Raising Her Voice: Women Writing Opera in Australia
Raising Her Voice: Women Writing Opera in Australia, edited by Suzanne Robinson and Joel Crotty
Lyrebird Press, The University of Melbourne
Women have been composing opera in Australia since 1905, yet until very recently few of those works were staged, commissions were rare and revivals were non-existent. Happily, a sea- change in the last two decades has seen an upsurge in opera composition by women and those operas are now performed all over the world by first-rate ensembles and capable casts. Essays in this volume examine operas composed by thirteen women born or resident in Australia—Anne Boyd, Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, Florence Ewart, Helen Gifford, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Andrée Greenwell, Cat Hope, Elena Kats-Chernin, Liza Lim, Mona McBurney, Kate Neal, Johanna Selleck and Margaret Sutherland—documenting the obstacles, incomprehension and prejudice many of them faced and yet how vividly imaginative and accomplished these works are. Based on newly discovered archival sources and interviews with living composers, librettists and directors, and accompanied by production photos and copious musical examples, Raising Her Voice is landmark study of more than a hundred years of invention, inspiration and persistence in a genre regarded as the most prestigious of all.
Foreword by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon. With contributions from Ty Bouque, Jacinta Dennett, Louise Jenkins, Pamela Karantonis, Linda Kouvaras, Sally Macarthur, Aidan McGartland, Stephen Mould, Faye Patton, Jaslyn Robertson, Suzanne Robinson, Helen Rusak, Johanna Selleck and Sue Tweg.
CONTENTS
I. VOICING DIFFERENCE: RACE, GENDER AND CULTURE
1 Uncovering cultural and musical eclecticism in Margaret Sutherland’s The Young Kabbarli (1964)
Aidan McGartland
2 “Composer by necessity”: The theatrical imperative behind the impact, legacy and cultural politics of Deborah Cheetham Fraillon’s Pecan Summer (2010)
Pamela Karantonis
3 Anne Boyd’s The Olive Pink Opera (2022): Witnessing creative matter becoming operatic
Sally Macarthur
4 A ground-breaking 1990s feminist chamber opera: Andrée Greenwell’s Sweet Death (1991)
Linda Kouvaras
5 Ars emetica: Disgust, hunger and feminine throats in Liza Lim’s Yuè Lìng Jié (Moon Spirit Feasting) (2000)
Ty Bouque
6 Expressing the inexpressible in Australian opera: Cat Hope’s Speechless (2019) and Kate Neal and Tamara Saulwick’s Permission to Speak (2016)
Jaslyn Robertson
II. OPERA AND THE IMAGINARY
7 Mona McBurney’s The Dalmatian (1905): Bringing cosmopolitanism to operatic composition in early twentieth-century Australia
Louise Jenkins
8 Indian myth and motif in Florence Ewart’s Nala’s Wooing (1933): An episode from the Mahābhārata
Faye Patton
9 India and empire in Peggy Glanville-Hicks’s opera The Transposed Heads (1954)
Suzanne Robinson
10 Helen Gifford’s Iphigenia in Exile (1986): “Bloodthirsty and barbaric, but quite musically pure”
Jacinta Dennett
11 Questioning The Quickening (1998): Bringing an opera to life
Johanna Selleck and Sue Tweg
12 Elena Kats-Chernin’s journey back to Baroque: The Monteverdi-Trilogie (2012)
Stephen Mould
13 Nils Holgerssons wundersame Abenteuer (2023): A children’s opera by Elena Kats-Chernin
Helen Rusak
Appendix: List of operas by women born or resident in Australia between 1905 and 2024
ISBN: 9780734038074 (paperback); published 2026. Also available as a downloadable pdf (ISBN: 9780734038081; AMR023E). ISSN: 1325 5266
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