‘YOU have the privilege’ the chairman of the Royal Musical Association told Frederick Meadows White at a meeting in May 1883, ‘of being married to a very clever woman.’
Frederick, an eminent QC, knew that quite well. Alice, a pupil of William Sterndale Bennett and George Macfarren, had composed her first symphony at twenty-four. Chamber music and songs had followed, with another symphony, overtures, choral works and a clarinet concerto. Sir George Grove praised her music as ‘full of tune and poetry’; Stephen Stratton of the Birmingham Post hinted excitedly at ‘greatness’.*
Yet Frederick also knew that Alice blamed the musical establishment’s preoccupation with finding a ‘great’ female composer for discouraging the merely good ones.* It was embarrassing, too, to be singled out in front of Ann Mounsey, and Macfarren’s student Oliveria Prescott.** So Frederick assured the meeting that Alice was no Mozart or Handel, simply a good mother to their two daughters, and a loving wife.
Alice could not have briefed more tactful Counsel.
Sir George Grove was the founder of the famous multi-volume ‘Grove’s Dictionary of Music’.
‘All I would maintain’ said a correspondent writing in ‘The Monthly Musical Record’ in 1877 under the pen-name ‘Artiste’, ‘is that many a woman’s talent is wasted by her undecided, vacillating spirit, and that were she only to aspire humbly but earnestly to a higher form of art, there is every cause to believe that she might work out a path of distinction for herself.’ Biographer and musicologist Ian Graham-Jones believed these were Alice’s own words: see ‘Signature’, Volume II, Number 3 (Autumn 2008).
Ann Mounsey (1811-1891) was the wife of William Bartholomew (who wrote the words for Mendelssohn’s ‘Hear my Prayer’) and a composer in her own right; Oliveria Prescott (1843-1919) was a lecturer in Music at Newnham College, Cambridge, and Sir George Macfarren’s amanuensis, as Macfarren had become blind in 1860.
Précis
Alice Mary Smith was a successful English composer of the Victorian era, whom the music establishment hoped might be the first ‘great’ female composer from Britain. Alice, however, preferred to portray herself as a working mother, hoping thereby to encourage married women into her profession without either her reputation or the expectation of achieving ‘greatness’ hanging over them. (58 / 60 words)