Ethel Smyth Plays Golf in Limbo

by Rachel J. Peters

Anna Singer as Ethel Smyth
Robert Frankenberry, piano

WQED-FM’s Anna Singer is composer and suffragette Ethel Smyth looking back on what it was like to be a composer and a woman.

Premiered in October 2020 in The March of the Women Series

Composer/librettist Rachel J. Peters (b. 1977) writes all manner of works for the stage. Her operas include Rootabaga Country (Sarasota Opera), Companionship (Fort Worth Opera), The Wild Beast of the Bungalow with Royce Vavrek (Oberlin Conservatory), No Ladies in the Lady’s Book with Lisa DeSpain (Utah Opera; published by E.C. Schirmer), Steve (Boston Opera Collaborative), Everything Comes to a Head with Margi Preus and Jean Sramek (Lyric Opera of the North/Decameron Opera Coalition), Pie, Pith, and Palette with Marvin J. Carlton (The Atlanta Opera), and Monkey Do (Rhymes With Opera). On the horizon are Staggerwing at Opera Kansas (also with Ms. DeSpain), a world premiere with Leanna Kirchoff for Opera Steamboat, and others yet to be announced. Rachel’s musicals include Only Children with Michael R. Jackson (NYU Tisch, Lincoln Center Directors Lab), Tiny Feats of Cowardice with Susan Bernfield (NYC Fringe Festival), Write Left with John Walch (Playwrights Horizons Theatre School), Tomato Red (UC Irvine), and Octopus Heart (NYU Steinhardt). Scores for plays include the critically acclaimed Stretch (a fantasia) (New Georges) and Tania in the Getaway Van (Flea Theater) by Susan Bernfield, Transatlantic by John Walch (Arkansas Rep), The Bacchae (Asolo Rep Conservatory), and several works by Stan Richardson. Her concert mini-monodrama, Ethel Smyth Plays Golf in Limbo, written for Albatross Duo, was performed at Semperoper Dresden and continues to enjoy performances all over the US. Other concert works include If You Can Prove That I Should Set You Free (Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire), Jack's Vocabulary (Hartt SPASM), I Live Here (Galapagos Art Space), Canon I (Two Sides Sounding), And Then (BayPath College), and Fronds: The Wisdom of Fanny Fern (Walt Whitman Project).  

Rachel’s extensive catalogue of art songs and cabaret songs has been performed at Lincoln Center, Second Stage, National Opera Center, Symphony Space, NYMF, Ars Nova, Joe's Pub, and cabarets and theatres nationwide. Rachel is a contributing composer/lyricist to the new generation of The AIDS Quilt Songbook. Additionally, her music can be heard on Michael R. Jackson’s Dirty Laundry and Zachary James’s CALL OUT albums.

Residencies include Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Yaddo, and Brush Creek Arts. Rachel has received Anna Sosenko Assist Trust and multiple ASCAPlus awards. For Rootabaga Country, Sarasota Opera received an OPERA America Female Composers Commissioning Grant, and her collaboration as librettist with Leanna Kirchoff on their opera Friday After Friday won an OPERA America Female Composers Discovery Grant. Rachel is a proud alumna of New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio, American Opera Projects' Composers and the Voice, and a frequent fellow at the John Duffy Institute for New Opera. She holds a double B.A. summa cum laude from Brandeis University and an MFA from New York University’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. 

Rachel originally hails from St. Louis and currently lives in Brooklyn, where she probably couldn’t swing her cat without it running into many other composers. Much to her continued bewilderment, she is often mistaken for this woman online.