Ex. 5-11: After Sunset

No. 3, the final song of Ethel Smyth's Three Moods of the Sea (1913), for voice and piano. The words are by the English poet Arthur Symons, from his collection Silhouettes (1892). The poem describes a calm, dreamlike scene: the sea after sunset, a purple afterglow on grey clouds, and the moon and stars coming out. It is the gentle close to the set, in contrast to the stormy second song, "Before the Squall."

Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) was an English composer and a leading figure in the women's suffrage movement. She wrote "The March of the Women" (1910), which became the anthem of the British suffrage campaign. In 1912 she was jailed for two months in Holloway Prison for joining a protest; when the conductor Thomas Beecham came to visit, he found her leaning from her cell window, conducting the other imprisoned women as they sang her march — with a toothbrush. She was the first woman composer to be made a Dame — the female form of a British knighthood.

From the album Un lieu à soi by Lucile Richardot and Alexis Gournel (2024)
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