Haral Vogel

One could hardly intuit from these fresh and flowing violin sonatas the obstacles their female composers had to face – family opposition for Mel Bonis in France and Ethel Smyth in England, professional bigotry for Elfrida Andrée in Sweden. It has taken a century and more for that initial prejudice to fall away, and they are now beginning to attract a fair hearing for their music.

Maurice Maeterlinck completed his play The Blue Bird ("L’Oiseau bleu") in 1908. Several of his previous works had proved popular as operatic subjects (Pelléas et Mélisande and Ariane et Barbe-Bleue) so it's no wonder that composers jumped at the opportunity to set his latest creation to music.French composer Albert Wolff based an opera on the story, which premiered at the New York Met but subsequently fell into oblivion. Prior to that, in 1912, Max Reinhardt adapted it as a Christmas play and staged a production in Berlin, inviting no less a person than Engelbert Humperdinck to write the incidental music for it. The music was never published, but Steffen Tast eventually located the score and salvaged it for us all to enjoy. A sweet story and newly discovered music by Humperdinck that's sweeter still? Truly a recipe for a fairy-tale ending!