Italians, Indians and the Indigenous: Innovative Themes and Material Used in Operas Written by Early-Twentieth-Century Australian Women Composers

Abstract

When asked about opera, many people would immediately think of a large-scale vocal and dramatic work written by a European male. Rarely would “opera” conjure the image of an Australian woman composer. Yet a number of Australian women wrote operas that were performed and well-reviewed. Mona McBurney (1862–1932) composed her opera The Dalmatian (subtitled An Idyll of Murano) in 1905. It was performed in its entirety in 1926 and earned the peculiar evaluation as “the sixth greatest opera of its type in the world at that time” (The Age, 1926). Florence Donaldson-Ewart (1864–1949) wrote five major operas and it was said of her achievements: “When she wrote her large-scale opera The Courtship of Miles Standish, in 1930 at the age of 66, she was only the second British-born woman to have written an opera on that large scale” (Queanbeyan Age, and Observer NSW 1927–1954). Meta Overman (1907–1993) and Margaret Sutherland (1897–1984) both contributed to the operatic genre, making important advances in their innovative treatment of material, instrumentation and idiom. Meta Overman’s opera Psyche (1955) introduced the concept of dancers and instrumentalists playing character roles and Margaret Sutherland’s The Young Kabbarli (1964), on the life of Daisy Bates, introduced an Australian indigenous idiom.