In 1902, Ethel Smyth wrote to her partner in despair. She was in Berlin, for the premiere of her second opera Der Wald (‘The Forest’). ‘I have never suffered so acutely’, she lamented. By any account, the first performance of Der Wald was not a success. The orchestra were under-rehearsed, the singers nervous about cuts made by the management, and the audience was in no mood to welcome a new work by an English composer. The Second Boer War had prompted an outpouring of anti-English sentiment in Germany, and critics were chagrined that the Berlin Court Opera had prioritised an English composer over a German. They expressed their disapproval vocally. ‘Every minute I thought yells from the public would stop the performance,’ Smyth reported.

The composer in question being a woman only made matters worse. One critic openly admitted that they came to the performance expecting it to be a failure because the composer was a woman. ‘The work of the English composeress did nothing to weaken the prejudice that one is generally accustomed to show for female compositional activity’, they wrote. The Berlin press dubbed Smyth a ‘composing Amazon’, the Berliner Tageblatt dismissing Der Wald as ‘the well-meaning work of a dilettante’. National-Zeitung retorted that the opera was not even at ‘the level of dilettantism’, and was ‘really incredibly childish’.

A more retiring character than Smyth might have been defeated by such an onslaught. Instead, Der Wald became a turning point in her career. For the first time, she saw herself as a potential figurehead for other women and started adopting something like a feminist attitude. ‘There is a certain amount of fighting for the “Wald” which I must do’ she wrote to Henry Brewster, her partner and collaborator on Wald’s libretto. ‘I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs … I am not afraid and in my way an explorer who believes supremely in the advantages of this bit of pioneering.’ Before Der Wald, Smyth had shown little interest in organised feminist movements, but her experiences with this opera nudged her towards the path that would eventually culminate in her joining the suffrage movement, composing the anthem for the Women’s Social and Political Union, and being jailed for the cause in 1912.

E.M. Smyth's Der Wald (The Forest) premiered in 1902

Smyth had begun work on Der Wald in 1896, while on holiday in Italy with Brewster. Although Smyth and Brewster’s relationship was romantic, their partnership was driven by a shared creative energy. Brewster was a poet and philosopher, and Smyth found his writing to be a boundless fount of inspiration. For much of their relationship they lived in different countries and worked out their collaborations on paper, leaving behind a great deal of information about the genesis of the works she composed while they were together.

Inspired by Shakespeare, whose writing Smyth admired greatly, Der Wald was conceived as a ‘history opera’ with characters loosely based on historical figures. Brewster steered her away from this plan, and after debating the merits of different scenarios – she rejected Brewster’s suggestion of basing the opera on Tess of the D’Urbervilles – they alighted on the opera’s final form and Smyth completed the majority of the composition between 1900
and 1901.

In one act, the opera focuses on a love triangle, which is perhaps not unrelated to the fact that Smyth had for many years been embroiled in a love triangle with Brewster and his wife, Julia. In the heart of a forest, Röschen is about to marry her lover Heinrich. They are interrupted by the witch Iolanthe, who condemns Heinrich to death when he rejects her advances. Röschen chooses to die rather than be without Heinrich, and the opera concludes with Iolanthe leaving their two bodies on the stage, disappearing into the forest which remains unchanged, indifferent to the lovers’ plight.

Despite the Berlin debacle, Der Wald became the first opera by a woman to be staged at Covent Garden, where the press response was far more favourable. It was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as a work of ‘rare imagination’, and by the Pall Mall Gazette as ‘a distinct and unique triumph’ that ‘rises at times to moments of absolute genius’. Covent Garden very rarely staged works by English composers, and there was finally a critical momentum behind supporting English opera. Smyth’s opera was in the right place at the right time. The Globe enthused that Der Wald was ‘the thing that we have wanted so long – a really fine opera by a native composer’.

Smyth’s searingly powerful score was as daring as anything else being heard in 1902. Debussy’s Pélleas et Mélisande had just premiered, Puccini’s Tosca only two years before – Strauss’s Salome, Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg were all yet to be written. Der Wald combines a rich Romantic idiom with a psychological intensity and use of dissonance that points towards later expressionist operas; the English reviewers recognised it as belonging to ‘the most modern school’. Smyth uses different timbres for characterisation, and Iolanthe’s part in particular pushes the singer to the extremes of their vocal capacity. It’s one of her most intense, concisely wrought scores, perhaps responding to the criticisms of her first opera, Fantasio, that had declared the work too long.

The opera’s positive reception was followed keenly in the US, and Smyth was offered a contract that made her the first woman to have an opera performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Her visit to the States was widely anticipated; as the Savannah Morning News put it bluntly, ‘the peculiarity of a woman’s name attached to an operatic composition is attracting wide curiosity.’ Sadly when the production ran in 1903, Smyth was once again judged as a woman first and an artist second. Der Wald was criticised for its lack of ‘sweetness and grace of phrase’, and The New York Times slammed it as a product of ‘vaulting ambition’ and ‘general incompetency’. Showing just how capricious critical tastes could be, the same ‘modern’ elements in the score that had been praised as bold and audacious in London were lambasted in the US as ‘strident, formless … utterly unfeminine.’

Faced with this kind of press, Der Wald could not survive. The opera lapsed into relative obscurity, and it would be more than a century before the Met would stage another work by a woman – Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin in 2016. But Smyth had achieved something truly historic with Der Wald. She was born in an era when it was thought not just improbable but biologically impossible for women to compose large-scale works. With Der Wald she proved, irrefutably, just how false this idea was. Not only this, but Der Wald marked an important step in the development of English opera, showing that British opera composers could stand alongside their European counterparts. By the time Smyth wrote her fourth opera, The Boatswain’s Mate, she was recognised as a powerful voice in an emerging national school. Der Wald is a vital part of Britain’s operatic history, and of Smyth’s personal story – but beyond this it is a brilliant, vibrant opera that deserves to be heard. 

The recording of Der Wald from BBC Symphony Orchestra and John Andrews is out now on Resonus Classics.