What to read after Ode to the Passions?

Alice Mary Smith (1839–84) was one of the few women composers in the early to mid-Victorian era to write in larger-scale genres. Moreover, she was able to have nearly all her works publicly performed. By 1878 Smith had turned her attention to works for chorus and orchestra: Ode to the Passions was the second of four choral pieces published before her untimely death.

The work closely follows the text of William Collins’s The Passions: An Ode for Music of 1746 and is in nine movements (some of which are linked), preceded by an orchestral introduction. Composed expressly for the Three Choir Festival held in 1882 in Hereford, it received wide acclaim and was subsequently performed in Bradford, in London (twice), and even reached Australia. Smith deliberately eschewed the harmonic language of the continental composers, and, no doubt because of this, her works fell out of popularity shortly after her death.