Publisher's Synopsis
It is quite amazing that the piano works of the English composer Ethel Smyth had remained unpublished to this day. She wrote all of these pieces during her years of study in Leipzig, after 1877, when she met such illustrious figures as Brahms, Clara Schumann, Dvorák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky. It should come as no surprise that these musical giants left their stylistic traces in Ethel Smyth's piano oeuvre. Smyth wrote her three piano sonatas all in the same year, 1877, whereby she raced through a kind of musico-historical evolution in accelerated motion. Her point of departure was Haydn and Mozart, who clearly inspired her C major Sonata. Then came the Romantic era, with the actress Marie Geistinger providing the inspiration for the impassioned C sharp minor Sonata. The culmination was reached with Brahms, whose spirit is reflected in the two movements of the fragmentary D major Sonata.
