Works | Peggy Glanville-Hicks

Was PGH the first Australian woman to compose an opera?

By Suzanne Robinson on September 19, 2022in Works

Although there seems to have been a craze for opera composition in Australia in the late nineteenth century, with more than thirty composed between 1880 and 1900, in the following decades only a few composers attempted it, and mainly those associated with conservatoriums. PGH was in fact one of a select few Australian-born composers who completed an opera between 1900 and 1939.

Among the earliest twentieth-century opera composers in Australia were several English-born men and women: G.W.L. Marshall-Hall and Florence Ewart in Melbourne and W. Arundell Orchard, later director of the Sydney Conservatorium, in Sydney. Ewart, although originally a prodigy on the violin, studied composition with Respighi in the 1920s and subsequently composed The Courtship of Miles Standish in 1931 and Nala’s Wedding in 1933. Fritz Hart, the most prolific composer of operas in the country, director of the Melba Conservatorium and PGH’s composition teacher, was also born in England. Possibly at work on Isolt of the White Hands while Glanville-Hicks was studying with him, he left Melbourne for Hawaii soon after, having added fourteen operas to the list of all those composed in Australia. Below is Christian Waller’s poster for the production of Hart’s romantic comedy Pierrette (1913) in Melbourne in 1931, which involved Glanville-Hicks and her fellow students at the Melba Conservatorium.

Artist: Waller, Christian. | Title: Playhouse Theatre | Date: 1931 | Technique: linocut, printed in black ink, from one block; hand-coloured

The origins of ‘Come Sleep’

By Suzanne Robinson on March 15, 2022in Comment, Works

Published in 1938, Come Sleep is one of the best-loved of all Glanville-Hicks’s songs. The poem, which she thought was by John Fletcher (seen here in a portrait by an unknown artist), was published in the Oxford Book of English Verse in 1919 and has been set by others, including Rebecca Clarke, as simply “Sleep”. It derives from the play The Woman Hater, now attributed to both John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, published in 1607. Possibly its origins were unknown to Glanville-Hicks, who was simply attracted to a song about delight, pleasing dreams and abiding joys. But as a hymn to women’s wiles and as an example of a women using music to woo a man impervious to her charms, it seems fitting that it was published in the year Glanville-Hicks married Stanley Bate.

PGH’s “Irish heart”

By Suzanne Robinson on September 12, 2021in Articles, Works

A song titled Ireland is the earliest extant work by Glanville-Hicks. In 1931 the Australian Musical News claimed it was a setting of Herrick, but the manuscript score reveals that the poem’s author was the Irish-born poet David McKee Wright. Taken from Wright’s “Dark Rosaleen” suite, it was published in An Irish Heart of 1918. The title refers to Wright’s own nostalgia for “my country”, having emigrated at the age of eighteen to New Zealand.

county-down-view-cropped — County Down, Ireland

Wright’s range was wide, writing ethereal lines about angels and gods, about the “lustrous hair” of a lover and, by contrast, about life as a shepherd and rabbiter, “Long, weary days and nights without a smoke”. He could also depict modern urban life: “The trams are shrieking down the wire; Wild motor-cars, with stench and horn, / Speed on the large, inflated tyre, / Raising a dust of pride and scorn”.

PGH and book designers

By Suzanne Robinson on July 19, 2021in Books, Design, Works

PGH was always interested in the design of her scores and record covers. She drew an elaborate cover for her first opera, Caedmon (1936), which resulted from her researches on early Medieval England. Her interest in book covers seems to have been revived from 1945 during her relationship with Paul Bowles, who mixed with the circle of writers and artists associated with Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s avant-garde magazine View, published in New York from 1940 to 1947. Several issues of View in fact remain in her archive. Among the contributors to the journal that she knew, in addition to Bowles himself, were the artists Brion Gysin and Alexander Calder and she was to set the poetry of Wallace Stevens, subject of an interview in View’s first issue.

Was PGH the first Australian woman to compose an opera?

The origins of ‘Come Sleep’

PGH’s “Irish heart”

PGH and book designers

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Was PGH the first Australian woman to compose an opera?

The origins of ‘Come Sleep’

PGH’s “Irish heart”

PGH and book designers

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