Ethel Smyth was such a towering, larger-than-life personality that to encapsulate her character and adventures in a few lines is almost impossible. Daughter of an Indian army general, who later held command of the artillery in Aldershot, she had to fight a titanic battle with her father to be allowed to go and study music at the Leipzig Conservatorium. (His reaction on hearing her announce her intention was "I would sooner see you under the sod".) The quality of teaching there proved a disappointment, but in Leipzig and during later visits to Germany she got to know, and learnt from, a host of musical celebrities, including Tschaikovsky, Clara Schumann, Mendelssohn’s daughter Lili Wach, and Grieg (all particular friends), Brahms, Joachim, and Gustav Mahler (who was considering producing her opera The Wreckers at the Vienna State Opera when he was ousted from his position there).

Composing was Ethel’s first objective in life, but in addition she poured as much energy and time into social life and friendships (including a long series of "passions" for other women), sport (especially hunting, golf and mountaineering), and feminism and the Suffragette movement. (In 1911 she spent some weeks in Holloway prison after hurling a brick through the Colonial Secretary’s window). Campaigning to secure performances of her music, in an age of immense prejudice against women composers, took almost as much time (or more) than actually composing it. During the Great War, by then in her late 50s, she spent several years in France working as a radiographer. It was during that time that she had a house - Coign - built in Woking, where she lived with a succession of old English sheepdogs for the rest of her life, fighting against increasing deafness. In 1922 she guest-conducted Woking Choral Society in a concert of her own works.

Above all she was an outstanding writer of prose. Her voluminous letters and diaries are sadly mostly unpublished, but she also, encouraged in later years by her close friend Virginia Woolf, wrote no less than nine volumes of autobiography, recently synthesised and abridged by Ronald Crichton as "The Memoirs of Ethel Smyth" (Viking, 1986). These contain vivid portrayals of her myriad friends, "passions" and acquaintances, ranging from Sir Thomas Beecham to John Singer Sargent (who painted her), Emmeline Pankhurst and the Empress Eugenie (widow of Napoleon III of France). Highlights include entertaining vignettes of her encounters with Queen Victoria, Kaiser Wilhelm and countless others, but they also contain lively and penetrating analyses of society and musical life in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain and Germany.

Despite all this activity Dame Ethel (she was made a KBE in 1923) managed to produce a considerable quantity of music, including six operas. It has always struggled to get the hearing it undoubtedly deserves, but it is powerful, highly professional stuff, championed and conducted by Beecham, Sir Adrian Boult and Sir Henry Wood, and admired by Constant Lambert and Bruno Walter among others. Her full-length opera The Wreckers made a powerful impression when revived at the Proms in the 1990s.

The Mass in D was written in 1891, "for Pauline Trevelyan", one of Ethel’s intense friendships of the time, and first performed at the Royal Albert Hall in 1893 under Sir Joseph Barnby. Pauline was a Catholic, and during composition of the Mass Ethel experienced an intense revival of High Anglican religious conviction that had been on the wane for some time. Some contemporary critics accused the work of lacking true religious feeling. Archbishop Benson commented that in this Mass God was "not implored but commanded to have mercy", and Bernard Shaw in his review of the first performance went so far as to say that "the whole work, though externally highly decorous, has an underlying profanity that makes the audience’s work easy". On closer acquaintance that seems very unfair. Much of the music is deeply felt and in no way less "religious" than the sacred music of, say, Verdi, Dvorak or Rossini. At the same time it is an exciting, large-scale work, forceful and reflecting to the full its composer’s exuberant personality. (A hunting friend at the first performance whispered to Ethel’s sister "I say Mrs Charlie!....this is slashing stuff, what?".) It is written for full orchestra (with triple wind), chorus and a quartet of soloists, and lasts some 65 minutes. The text is the usual text of the Latin Mass, but in accordance with Ethel Smyth’s instructions, the Gloria is performed last.