Play Mate

Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), Britain's greatest female composer, wrote six operas. The Boatswain's Mate, composed in Egypt in 1913-14, and first performed in 1916, was far and away the most popular of them, and between the wars, was often performed. It is a wonderfully tuneful and funny work, the most successful of all the British operas of the period, using folk music to evoke English rural life. Smyth was a close friend of Emmeline Pankhurst. She had been strongly involved with the suffragette movement immediately before she composed The Boatswain's Mate, and it's generally considered her most feminist opera (the overture quotes 'The March of the Women', her famous suffragette song). Smyth wrote her own libretto, adapting a story and play by W. W. Jacobs.