Victorian Overtures

Alice Mary Smith (1839–1884), or Alice Mary White as she was known to her contemporaries, was one of a surprisingly large group of successful Victorian women composers. Their music is gradually becoming known, at least to scholars, and A-R Editions is playing its part in this development. This composer’s two symphonies have already been produced as volume 38 in the series, by the same editor. It seems misleading and a little presumptuous to refer to her as “Smith,” since she was universally known by her married name at the time these two overtures were composed and performed. She published more than forty songs and piano pieces as Alice Mary White, so we must presume that was her preference. But I will follow the decision of the editor, even though it is inconsistent with volume 22 in the series, where Fanny Mendelssohn is allotted her married name of Hensel.

As Ian Graham-Jones points out in an excellent and well-documented biographical introduction, Smith was born into a relatively wealthy family—as were several other women composers of the period. Upper-and middle-class parents usually encouraged their daughters to study music as an accomplishment. What they often disliked was the idea of their earning a living in a public context. (Fanny Mendelssohn’s father kept her out of the profession for that reason; Maude Valérie White, who was younger than Smith, had to deal with similar objections from her mother.) Alice Smith received a first-rate education and took lessons from William Sterndale Bennett and George Macfarren, but not as a student at the Royal Academy of Music, where they were on the staff. No doubt this was because the RAM was designed to train professionals, who came from a lower social class. Alice did not need to earn a living, and thus had ample time to turn her musical accomplishments into a public asset. She continued to enjoy a life of leisure after her marriage in 1867 to a successful lawyer, Frederick Meadows White, who (unlike some husbands) must have encouraged her to continue her career.

Most Victorian female composers, like Smith, were pianists or singers or both, and were content to write for these or other domestic media. Few had an opportunity to learn the secrets of the orchestra, since these were a male preserve, as Graham-Jones rightly emphasizes. It is all the more surprising that Smith managed to acquire considerable skill in orchestration. In her relatively short life she produced two symphonies, a clarinet concerto, two cantatas for male chorus and orchestra, a masque, and several overtures on literary subjects. Graham-Jones gives a full account of these compositions and their performances, which were in most cases well received by both audiences and critics. He quotes reviews which tend to acknowledge that Smith had successfully rebutted any assumption that a woman could not produce great music.

The two overtures that comprise this edition are among her later works. The Masque of Pandora, based on a poem by Longfellow, was designed in eight scenes for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, but these survive only in fragmentary form, and it seems that only the overture was completed and orchestrated. It was first publicly performed at St. James’s Hall, London, in 1878. The second overture, Jason, or The Argonauts and the Sirens, was conceived from the start as a concert piece, inspired by a poem of William Morris. Both works reuse passages from unsuccessful works that Smith had composed earlier. They are scored for a substantial orchestra with a full complement of brass, timpani, and (in the case of Pandora) a harp. Each has a literary “program” of a rudimentary kind...