Christopher Wiley

The recent release of the first complete recording of Ethel Smyth’s The Boatswain’s Mate (1913–14) (Retrospect Opera, 2016), its staging by Toronto-based Opera 5 as part of the double-bill Suffragette (2017), and the upcoming centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act invite reconsideration of the relationship between this opera, the broadly contemporaneous leading suffragette activity of its composer-librettist, and feminism. Previous scholarship by Wood (1995) and Wiley (2004) that has explored similar ground has not gone so far as to call into question the popularly-held supposition that the work constitutes a ‘feminist opera’, made primarily on the basis of the overture’s liberally quoting two of Smyth’s own suffrage songs (‘1910’ and ‘The March of the Women’) instead of the conventional assortment of themes from the score itself, coupled to the suggestion that the opera’s female protagonist was modelled on Emmeline Pankhurst, with whom Smyth had maintained a close (some believe lesbian) relationship. My paper subjects this headline claim to renewed critical scrutiny, investigating factors including the extent of the indebtedness of Smyth’s libretto to the short story by W.W. Jacobs (from Captains All, 1905) in which it originated; Smyth’s creative process, about which she wrote at length in her auto/biographical books A Final Burning of Boats Etc. (1928) and Beecham and Pharaoh (1935); and her practice of drawing upon pre-existing music at several significant junctures in the score, including the heroine’s central aria ‘What if I were young again’ which is based on the traditional British ballad ‘Lord Randall’, a dialogue between a mother and the son who has been poisoned by his beloved.

Published version: Christopher Wiley, ‘Musical Biography and the Myth of the Muse’, in Critical Music Historiography: Probing Canons, Ideologies, and Institutions, edited by Markus Mantere and Vesa Kurkela. Farnham: Ashgate, forthcoming, 2014. My intentions in this chapter are to examine the ideologies that historically emerged from biographies of some of Western art-music’s most treasured personages precisely by marginalising the secondary characters that Catherine Peters has described as being those ‘lived in the shadow of the main subject, often paralleling or contrasting with it’. I aim not to question the portrayal of the principal protagonists so much as that of specific females with whom they were associated, and whose union was presented as deriving from shared artistic bonds, with the woman assuming the role of the composer’s ‘muse’. Though silenced and largely invisible throughout much of the text, these ancillary figures typically came into view at critical junctures in the biographies, as signifiers of the productivity and increasing creative power of their accompanying male composer; moreover, they were depicted as having inspired that person to acts of artistic greatness. While in some respects, such practices may reflect the generic expectation for biography to provide an engaging, novelistic reading experience, in the field of music – in which female ‘heroes’ were very few and far between, and little cultural space existed for anything more than a select handful of exalted men – an ideologically-loaded pattern developed in the course of the nineteenth century over and above that recognisable in other disciplines. This is the model to which I refer as the ‘myth of the muse’ or, to repeat a term I have used elsewhere, the ‘muse paradigm’. Following the lead of recent scholarship on mythology, in this context the word ‘myth’ is used not to denote a widely-held misconception with limited factual basis, so much as the ways in which information has been selected and reported to facilitate the dissemination, perpetuation and elaboration of cherished narratives that functioned to reinforce particular cultural values within their interpretive communities.