Smyth, Ethel

Smyth, Ethel – The Prison, Symphony for Soprano, Bass-Baritone, Chorus and Orchestra (Vocal score with English libretto)

For more information about the piece:

Part I: ‘Close on Freedom’ p.1
Part II: ‘The Deliverance’ p.104

Première:
Edinburgh, 19 February 1931

Preface

The Prison is the last large-scale composition by the English opera composer Ethel Smyth, a choral work that not only crowned her own career but erected a monument to her longstanding companion and librettist, the American writer and philosopher Henry Brewster (1850–1908). Smyth had met Brewster in 1882 during a months-long stay in Florence. Though he was married at the time to a sister of Smyth’s Leipzig confidante Elisabeth von Herzogenberg (1847–1892), he fell in love with the young composer. In the end this led to a permanent breech between Smyth and the Herzogenbergs even though she broke off contact with Brewster for a five-year period. It was not until early 1890 that the two lovers met again at the première of Smyth’s first orchestral work, Serenade in D. Following the death of Elisabeth von Herzogenberg and Brewster’s wife Julia (1842–1895), Brewster and Smyth began a collaboration that resulted in three operas: Fantasio (premièred 24 May 1898), Der Wald/The Forest (premièred 9 April 1902) and Les Naufrageurs/Strandrecht/The Wreckers (premièred 11 November 1906). Smyth made her librettist the dedicatee of The Forest and of Chrysilla, the third of her four French songs, which was intended as a literary and musical portrait of Brewster.

More than twenty years later Smyth’s symphony again ensured that Brewster’s writings were in the public eye. Here she set excerpts from his metaphysical book The Prison: A Dialogue, which discusses the inner struggle of humans to break free from the shackles of the self and to attain full awareness of the immortality of one’s soul in order to face death. Brewster shapes his monograph in the form of a conversation between friends on a manuscript allegedly written by an anonymous prisoner. For her symphony Smyth chooses excerpts from the prisoner’s final statements, dividing them among the vocal roles of the Prisoner (bass), his Soul (soprano), and the Voices (chorus). She had toyed with the idea of setting Brewster’s work to music for a long time: ‘Dame Ethel Smyth had felt that in the thoughts of her friend, H. B. Brewster, there was some hidden force waiting for its release in music, something which he had tried to say, had in fact succeeded in saying, but which needed the aid of a language, music, apprehended more intuitively than the written word can be.’1 Besides the musical setting, Smyth was greatly concerned with making Brewster’s text available to the public once again in the form of a reprint. In an extensive preface to the new edition, she sheds light on Brewster’s general significance to philosophy and to her personal life. …

Read preface of the full score /  Das Vorwort zur Partitur lesen > HERE