Focusing on “first” performances keeps women on the margins
“First” performances are a priority, but is this label damaging in the long-term?
Momentum has been gathering behind Ethel Smyth’s music recently. A statue commemorating the composer has gone up in Woking; last year a recording of her symphonic cantata The Prison won a Grammy; and this season, for the first time in the opera company’s history, Glyndebourne is staging one of her six operas — her magnum opus The Wreckers. It’s an extraordinary opera, and astonishing that it’s not better-known now. She herself considered it ‘The work by which I stand or fall’. With all this excitement behind Smyth, Wreckers is also making its way across the Atlantic, with Houston Grand Opera staging a production in October.
Both Glyndebourne and Houston are presenting their productions as historic “firsts” for Smyth. Houston’s is advertised as the ‘first-ever full-scale production from a major American opera company’, and Glyndebourne’s the ‘first major, professional staging of our lifetime.’
These are, in their qualified terms, true. But ‘full-scale’, ‘major’, and ‘professional’ are doing a lot of work here. Wreckers has been staged before in England at Covent Garden (1910 and 1931), His Majesty’s Theatre (1909), and Sadler’s Wells (1939) — professional but not in our lifetime — at Truro in 2006, by Arcadian Opera in 2018, and in semi-staged versions at the Queen’s Hall in 1908 and the Proms in 1994. It received its Scottish premiere in 1972. In the US, Wreckers got a fully-staged outing only a few years ago, in 2015, as part of the Bard Music Festival.
We have an obsession with firsts in classical music. It’s especially acute where women are concerned — performances are often advertised as an opportunity to hear pieces for the first time, and world or recording premieres are given priority for funding. There are so many unrecorded and unperformed works by women that it does, in some ways, make sense to give precedence to these. Plus it’s great for marketing — it’s always exciting to attend a world premiere. And highlighting that works are, in many cases, waiting decades if not centuries for their premieres helps to underline the prejudices and injustices that have kept historical women’s music off concert stages.
In more subtle ways, though, focusing on firsts also keeps women’s music sidelined. So long as women have to be the “first”, they cannot be the “favourite” or the “familiar”. The way that pieces become popular is not by being so unusual that it’s always their first outing in some capacity. It’s through repeat performances, widespread recording, and advocacy by those who truly love this music. Without these, composers and their works cannot gain or keep a place in the repertoire. They will always be on the outskirts. It’s just not possible for most women’s works to be included in programmes like Radio 3 favourite Building a Library, for example, where multiple recordings are compared to find a top recommendation. There aren’t dozens of recordings of most women’s pieces. Where longevity is concerned, the tenth, hundredth, and thousandth performances are just as important as the first.
Conversely, in those cases where women composers have rich performance histories, using qualifiers to advertise productions like Glyndebourne’s and Houston’s as “firsts” skews the historical record. It erases previous work, writing important milestones out of history. Any performance of Smyth’s Wreckers is, by 2022, very far from being the first. True, Smyth is still not widely performed. But part of the reason that we know about Smyth today, and that Glyndebourne and Houston can perform Wreckers at all, is thanks to the efforts of previous pioneers, many of them women.
It was Odaline de la Martínez who resurrected the Wreckers for the Proms, providing us with the first full recording of the opera. When Sir Thomas Beecham conducted Wreckers in 1909, it was only possible because of the extraordinary generosity of a patron called Mary Dodge. She provided the eye-watering sum of £1000 (nearly £80,000 today) to fund the performances, which were attended by King Edward VII. Smyth’s biographers, Louise Collis and Christopher St. John (pen-name of Christabel Marshall), provided important information about Smyth’s life which then provoked curiosity about her music.
These women and their work matter. They are the reason Ethel Smyth’s music has survived, and are part of the reason that it exists in the first place. Composers don’t materialise out of thin air. Without the women who sustained and supported Smyth all her life, she couldn’t have kept composing — and it’s those who have promoted Smyth since her death who have kept Smyth’s music alive, building awareness of her work to the point that, now, she has a wide enough following that large companies will take the risk of staging her works.
Eliding this past makes Smyth seem more unusual or exceptional than she actually is. There are still works by Smyth waiting for first performances, but the Wreckers is not one. Recordings now exist of most of her major works, including the operas The Boatswain’s Mate and Fête Galante; her orchestral Serenade and Violin & Horn Concerto (all, again, conducted by de la Martínez); The Prison (conducted by James Blachly); and many of her chamber pieces. While it may be true that in some qualified ways we are now staging Smyth firsts, surely just as important are the ways in which we are not. Smyth has long been part of the fabric of British music history.
By all means, let’s label historical firsts for what they are. But let’s also embrace the repeats that will allow women’s work to stop being unusual. Being the “first” and the “only” is exhausting. Manufacturing firsts creates cycles of supposed rediscovery that ultimately force women to repeat the same breakthroughs over and over again, diverting valuable energy and resources from real progress. I’m thoroughly looking forward to seeing these new productions of Wreckers — not because they are firsts, but because Smyth’s music is powerful, thrilling, and comes from a chapter of music history all too easily forgotten. These might be the first performances of this opera that many people will see, but I certainly hope that they won’t be the last.