Abstract
Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) has newly come to public attention recently, not for reasons of her six operas or any of her other compositions, nor for the ten volumes of literature she published in her later decades, but for her significant if comparatively brief contribution to women’s politics as a leading suffragette. The 2018 centenary of many women receiving the parliamentary vote in the UK (albeit not on equal terms to men) led to a marked increased interest in Smyth’s music, including performances of extracts from her operas at the BBC Proms both in the Albert Hall and Alexandra Palace as well as no fewer than three performances of her Mass in D, all in London, in the month of November alone. In anticipation of this centenary, in June 2017, Toronto-based company Opera 5 presented Smyth’s operas The Boatswain’s Mate (1913–14) and Fête galante (1921–2) as the double-bill Suffragette (see Figure 10.1), transposing the former to the new setting of the rebellious British punk era of the late 1970s (Opera 5 2017). This production raised anew the question of the relationship between The Boatswain’s Mate, in particular, and the broadly contemporaneous suffrage activity of Smyth as both composer and librettist of her work. The Boatswain’s Mate has itself lately enjoyed a resurgence in popularity, having been presented in Lucerne, Switzerland by Lucerne Opera at the Luzerner Teater, in collaboration with the University of Basel and the Lucerne Academy, in February 2014 (performed in German); at London’s Arcola Theatre as part of the annual ‘Grimeborn’ Festival in Summer 2018; and in a more local production at the Abbey Theatre, St Albans by St Albans Chamber Opera in October 2019. It was also released in its first complete professional recording by Retrospect Opera in 2016, 100 years after its premiere by the conductor Thomas Beecham’s newly formed Beecham Opera Company at Shaftesbury Theatre, London, on 28 January 1916, for which the composer made the last-minute decision to conduct herself. The stage is certainly set to reconsider The Boatswain’s Mate’s association with contemporary gender politics.