Ethel Smyth, Kaiser Wilhelm and the German connection

Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, suffragette and composer, but not a favourite of Edward VII. Photograph: Getty

I am not happy for Edward VII to have the last word on Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers (Letters, 18 March). I can’t immediately find it, but my recollection is of impressive and exciting music, especially for chorus and orchestra. Our much missed friend Steve Newton, whose knowledge of music I would have backed against mine and Edward VII’s combined, said we need look no further for the inspiration behind Peter Grimes and Billy Budd.

Ethel Smyth got on a whole lot better with Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose ear she bent exhaustively about English history and the English character, to put the Boer war in perspective. (Germany was fanatically pro-Boer and the conductor who was putting on her opera The Forest said he respected her as a composer but, being of the nation that mistreated the Boers, not as a human being.)
George Schlesinger
Durham