Major Female Opera Composers
A number of reasons, including the high cost of production and high status of opera, have been suggested to explain the relatively few women who have been composers of opera, and no woman composer met the criteria for inclusion above. However, some experts in our sample disagreed, and named one or both of the women below as comparable to those already listed:
- Francesca Caccini (1587 – after 1641) was one of the best-known and most influential female European composers before the 19th century. Her stage work, La liberazione di Ruggiero, has been widely considered the first opera by a woman composer.
- Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) is perhaps most famous for her work for the suffragettes; however, she also wrote several operas of note, including The Wreckers.
- Judith Weir (born 1954) began composing full-length operas in 1987 with A Night at the Chinese Opera.
Read more about this topic: List Of Major Opera Composers
Famous quotes containing the words major, female, opera and/or composers:
“The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“We have dancing ... from soon after sundown until a few minutes after nine o’clock.... Occasionally the boys who play the female partners in the dances exercise their ingenuity in dressing to look as girlish as possible. In the absence of lady duds they use leaves, and the leaf-clad beauties often look very pretty and always odd enough.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“I wish the opera was every night. It is, of all entertainments, the sweetest and most delightful. Some of the songs seemed to melt my very soul.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)