The Suffrage National Anthem?

​Do you know the words of the Suffrage National Anthem?
 
"They are waking, they are waking
In the East and in the West
They are throwing wide their windows to the sun
And they seen the dawn is breaking
And they quiver with unrest
For they know their work is waiting to be done."

 That's the first verse of The Awakening by American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, set to music in January 1911 by composer Teresa del Riego.
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​I discovered del Riego’s name when looking for histories of women composers at the Proms and cross-referencing the names with my research into the work of Edwardian theatre and entertainment professionals who supported the Votes for Women campaign. 

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Born in London in 1876 to an English mother and Spanish father, Teresa had a passion and talent for writing and performing music from a young age. She studied piano, violin, singing and composition in London and according to a 1944 report from the Society of Women Musicians published over 300 songs in her lifetime. 

​Her songO Dry Those Tears was a huge success in 1901:

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“There are probably few songs of modern times that have won a more instantaneous success than Teresa del Riego’s “O, dry those tears”; in fact it may be said to have created a record in the song-publishing world by selling to the tune of sixty thousand copies in the first six weeks after publication. It has been translated into three different languages – Italian, German, and Russian – and has been more parodied, perhaps, than any song of recent years, appearing on picture post cards, and even being reproduced in art pottery forms."

A Century of Ballads 1810-1910 by Harold Simpson
Published in 1910

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Teresa del Riego was one of the top five female composers performed at the Proms in the first half of the twentieth century, with her music appearing first in 1899, when she was just 23 years old, and then every year between 1901 and 1926, often multiple times including at 12 proms in 1915 and 10 proms in 1926. Five of her songs had their world premiere at the Proms, and one of her best known, Homing, was performed fifteen times in eight years, including on the first night in 1919, and for the Royal Family in 1924. You can see a complete list of her work at the Proms from 1899-1926 at the end of this blog post.

​She also wrote orchestral pieces, and set to music poetry by many writers including Edith Nesbit, William Butler Yeats, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Radclyffe Hall. She composed the song cycle Gloria in 1906 to texts by Stephen Coleridge, an author, barrister, and activist who co-founded of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and was a director of the National Anti-Vivisection Society. 

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"She has the gift of melody and her songs are full of harmonic colouring.
​She has also had the inestimable benefit of presenting them to the public through the medium of some of our very best singers."

"Women Song-Writers" in The Tatler, 1st January 1902

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But what of The Awakening?
​The song was officially launched at an Actresses’ Franchise League meeting on the 6th January 1911 in the grand setting of the Criterion Restaurant in Piccadilly Circus. At the first performance it was sung by contralto Edith Clegg, supported by a full chorus, and accompanied by del Riego herself. This must have been a coup for the suffrage societies - a week later, the newspaper of the Women’s Freedom League announced that the song was “our new Suffrage National Anthem” and that del Riego had given it to the League (The Vote, 14 January 1911). A thousand copies of the song were immediately printed to be sold in suffrage shops.

The song was championed by the Actresses' Franchise League at a variety of events during 1911. In May 1911 Ella Wheeler Wilcox was the Guest of Honour at an AFL meeting where The Awakening was sung by Muriel Terry and accompanied by del Riego. In June it was performed in London’s East End after  a speech by George Lansbury MP, in October Lily Clare sang it at the Lyceum Theatre, and in December of that year Rosa Leo sang it at an event at which Christabel Pankhurst spoke. The song received praise from across the suffrage press, and Royal Academy sculptor Sir George Frampton, famous for his statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, created a tableau inspired by the piece.

The published copy I found was in the collections of The Women’s Library, and belonged to the National Union of Women Teachers. I came across it whilst researching the entertainments that were put on by the Actresses’ Franchise League for the Women’s Social and Political Union’s Christmas Fair and Festival, held in 1911 in London. This fair ran for six days, and every day featured different entertainments. The performance spaces were full of sound - in the pop up theatre, there were suffrage plays, songs, and musical recitals, whilst all female orchestras played from the bandstand in the main space, interspersed with conjurors and suffrage Punch and Judy shows.

Most of my research into suffrage theatre has focused on plays and theatrical entertainments, but there was a lot of music composed to support the suffrage cause, and even more associated with it. Books of suffrage songs were published, alternative lyrics to existing songs were printed in suffrage newspapers and pamphlets, and the popular stage saw music hall songs, comic operettas, and patter songs both for and against votes for women.
 
Curiously, perhaps the best remembered suffrage song was also first performed in January 1911 - Ethel Smyth’s March of the Women, with lyrics written by suffragist playwright and actress Cicely Hamilton. This song was also directly associated with a suffrage society - Smyth dedicated the published score to the WSPU, the group most commonly associated with the term “suffragettes”, led by Emmeline Pankhurst.
 
Both The Awakening and March of the Women encourage a spirit of optimism and the power of positive collective action.  By 1911 the campaign for Votes for Women in the UK had already been active for forty-five years, and campaigners were constantly looking for new ways to boost morale and share knowledge.
 
It's interesting that the most popular suffrage songs of the early 1900s are about sisterhood, hope and new beginnings. “Hope is waking” in Cicely Hamilton’s lyrics for March of the Women. She tells us to open our eyes “to the blaze of day”. Florence MacAuley’s lyrics to the Women’s Marseillaise, the official anthem of the WSPU, exhort the daughters of the land to turn their faces “to the dawn”, and Wilcox and del Riego in The Awakening also rouse us out of sleep alongside women around the world “throwing wide their windows to the sun” eager to get on with the work of changing the world for the better. All three of these songs were initially performed with a large chorus – a visible and powerful symbol of the suffragist sisterhood taking up space and making themselves heard.

1911 was also the founding year of the Society of Women Musicians, which although it included many musicians, performers, and composers who were in support of the suffrage movement was not a suffrage organisation. The first President was composer Liza Lehmann, and the list of names associated with the organisation across its 60 year history include Ethel Smyth, Imogen Holst, and Elizabeth Maconchy. 
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In 1914 del Riego write some advice on The Interpretation of Songs:

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To me, no voice, however brilliant, large, or well-produced, is ever beautiful unless the singer interprets well and intelligently, and also has charm and individuality!

​Lose yourself in your song as much as possible, and you will find the vocalisation easier, and the spirit more distinguishable to the audience. Does one not know the delightful and exhilarating feeling of listening to an artist who takes one into another sphere for the moment by his or her singing? It is the interpretation, the colouring of the picture, the entering into the spirit of the music that carries one away. It is not only the composition, or only the voice, or only the bald combination of the two, it is in face the music perfectly rendered that makes the perfect whole.

The Musical Herald, ​1914

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By Windon & Grave, London - March Haring, "Famous Women Composers" Scrap Book (April 1908): 582., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65116772

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​During the First World War, in which her husband was killed in action, Teresa del Riego devoted herself to charity concerts and fundraising, and wrote patriotic music for Armistice commemorations. Her songs remained popular in both print and recordings throughout the 1920s and 30s, and she became an Honorary Vice President of the Society of Women Musicians in the 1940s. In April 1954, the day after her 78th birthday, the BBC Home Service celebrated her legacy in a programme called Sixty Years of Song, with contralto Janet Howe, tenor John Hanson, and the BBC Chorus and BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Michael Collins.

Teresa del Riego died in 1968 at the age of 91. Her work may not have appeared at the Proms for nearly a century, but a suffrage song still features prominently there every year. Hubert Parry’s setting of Jerusalem was known as the Women Voter’s Hymn after it was sung at a Suffrage Demonstration concert in 1918. Parry was openly supportive of Votes for Women and friends with Millicent Garret Fawcett, the leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the oldest and largest campaigning organisation for women’s suffrage in the UK. Parry gave copyright of the song to Fawcett’s society, and it was subsequently passed to the Women’s Institute. It has been played at every Last Night of the Proms since 1953.

Recordings of del Riego’s songs – on shellac, vinyl, and cd – have been made and sold since 1908, so I assumed that The Awakening was amongst them, but was totally wrong. I couldn't find any recordings of the song, or much mention of it outside of suffrage newspapers.
I'm delighted to have written an episode of BBC Radio 3's The Essay about it, and to have it recorded for what seems to be the first time.

You can hear the Suffrage National Anthem on BBC Radio 3's The Essay on the 23rd September 2024 at 9.45pm - sung by Lucy Stevens with accompaniment by Elizabeth Marcus. 

Lucy Stevens is an actor, singer and theatre maker who has created shows about the lives of Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Lawrence and Kathleen Ferrier. Elizabeth Marcus studied at the Guildhall School where she now works as a vocal coach, accompanist, and professor of harpsichord.

For more info and to listen live or again on BBC Sounds click here:
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00230gr

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Here are the pieces by Teresa del Riego programmed at the BBC Proms from 1899-1926 collated from the data at www.bbc.co.uk/proms/events/composers/9b182cb6-76ab-41b8-9f5c-daeb0f7929b4/works
 
1899
Prom 45 – Love is a bird (proms premiere)
 
1901
Prom 19 - Slave song
 
1902
Prom 19 – A song of life
Prom 61 - Slave song
 
1903
Prom 25 – A Land of Roses (proms premiere)
Prom 41 - Slave song
Prom 42 – The waking of spring (proms premiere)
 
1904
Prom 16 - Slave song
Prom 33 – Life’s recompense
 
1905
Prom 12 – Look up, O heart (proms premiere)
Prom 39 – My gentle child (proms premiere)
Prom 43 – L’amour (proms premiere)
Prom 48 – A song of gladness (proms premiere)
 
1906
Prom 13 – Thou little tender flower; Look up, O heart
Prom 45 – Les larmes
Prom 48 - Slave song
Prom 49 – The bell
Prom 51 – Happy song (proms premiere)
Prom 53 – Brown eyes (proms premiere)
 
1907
Prom 38 – Brown eyes
Prom 52 - Happy song
 
1909
Prom 06 – Outward bound (proms premiere)
Prom 27 - Happy song
Prom 41 – Outward bound
Prom 43 – A song of life
 
1910
Prom 18 – I lay my laurels at your feet (proms premiere)
Prom 36 – Slave song
 
1911
Prom 03 – Hayfields and butterflies
Prom 34 – Children’s pictures (Shadow march; Where go the boats?)
 
1912
Prom 54 – Sink, red sun
 
1913
Prom 07 – The reason
Prom 41 - Happy song
Prom 43 - The reason
Prom 53 - Children’s pictures (Shadow march)
 
1914
Prom 34 - Sink, red sun
Prom 55 - Sink, red sun
 
1915
Prom 02 - Sink, red sun
Prom 04 – Rest thee, sad heart; Happy song
Prom 12 – Harvest
Prom 16 - The reason
Prom 21 - Sink, red sun
Prom 29 - Harvest
Prom 37 – England mine
Prom 40 – Thank God for a garden
Prom 43 - Happy song
Prom 48 – The book
Prom 52 - The reason
Prom 54 - Thank God for a garden
 
1916
Prom 4 - Thank God for a garden
Prom 23 - The reason
Prom 28 - Sink, red sun
Prom 29 - Thank God for a garden
Prom 47 – In exile (proms premiere)
 
1917
Prom 15 - Sink, red sun
Prom 28 - Thank God for a garden
Prom 42 – Some other day
 
1918
Prom 09 – Homing (proms premiere)
Prom 14 - Thank God for a garden
Prom 18 – Homing
Prom 40 - Sink, red sun
Prom 58 - Homing
 
1919
Prom 01 – First night of the Proms 1919 – Homing
Prom 23 – Homing
Prom 28 - Thank God for a garden
Prom 30 - Homing
Prom 32 - Happy song
 
1920
Prom 14 – The merry heart (world premiere)
Prom 22 – Reconciliation (world premiere)
Prom 37 - Reconciliation
Prom 47 – The merry heart
 
1921
Prom 10 - Thank God for a garden
Prom 23 – Homing
Prom 51 - Sink, red sun
Prom 56 – Homing
 
1922
Prom 04 – Homing
Prom 25 - Sink, red sun
Prom 56 – Homing
 
1923
Prom 13 - Thank God for a garden
Prom 26 – Homing
Prom 34 - Sink, red sun
Prom 40 - Dolores (world premiere)
 
1924
Prom 04 - Thank God for a garden
Prom 20 - Thank God for a garden
Prom 58 – In the presence of Their Majesties King George V and Queen Mary – Homing
 
1925
Prom 10 – Brown eyes
Prom 16 – Homing
Prom 31 - Thank God for a garden
Prom 48 – Some day when the song-bird seeks its nest
Prom 54 – If any little song of mine ;The little blue bay
 
1926
Prom 14 – My ship (world premiere)
Prom 19 – Homing
Prom 20 - Thank God for a garden
Prom 23 – If any little song of mine; Happy song
Prom 26 – Life is a caravan (world premiere)
Prom 41 – My ship
Prom 45 – Homing
Prom 46 - Sink, red sun
Prom 53 – Life is a caravan
Prom 55 – Last night of the Proms 1926 – The night has a thousand eyes