Virginia Woolf thought Ethel Smyth was the first woman to write an opera. That’s understandable, in an era when female composers were seen as a novelty. Smyth was the first woman to have an opera performed at Covent Garden, when The Wreckers was staged in 1909. Six years earlier, her Der Wald (The Forest) became the first opera by a female composer to be performed at the New York Metropolitan Opera. An American production was a huge deal for a British artist – and Smyth told the press that ‘every woman who comes after me will find it easier because of my journey first over the rough road’.
In some respects, Smyth was right. The 20th century saw more women writing operas than ever before, as doors to musical education and institutions opened wider. In others, her hope was not borne out. The canon of works performed in opera houses has remained overwhelmingly male. Not until 2016 did the Met stage another opera by a female composer – Kaija. Two years later, the company commissioned its first operas by women: Jeanine Tesori’s and Missy Mazzoli’s will be performed there, following premieres respectively at Washington National Opera this autumn and by English National Opera in 2025. And while Smyth’s operas indeed mattered, Smyth and Woolf were wrong in assuming no one else had travelled that road before. The history of women writing opera is in fact much longer and richer.
