she decided to remain in Leipzig – a city that had grown into a powerful economic center, fueled by its publishing, textile, and law industries, as well as one of the first railroad lines in Germany. She hoped to take advantage of Leipzig’s rich cultural life. It was a city brimming with all things musical, and it had welcomed many of Germany’s most famous composers – from J.S. Bach (1685-1750) to Gustav Mahler (1860-1911).  It was also home to the oldest civic orchestra in the world, the Gewandhausorchester (“Garment House” Orchestra), founded in 1743.

Smyth found herself a private composition teacher – Austrian composer and conductor Heinrich von Herzogenberg (1843-1900). He was respected in musical circles for his knowledge of the music of J.S. Bach and contrapuntal techniques. Smyth soon entered into a seven-year romance with his wife Elisabeth, who was also a pianist and composer. Their intimacy would define “the happiest years of [Smyth’s] early life,” and the eventual rupture of their relationship would later break Smyth’s heart. [29]

Elisabeth von Herzogenberg (1847-1892)

Elisabeth von Herzogenberg (née von Stockhausen) was born in Paris into a family of German aristocrats. Her father, Bodo Albrecht von Stockhausen (1810-1885), served as a diplomat in the Hanoverian Court. Her mother, Clothilde Annette (1818-1891), was a Countess of the noble German Baudissin family.   Elisabeth’s father was an avid amateur pianist, studying in Paris with Polish virtuoso pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849).

In 1853, the Stockhausens moved to Vienna, where Bodo Albrecht had been named ambassador to the Viennese Court. In Vienna, Elisabeth and her two older sisters benefited from a formal education. They were also exposed to the arts, attending opera and concert performances in aristocratic circles.

Elisabeth eventually studied piano with Julius Epstein (1832-1926), a renowned Croatian piano pedagogue. She also briefly took piano lessons with German composer Johannes Brahms, who would later become a life-long friend and musical confidante.

Elisabeth fascinated those who knew her, and she was admired for her intelligence, beauty, and musical talents.

As Smyth recalled from their first meeting, Elisabeth was ever multifaceted – a strikingly beautiful “siren,” a “genius” with a sharp mind, and an aristocratic host who was unexpectedly a “Heaven-inspired cook.” [30]

At the time I first met her she was twenty-nine, not really beautiful but better than beautiful, at once dazzling and bewitching; the fairest of skins, fine-spun, wavy golden hair, curious arresting greenish-brown eyes, and a very noble rather low forehead, behind which you knew there must be an exceptional brain… It really was true that with her sunshine came in at the door, and both sexes succumbed equally to her charm. [31]

Heinrich von Herzogenberg (1843-1900)

In Vienna, Elisabeth would meet Heinrich von Herzogenberg, a descendant of French nobility and the son of an Austrian court official. In 1861, he had pursued law and philosophy studies at the University of Vienna, only to abandon his degree for a career in music a year later.

Despite their different religions (he a Catholic; she a Protestant), Elisabeth and Heinrich were married in 1868. They lived for a time in Graz, where Heinrich worked as a freelance composer, finally settling together in Leipzig in 1874.

By Smyth’s account, the Herzogenberg marriage was “notoriously happy,” a respectful partnership in which “she was as devoted to him as he to her.” [32] Inspired by their abiding love of music, the Herzogenbergs cultivated a salon in Leipzig, which attracted illustrious creatives of the day, including our protagonist Ethel Smyth, Hungarian virtuoso violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) and Austrian-German contralto Amalie Joachim (1839-1899), German pianist and composer Clara Schumann (1819-1896), as well as German composer Johannes Brahms.

Elisabeth the Composer

Elisabeth was a talented composer and pianist. Smyth described her as a “… musical genius. Almost by instinct she read and played from score as do few routined conductors, and in judgment, critical faculty, and all-round knowledge was the perfect musician.” [33]

Only three of Elisabeth’s compositions have ever been published – two during her lifetime (24 Volkskinderlieder and “Nachklang” in her husband’s Gesänge und Balladen, Op. 44) and one immediately after her death (Acht Klavierstücke).

Influenced by the music of mid-19th-century German composers Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms, Elisabeth never publicly promoted her own compositions. Musicologist Antje Ruhbaum notes that no primary source, such as letters, survives to verify if Elisabeth’s works were ever privately performed. [34]

Elisabeth revealed certain frustrations to Smyth about the trajectory of her musical career. [35] In July 1878, she cautioned Smyth against allowing momentary pleasures, like lawn tennis and dancing, to distract from her musical studies, writing,

Ethel, beware lest it should be with you as with me. … I often could weep to think of the time I have lost, how badly I have husbanded my little talent. And now here I am — for all my artist’s soul in the bonds of wretched dilettantism! If you knew what pain my conscience gives me… you would do anything to avoid such a fate. [36]

In Elisabeth’s warning to Smyth, it’s also worth noting how her conception of her own artistry was heavily influenced by gendered stereotypes. Without sufficiently “husbanding” her talent – a masculinized form of caretaking – she remained trapped in the ranks of amateurs, a belittling label that was often reserved for the domestic musical activities of women.

Socio-Economic Class & The 19th-Century Woman Musician

Elisabeth’s confession about her unrealized creative potential illustrates how her relationship to music ultimately diverged from Smyth’s. Both women benefited from their societal status in pursuit of a musical education. However, as musicologist Nancy B. Reich outlines in “Women As Musicians: A Question of Class,” Elisabeth’s aristocratic background also hindered her musical development.

By the turn of the 19th Century in Europe, Reich argues that two groups of women musicians had emerged – the “professional woman musician” and the “nonprofessional woman musician.” [37] For Reich, the 19th-century professional woman musician was a working artist. She existed on a lower economic rung and relied on her creative efforts to support herself and her family. She performed publicly, published her music, and toured.

Conversely, the 19th-century non-professional woman musician came from an aristocratic or monied background with access to a musical education. She rarely made money from her musical activities, which were confined to private performances for family and friends. She engaged, though, in more public musical acts, such as organizing salons, which were an important means of artistic networking, music-making, and creative connection throughout the 19th Century. [38]

While “non-professional” women musicians, like Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, developed sophisticated skills in performance and composition, sometimes akin to the level of any professional, their efforts often remained hidden behind closed doors, which could stymie their musical output. [39]

Despite Smyth’s upper middle-class English background, her musical path was entirely different. She successfully crossed from the ranks of the “non-professional” into the professional realm, aided (in part) by her financial independence and single status.

Although their career trajectories ultimately diverged, music remained a shared passion for Smyth and Elisabeth, an illuminating space where both women saw each other most clearly. Smyth recalled,

In musical matters Lisl [Elisabeth] and I saw absolutely eye to eye, and it was a strange intoxicating thing to realize that in moments of musical ecstasy the heart of the being on earth you loved best was so absolutely at one with yours that it might have been the same heart. [40]

Lieder & Balladen, Op. 3 (1886)

By the winter of 1878, Smyth had befriended the Herzogenbergs. The couple “adopted” the young composer into their lives, reserving a room for her in their home. Smyth became particularly close to Elisabeth, who was eleven years her senior, affectionately calling her Lisl.

From now onwards I became, and remained for seven years, a semi-detached member of the Herzogenberg family… not a day passed but that one or other of my meals was taken with them… the little spare room, stocked for my needs, was always ready when required… [41]

During her Leipzig years with the Herzogenbergs, Smyth composed Lieder & Balladen, Op. 3, some time between 1877 and its publication in 1886. The opus contains five songs: “Vom Berge” (From the Mountain), “Der verirrte Jäger” (The Lost Hunter), “Bei einer Linde” (By a Linden Tree), “Es wandelt, was wir schauen” (What we look at, it changes), and “Schön Rohtraut” (Pretty Rohtraut).

Smyth drew from two literary sources – the first four songs employ poetry by Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857), while its final song, “Schön Rohtraut,” is a ballad set to poetry by Eduard Mörike (1804-1875). At elite salon gatherings, Smyth would perform some of these early song compositions for composers Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann.

Lieder in a Gendered “Double Bind”

While Smyth’s early Lieder (songs) brought her social acceptance and some success in the salons of Leipzig, they also engendered anxiety. On the one hand, 19th-century “sexual aesthetics” promoted song composition as an “acceptable” musical genre for women composers – it was small-scale in nature and omnipresent in domestic music-making. However, in the hands of a woman composer, Lieder was also considered inferior, amateur, and “feminine.”

Smyth was all too aware of the “double bind” of song. She may also have been wary of being pigeonholed as “just” a woman composer of Lieder.  While Smyth’s songs certainly served as her compositional “ticket” to the upper echelons of Leipzig’s musical society, Smyth worried that her penchant for Lieder composition would be conflated with an inability to produce larger-scale musical works in the public sphere.

She remarked to her mother in a letter from February 1878,

I have to sing my songs everywhere (my voice is in very good form at present for it!)… I can hardly help saying straight out in people’s faces what I do say in so many words: ‘Oh yes, that’s all very fine, but the question is, will my talent stand cultivation?’ Years only can prove that question, for till one is through one’s studies and has all one’s material there, one cannot tell if one has profited by those studies and can use and shape that material… [42]

While it may be ordinary for a young composer to navigate personal insecurities as they embark upon their musical career, the fact remained – that the continual private success of Smyth’s Lieder, as she “sang her songs everywhere” in Leipzig, was not proof enough, even in her own estimation, of an ability to “cultivate” her own talents in the long term.

Smyth’s Songs in the Publishing House

Throughout her Leipzig years, Smyth’s songs became a vehicle for self-promotion and earning extra income, outside of the modest allowance stipulated by her father. Smyth cultivated her business acumen by negotiating and selling her songs to music publishers, a skill which would serve her with larger-scale works throughout her career. However, she would face a music publishing industry rife with gender bias and diminished expectations towards the “value” and marketability of publishing music by women composers.

While Lieder & Balladen, Op. 3 aren’t explicitly mentioned, this opus may have been on Smyth’s mind as she wrote to her mother in April 1878,

… I went to Breitkopf and Härtel – the music publishers par excellence in the world. The nephew, who conducts the business, Dr. Hase, I know very well and he is quite one of the most charming men I ever met… Well, he began by telling me that songs had as a rule a bad sale – but that no composeress had ever succeeded, barring Frau Schumann and Fraulein Mendelssohn, whose songs had been published together with those of her husband and brother respectively. He told me that a certain Frau Lang had written some really very good songs, but they had no sale. I played him mine, many of which he had already heard me perform in various Leipzig houses, and he expressed himself very willing to take the risk and print them. But would you believe it, having listened to all he said about women composers, and considering how difficult it is to bargain with an acquaintance, I asked no fee! Did you hear of such a donkey! [43]

Here, Smyth maneuvered the dismal expectations of Dr. Hase at the famed Leipzig music publisher, Breitkopf and Härtel. He claimed that “as a rule” publishing the Lieder of women composers was a poor investment. Save for composers Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847), who had published songs respectively alongside famous husbands (Robert Schumann) and brothers (Felix Mendelssohn), women’s songs didn’t sell. Even composer Josephine Lang (1815-1880), who wrote over 300 Lieder and was publicly championed by prominent German music critic Ferdinand Hiller (1811-1885), had received little public interest.

After an inauspicious start to their meeting, Dr. Hase accepted the songs for publication, and Smyth implies that he admired them more than he cared to let on. However, distracted by his stipulation that her songs would surely fail, Smyth became so harried (or intimidated) as to completely “forget” to negotiate a fee for the songs’ publication.

As demonstrated many times throughout her life, twenty-year-old Smyth would not give up so easily. Ever the optimist, she tried yet again to be paid for her songs a month later, writing to her mother,

I am still, besides other work, working away at those songs to take to the printers to-morrow. They are pretty sure to take them as now they are so well known here. Whether they give me much for them is another question – or indeed anything! But I hope so. [44]

“Bei einer Linde” (By a Linden Tree)

Musicologist Jürgen Thym observes that song as memory was “a topos visited many times in the nineteenth Century, especially by composers of Lieder.” [45] The third song of Lieder & Balladen, Op. 3, “Bei einer Linde” (By a Linden Tree), invokes the memory of a lost love affair through the enduring growth of a linden tree.

Smyth’s seven-year romance with Elisabeth von Herzogenberg had blossomed as she composed “Bei einer Linde.” By its publication in 1886, their relationship was irrevocably broken.

While “Bei einer linde” doesn’t reference Elisabeth directly, it serves as a potent metaphor to retroactively frame “the very tenderest relation” that “governed [Smyth’s] life both humanly and musically for so many years.” [46] “Bei einer Linde” expresses nostalgia for a past that no longer exists, not unlike the act of Smyth memorializing her own relationship with Elisabeth in her memoirs.

Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (1788-1857)

The author of “Bei einer Linde,” Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, was considered one of the great lyric poets of the German Romantic era.  Born into a noble family in Upper Silesia (now Poland), Eichendorff’s younger years were marked by the violence of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815).

As he studied law in Halle and Heidelberg, Eichendorff was introduced to leading writers of the Frühromantik (Early Romantic), including Achim von Arnim (1781-1831) and Clemens Bretano (1778-1842). By 1822, his family had lost their ancestral estate of Schloß Lubowitz, and he worked as a civil servant in the Prussian government until his retirement in 1844.

Despite his career in public administration, Eichendorff wrote voluminously – as a poet, novelist, playwright, editor, translator, literary critic, and anthologist. Eichendorff’s poetry, encapsulated in his 1837 collection Gedichte (Poems), often imitated the subject matter and versification of folk songs. He wrote in a straightforward style with simple language, engaging with Romantic themes of nature, wandering, love, the passage of time, nostalgia for the past, and the supernatural.

Eichendorff was one of the most popular Lieder poets, set by composers such as Mendelssohn, Brahms, Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf (1860-1903), Richard Strauss (1864-1949), and of course, Ethel Smyth. It speaks to Smyth’s savviness and assimilation into German-speaking culture that she would choose to set Eichendorff as the primary poet of her first set of Lieder (songs).

“Bei einer Linde”: The Poem

In “Bei einer Linde,” we encounter a scene in nature. Our protagonist visits a linden tree, where they and their beloved once carved their initials in springtime. The years have passed; their relationship has ended. The tree has now grown from a sapling into an adult with hardened bark. The couple’s initials, akin to their love, have been erased from its overgrown branches. In the shade of the tree, our protagonist admits that they’ve never healed from this past love and never will.

“Bei einer Linde”: The Music

In Smyth’s conception of “Bei einer Linde,” her musical setting remains compact, yet never lacking in originality. She refrains from overriding the poem’s existing structure and language, while still offering her own harmonic and motivic ideas on the text.

As a poem, “Bei einer Linde” is constructed of three stanzas of four lines, each following a predictable ABAB, CDCD, etc. rhyme scheme. For her part, Smyth honors the three-stanza structure of the poem by composing her musical version in three sections – A, B, and A1 (or a repetition of A with modifications). 

Smyth further delineates her stanza structure through key modulation – E Major to G Major, and a final return to the home key of E Major. For the listener, this modulation to a minor third above is noticeable. It dramatically illustrates the protagonist’s shift in perspective from their past relationship to their present reflections on the tree throughout the second verse of the poem.

Smyth also retains the poem’s original versification, adding little repetition save ,,hienieden heilen” (to heal this side the grave) twice at the song’s conclusion. This sole moment of textual repetition creates a sense of finality, backing the protagonist’s admission that they may never truly heal from their lost love. 

In another instance of text painting, Smyth employs an arpeggiated sixteenth-note figure in the piano line. From its onset in the song’s first section, this arpeggiation becomes an instantly-recognizable motif. It evokes a nostalgic pathos that aligns with the protagonist’s remembrance of their former relationship. 

As this musical figure reappears in the third and final section of “Bei einer Linde,” it becomes even more extended in its range, heightening the unresolved tension inherent in our protagonist’s reflections.

The Linden Tree

It’s important to also discuss the powerful symbolism of the linden tree as a  “‘sacred’ tree of… lovers” in German Romantic poetry. [47] Belonging to the genus Tilia, the linden (or lime) tree is found in Asia, Europe, and eastern North America. It comprises over 30 different species of trees, which can grow over 100 feet tall with heart-shaped leaves.

For thousands of years within various cultural practices, linden trees have represented love, truth, peace, justice, prosperity, fidelity, and fertility. During the Middle Ages in western Europe, tradition dictated that lovers should swear their fidelity under a linden tree, whose truth-telling powers made it impossible for the couple to lie. [48]

By the mid-19th Century in Germany, linden trees were often referenced in poetry and subsequently surfaced in song settings. The Romantic-era preoccupation with the natural world as a reflection of an individual’s inner life transformed the linden tree into a ripe symbol of love lost or gained. 

For example, the fourth song of Franz Schubert’s famous 1828 song cycle Winterreise (Winter’s Journey) is aptly titled “Der Lindenbaum” (The Linden Tree). Having been rejected by their lover, the cycle’s grief-stricken protagonist wanders through a desolate, winter landscape. Akin to Smyth’s protagonist in “Bei einer Linde,” they come upon a linden tree, where they had once carved their beloved’s name.

In the freezing night, the tree invites them to find Ruhe (rest) under its branches. Instead of serving as a nostalgic reminder of what-could’ve-been, the tree now encourages the poem’s protagonist to seek solace in death.

ETHEL & LISL

How exactly then is “Bei einer Linde” a means of better understanding Smyth’s relationship with Elisabeth von Herzogenberg? Not only was the song’s composition heavily influenced by Smyth’s time in Leipzig with the Herzogenbergs, but the relationship that it describes – one of first love, hope, the spectre of a shared life, and ultimate fragmentation – mirrors the eventual dynamic between the two women.

In the spring of 1878, as the young composer suffered from (what she described as) a “severe illness… really a nervous breakdown,” Elisabeth personally nursed her friend for over two weeks. [49] She remained by Smyth’s bedside day in and out, “..washing me herself, performing all the sick-room offices for me, cooking on her own little cooker… reading to me, alternately petting and keeping me in order.” [50]

Their relationship was complex from the outset, and the two women often compared their dynamic to that of a parent and child. Elisabeth, who suffered from heart disease, could not have children, a reality that caused her lifelong sadness. Due to Elisabeth being eleven years older, she initially regarded Smyth as both the child she could never have and a younger composer to take under her wing.

However, Smyth and Elisabeth’s relationship soon veered into the romantic. After Smyth’s health improved enough for Elisabeth to embark on a trip to Austria, she wrote letters to the recuperating composer every day, sending chocolates, flowers, and books to her door. By the summer of 1878, as Smyth returned to England for a family visit, their affection for one another was fixed.

In an excerpted letter, Elisabeth wrote to Smyth about managing the pain of their brief separation,

… that cannot change the fact that we love each other… My child, I wonder sometimes at the different ways Fate spins the thread which binds people together – how it often takes years to enter into possession, and how in our case something has grown between us that tells me we belong together, inseparably! [51]

For Smyth, the feeling was mutual. In an 1878 letter to her mother, she wrote, “What is it in Lisl that none can resist, old, young, rich or poor?… One can’t envy Lisl anything, she deserves all the love a mortal can give her…” [52]

As their relationship developed, Elisabeth’s husband Heinrich was aware of their bond. It’s unclear, though, how he qualified his wife’s relationship with the young English composer. By 1880, Elisabeth even mentioned to Smyth that Heinrich did sometimes find their “ménage á trois” tedious, but he accepted it nonetheless. [53]

The ,,Lebensteufel” of Ethel Smyth

In the autumn of 1881, after a family visit to England, Smyth returned once more to Leipzig. Over the past three years, her relationship with Elisabeth had matured, although Smyth now sensed a distance forming between the two women.

It didn’t help matters that Smyth, as an energetic 23-year-old, was only too eager to explore all that life had to offer. She had a self-attributed “knack of constantly forming new ties,” a trait which – as author Rose Collins dryly notes in Portraits to the Wall: Historic Lesbian Lives Unveiled – made her “something of an emotional magpie.” [54]

For her part, Elisabeth wished to maintain their well-established intimacy in Leipzig. [55] She believed that Smyth was too motivated by Lebensteufel (life’s devil), a restless desire to seek out new experiences, no matter the cost. [56]

Although Christmas was always spent with the Herzogenbergs in Leipzig, Smyth announced her plans to travel to Italy and Switzerland the following winter. In Italy, Smyth would make “contact with other forms of beauty than music.” [57] Over the past four years, she had dutifully studied composition with Heinrich, and now clamored for fresh inspiration and the opportunity to compose independently of her teacher.

The Brewsters of Florence

A year later, in the fall of 1881, Smyth set out for Italy. In Florence, she would befriend an eccentric couple – the Brewsters. They were “hermit-like,” avoided most of society, and lived on the historic Via de’ Bardi with their two children. [58]

Julia Brewster (1842-1896) (née von Stockhausen) was Elisabeth’s older and much beloved sister. Her husband, Henry Bennet Brewster (1850-1908), whom we met earlier in this post, was a British-American philosopher and writer. He was also the man “destined to become [Smyth’s] greatest friend” and the ultimate source of her disastrous rupture with Elisabeth. [59]

The Brewsters, as Elisabeth described to Smyth in a letter, “lived in a world of their own” – they only spoke formal French to one another at home, Julia was eleven years older than her husband, and the pair maintained “extraordinary views on marriage.” [60]

They were wed in a church ceremony so as not to distress Julia’s parents, but in reality, the Brewsters did not practice marriage as a “binding engagement.” [61] Smyth described their philosophy as follows:

If either of the couple should weary of married life, or care for someone else, it was understood that the bond was dissoluble, and there was a firm belief on both sides that no such event could possibly destroy, or even essentially interrupt, their “friendship” as they called it, founded as it was on more stable elements than mere marriage ties. ‘Do not be afraid,’ they said, ‘of anything life may bring; face it, assimilate it, and the gods will see you through.’ [62]

The Brewsters discussed this pact openly – to release each other from their union if they fell in love with another – although Smyth noted that it was “only as a general thesis” and had yet to be tested. [63]

Initially, Smyth found Henry to be shy, but they soon found common ground with discussions on literature, philosophy, politics, and art.

She wrote, “[Henry] seemed to have read all books, to have thought all thoughts; and last but not least was extremely good looking… It was the face of a dreamer and yet of an acute observer, and his manner was the gentlest, kindest, most courteous manner imaginable…” [64]

Over the next two winters, Smyth spent time with the Brewsters in Florence. While she was originally drawn to Julia, Smyth unexpectedly found herself enjoying time with Henry more and more. [65]

Just as she had formed a sort of triangle with the Herzogenbergs in Leipzig, Smyth now found herself pulled into yet another triangle – this time, with the Brewsters in Florence.

A Love Triangle Gone Awry

As you can imagine from the tale of “Bei einer Linde,” the Brewster-Smyth love triangle proved to be combustible. After knowing Smyth for only a few weeks, Henry confessed to his wife that he had fallen in love with her. In turn, Julia suggested that he leave immediately; the pretense was a lion-hunting expedition in Algeria, but it was actually a means of distancing himself from Smyth. (Fortunately, Smyth notes that he “achiev[ed] nothing more than once hearing a lion roar in the distance.” [66])

For her part, Smyth was blissfully unaware of Henry’s feelings. In 1884, after spending two winters with the couple in Florence, Smyth finally admitted that she too was in love with him. From that moment on until his death in 1908, Smyth and Henry would maintain their complicated bond.

However, the fallout of their attraction to one another was chaotic; it bulldozed some of Smyth’s most cherished relationships, particularly with Elisabeth. As author Rose Collins suggests, “For the next ten years or so, this odd couple upset everybody with their on-off intense romantic friendship.” [67]

Smyth felt it was impossible to continue on as they were, and she decided to cut off all contact from Henry. [68] Upon returning to Leipzig in 1884, Smyth revealed everything to Elisabeth, and they initially “saw eye to eye in all points, and parted, as may be imagined, more closely if more tragically knit than ever.” [69]

While Smyth claimed that she didn’t meet Henry again for another five years out of deference to Julia, the trio continued to write letters in an attempt to reconcile their “situation.” Henry wished to abide by the Brewsters’ much-discussed pact to dissolve their union. Julia was devastated by what she viewed as Henry and Smyth’s betrayal.

Smyth was torn between her love for both Elisabeth and Henry, the fear that society would label her an “adulterer,” and total incredulity at the fact that Julia had presented herself as far less invested in her marriage than she actually was.

Although Smyth took great pains in her memoirs to describe the actions of all involved as honest and level-headed, the reality was that Julia had no intention of neatly removing herself from her own marriage.

On Smyth’s part, it seems intensely naive to not fully comprehend how this revelation would wound Elisabeth. Not only was Smyth in love with another person, but he was also her sister’s husband. It placed Elisabeth in an impossible position – to choose between her love of Smyth or loyalty to her family.

By the winter of 1884, Heinrich von Herezogenberg had been offered a new teaching position in Berlin, and the Herzogenbergs prepared to move from their beloved Leipzig. After having cut all (in-person) contact with Henry, Ethel hoped to eventually join them in Berlin.

However, news of the Brewster-Smyth triangle spread amongst their family and friends. Elisabeth’s mother and brother, who had never approved of Smyth, privately campaigned for Elisabeth to cease all contact with the English composer. From their biased perspective, Smyth was entirely to blame. How could Elisabeth continue any relationship with the person responsible for the demise of her sister’s marriage? This familial pressure, as well as experiencing Julia’s sadness firsthand, overwhelmed Elisabeth.

A year later, in May 1885, Smyth accompanied the Herzogenbergs to the train station in Leipzig. She said her goodbyes on the platform with the caveat that she would soon join them in Berlin after a trip home to England.

Over forty years later, as Smyth wrote Impressions That Remained, this scene at the train station remained forever seared into her mind – Lisl waving, her face framed in the train window.

I remember few dates, but that date, May 7, will be remembered to my dying day. As the train moved off and slowly rounded the curve, I saw Lisl still waving at the window… never to see her again in this world, except in dreams. [70]

The Final Rupture

By the summer of 1885, now in separate countries, Smyth worried incessantly about the future of her relationship with Elisabeth. Their lives had revolved around one another for the past seven years, and Smyth simply couldn’t envision a future without her.

By June, after visiting with her brother, Elisabeth’s tone in her letters changed.  As Smyth notes, “The work of disintegration had begun.” [71] Then, without a word, Elisabeth stopped writing. They had once written to each other every day.

Two months later, a letter finally arrived. In no uncertain terms, Elisabeth informed Smyth that, despite the pain it caused them both, their relationship was over. She accused Smyth of being “a wild horsewoman blinded by self-love, galloping rough-shod over all [she] met…” [72]

Elisabeth blamed herself for not cutting off association with Smyth sooner, and while she admitted that she didn’t think Smyth capable of actively deceiving anyone, “… of what avail are innocence and excellent intentions if none the less devastation marks your path?” [73]

As she read these harsh words, Smyth admitted that she finally saw herself through Elisabeth’s eyes, “not as a co-adjutor in a noble reading of Destiny, but simply as [a] thief of someone else’s goods…” [74] Smyth begged Elisabeth by letter to reconsider, but after exchanging a few more missives, Elisabeth fell silent. [75]

Except for a single letter two years later, they would never speak to or see each other again. Smyth never gave up hope that they would one day reconcile, and she followed Elisabeth’s activities from afar through mutual friends.

Seven years later, in 1892, Smyth was devastated to learn from Henry that Elisabeth had died unexpectedly in San Remo, Italy – from complications due to her heart condition.

Epilogue

In 1895, three years after Elisabeth’s death, the Brewsters finally divorced. Julia would die a year later – from the same heart condition as her younger sister. Smyth and Henry’s romance, friendship, and creative partnership continued until his own death in 1908; they would write around 1,000 letters to one another. [76] Although Henry asked Smyth to marry him several times, she refused.

In 1886, as Elisabeth abruptly ended their relationship, Smyth was thirty-four years old. This rupture signaled the beginning of the end of Smyth’s time in Leipzig. She wrote of her forced sense of self-resignation, “The strands of what was to become the fundamental friendship of my life were severed, not to be re-joined for many years. I burned my boats and went into the desert.” [77]

By 1890, Smyth would return to England, throw herself into her career as a composer, and later join the women’s suffrage movement. She would also pursue relationships with other fascinating women, some of whom I’ve mentioned earlier in this post.

Ultimately, though, Smyth’s relationship with Elisabeth von Herzogenberg was one of the most meaningful in her life. Its abrupt and unresolved end haunted her, and Smyth’s coming-to-terms with the consequences of her own actions remained a lifelong struggle.

In Christopher St. John’s 1959 biography of Smyth, the author recounts a conversation between the composer and writer Vernon Lee (1856-1935). Lee asks Smyth, “‘To how many people have you given without reserve, and got something like the equivalent in return?’” Smyth responds, “‘To three; Lisl, Harry and —” (Smyth refrained from naming the third). [78] As she published Impressions That Remained in 1919, twenty-seven years after Elisabeth’s death, Smyth mentioned the nickname “Lisl” over 150 times, more than any other figure in the book.

It seems then that Ethel Smyth shares a great deal with our protagonist in Eichendorff’s poem “Bei einer Linde” – both must rely on their memories of the past to conjure the love they once cherished. Sadly, our poem’s protagonist can never re-carve their initials into the bark of the linden tree. They are left to trace the shape of each letter through the recesses of their memories.

However, Smyth attempted to reanimate her past; she wrote a book to inscribe Elisabeth and their love onto the pages of history. While Smyth’s account may be one-sided, paired with an analysis of her Lieder, we catch a glimpse into the inner lives of these two remarkable women. As Elisabeth so aptly wrote to Smyth in a letter from 1878, “And now there you are, little tree, grown into my heart with such deep roots that nothing can ever tear them out!” [79]

[1] Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Autobiographical Account of a Tour Abroad in the Year 1888, English translation by Luis Sundkvist, Tchaikovsky Research, 2009, https://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/Autobiographical_Account_of_a_Tour_Abroad_in_the_Year_1888#cite_note-note2-2.
[2] Ethel Smyth, The Memoirs of Ethel Smyth, edited by Ronald Crichton, New York: Viking, 1987, Internet Archive, 355-366, https://archive.org/details/memoirsofethelsm00smyt.
[3] John Yohalem, “A Woman’s Opera at the Met: Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald in New York,” The Metropolitan Opera Archives, April 17, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20221114133959/http://archives.metoperafamily.org/imgs/DerWald.htm.
[4] Judith Tick, “Women as Professional Musicians in the United States, 1870-1900,” Anuario Interamericano de Investigación Musical 9 (1973), 16, https://doi.org/10.2307/779908.
[5] Derek B. Scott, “The Sexual Politics of Victorian Musical Aesthetics,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 119, no. 1 (1994), 91.
[6] Emily Rooke, “Dame Ethel Smyth,” Royal College of Music, accessed on November 4, 2024, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/dame-ethel-smyth-royal-college-of-music/_QXh_npyMAr77w?hl=en.
[7] Eugene Gates, “Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don’t: Sexual Aesthetics and the Music of Dame Ethel Smyth,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education vol. 31, no.1 (1997), 63.
[8] Ibid., 65.
[9] Gates, “Damned If You Do,” 65.
[10] Amy Zigler, “Works List,” Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), https://www.ethelsmyth.org/music/works-list/.
[11] Rachel Lumsden, “‘The Music Between Us’: Ethel Smyth, Emmeline Pankhurst, and ‘Possession,’” Feminist Studies vol. 41 no. 2 (2015): 336.
[12] Ethel Smyth, Impressions That Remained: Memoirs, London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/impressionsthatr010821mbp/page/n11/mode/2up, 6.
[13] Amanda Harrris, “The Smyth-Brewster Correspondence: A Fresh Look at the Hidden Romantic World of Ethel Smyth” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 14 (2010), 73, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/wam.2010.0005.
[14] Leon Edel, “Triumphs and Symptoms,” review of The Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, The New York Times, March 25, 1979, ​​https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/17/specials/woolf-letters4.html.
[15] Christopher Wiley, “‘When a Woman Speaks the Truth About Her Body’: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and the Challenges of Lesbian Auto/biography,” Music and Letters 85, no. 3 (2004), 390-392, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/178710.
[16] Harris, “The Smyth-Brewster Correspondence,” 87.
[17] Laura Fitzmaurice, “Clotilde Brewster: American Expatriate Architect,” 19th Century Magazine (Fall 2014): 17. Internet Archive.
[18] Harris, 79.
[19] Lewis Orchard, “Ethel Smyth and Henry Brewster,” Exploring Surrey’s Past, April 2019 https://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/9180-Ethel-Smyth-and-Henry-Brewster-edit-for-ESP.pdf.
[20] Maddy Shaw Roberts, “Composer and political activist Dame Ethel Smyth is officially a Grammy winner,” Classical fM, March 15, 2021, https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/composer-ethel-smyth-first-grammy-nomination-the-prison/.
[21] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “British Empire,” Encyclopedia Britannica, June 24, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/place/British-Empire.
[22] Phillip Mallett, “Women and the Law in Victorian England,” The Victorian City: Research by Phillip Mallett, accessed on October 27, 2024, https://victoriancity.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/women-and-the-law-in-victorian-england/.
[23] Emily Gulla, “A brief history of the word ‘spinster’ and how it’s still used today,” Cosmopolitan UK, February 14, 2020, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/relationships/a30868873/spinster/.
[24] Erin Blakemore, “Original Spin: On the History of the Spinster,” JSTOR Daily, April 24, 2015, https://daily.jstor.org/original-spin-history-spinster/.
[25] Matthew Ingleby, “Charles Dickens and the push for literacy in Victorian Britain,” Queen Mary University of London, June 10, 2020, https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2020/hss/charles-dickens-and-the-push-for-literacy-in-victorian-britain.html.
[26] Devon Lemire, “A Historiographical Survey of Literacy in Britain Between 1780 and 1830,” Constellations 4 (1): 249, https://doi.org/10.29173/cons18862.
[27] Janice Heppenstall, “Spinsters,” English Ancestors, April 21, 2020, https://englishancestors.blog/tag/titbits-magazine-1889/.
[28] Ethel Smyth, A Final Burning of Boats, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1928, 16.
[29] Ibid., 182.
[30] Smyth, Impressions, 170.
[31] Ibid., 169.
[32] Smyth, Impressions, 170, 173.
[33] Smyth, Impressions, 170.
[34] Ruhbaum, ,,Elisabeth von Herzogenberg: Rezeption.”
[35] Ibid.
[36] Smyth, Impressions, 269.
[37] Nancy B. Reich, “Women as Musicians: A Question of Class,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, edited by Ruth A. Solie, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 126.
[38] Reich, “A Question of Class,” 126-127.
[39] Ibid., 127-129.
[40] Smyth, Impressions, 232.
[41] Ibid., 272-273.
[42] Ibid., 244.
[43] Ibid., 248.
[44] Ibid., 247.
[45] Jürgen Thym, “Song as Memory, Memory as Song,” Archiv Für Musikwissenschaft 69, no. 3 (2012), 263, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23375389.
[46] Smyth, Impressions, 179, 181.
[47] Alina-Maria Ţenche-Constantinescu, et al., “The symbolism of the linden tree,” Journal of Horticulture, Forestry, and Biotechnology, Volume 19, no. 2 (2015): 239, https://journal-hfb.usab-tm.ro/romana/2015/Lucrari%20PDF/Lucrari%20PDF%2019(2)/41Tenche%20Alina%202.pdf.
[48] Ţenche-Constantinescu, 239.
[49] Smyth, Impressions, 185.
[50] Ibid., 180.
[51] Ibid., 181.
[52] Ibid., 223.
[53] Ibid., 288.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Collins, “Dame Ethel Smyth,” 2618.
[56] Smyth, Impressions, 302.
[57] Ibid., 304.
[58] Smyth, Impressions, 303.
[59] Ibid., 312.
[60] Ibid., 313.
[61] Ibid., 312.
[62] Ibid.
[63] Ibid., 312-313.
[64] Ibid., 314.
[65] Smyth, Impressions, 313-314.
[66] Ibid., 169.
[67] Ibid., 315.
[68] Rose Collins, “Dame Ethel Smyth,” in Portraits to the Wall: Historic Lesbian Lives Unveiled, Amazon, 2020, 2645, Kindle.
[69] Smyth, Impressions, 366.
[70] Ibid., 367.
[71] Smyth, Impressions, 352.
[72] Ibid., 369.
[73] Ibid., 371.
[74] Ibid.
[75] Ibid.
[76] Harris, “The Smyth-Brewster Correspondence,” 72.
[77] Smyth, Impressions, 373.
[78] Christopher St. John,  Ethel Smyth: A Biography, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1959, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/bwb_O8-BQS-326/mode/2up, 17.
[79] Smyth, Impressions, 223.

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