cellist Mietze Dill
Renowned women composers and performers whose works of “enduring beauty and power” have been shelved, sidelined, misattributed or overlooked will be given a platform at the 2026 Wakkerstroom music festival.
In her welcoming note, festival chairperson Linette van de Merwe, a professional mezzo-soprano and lecturer in the Humanities Department at Pretoria University, invites classical music enthusiasts to turn their gaze and ears towards “the truth that patriarchal society has forgotten: great art has no gender”.
‘‘I don’t think I can recall seeing a man perform a programme of women composers here in South Africa,’ cellist Mietze Dill says.
Dill, the founder of string quartet Serendipity Strings teaches music at a boys’ school in Pretoria and is enrolled for a PhD in artistic research at the University of the Free State, exploring Virginia Woolf’s relationship with chamber music.
“Virginia Woolf was very knowledgeable about music and its political context, which was unusual for women in the Victorian era,” Dill says. “Music was central to her social life and appears frequently in her letters and diaries. In her novel, The Voyage Out, Woolf’s heroine plays a Beethoven piano sonata commonly considered to be unattainable for women and in Night and Day references to Mozart’s operas are critiqued for their elevated status in patriarchal society.”
In a performance appropriately titled Unheard (of), Mietze Dill and pianist Mareli Stolp will play the Cello Sonata in A minor, Op.5, composed in 1887 by Dame Ethel Smyth. Smyth, a close friend of Virginia Woolf’s during the past 19 years of the writer’s life, also features in Mietze Dill’s doctorate.
“She was a remarkable composer and is completely underrated and undervalued to this day,” Dill says. When Dill asked a friend who was going to London to find Smyth’s composition, she struggled, although it had been published by a reputable publisher. When she did finally get the music, it was full of mistakes.
“This is a famous music publisher, how could this happen?” Dill asks. “Attempts to find the sheet music by other women composers online have been equally unproductive.” After researching the sonata’s publishing history, it came to light that the work was out of print for nearly a century – only resurfacing as a published work in 2016.
Smyth’s music has been praised for its emotional depth. “It’s a remarkable work of great ingenuity and beauty,” Dill says. The last of the three movements has a quick tempo, suggesting marching music. Dill speculates that this might be related to the composer’s activism as a member of Emmeline Pankhurst’s suffragette movement.
In 1912, Smyth was jailed for two months, allegedly for throwing stones at a politician’s window. An enduring anecdote is of Smyth leaning out of a prison window and using a toothbrush as a baton to conduct fellow suffragettes in the courtyard below in a performance of her music, The March of the Women.
Next on the Unheard (of) programme is a selection of pieces composed between 1893 and 1921 by the American composer, Amy Beach. Beach was the first woman to achieve international recognition as a composer of large-scale art music in the US. Her Romantic/late Romantic music has been used to represent one of the two distinct pillars of early 20th century American classical music. Gershwin’s modernist music influenced by jazz represents the other pillar. The two pillars represent the evolution of music from the European tradition to a distinctly American style of music.
Beach, who was married to a businessman, was inhibited from pursuing her vocation like most women of her era and she received little formal training. Dill says this is evident when compared to music Smyth composed.
Dill and Stolp will play four pieces by Beach: La Captive, Berceuse, Pastorale and Dreaming.
A short romantic melody for cello and piano, titled Solitude, by French composer Rita Strohl in 1897 is another gem on offer by Dill and Stolp. Born in France in 1865, Strohl was trained at the Paris Conservatory and received private tuition in composition. The fruits of her prolific musical career include 50-odd melodies written between 1887 and 1901.
The final piece on the Unheard (of) line-up is Serenade, Op. 46 by the late-Romantic French composer, Mélanie Hélène Bonis. Born in Paris in 1858, Bonis taught herself to play the piano until a family friend persuaded her parents to allow her to take private music lessons when she was 12. At 16, she got herself admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris, where she fell in love with a singing student, Amédée Landély Hettich.
Her parents whisked her away and married her off to a twice-widowed industrialist and father of five sons. Her husband, who was 22 years her senior, had no interest in music and was intolerant of his wife’s musical ambitions. While married, Bonis reunited with Hettich, who had also married. Living a double life, Bonis forged a path that went against the social norms of the time. She wrote more than 300 works, blending Romanticism with Impressionism, including piano pieces, chamber works, orchestral music and choral works.
The Wakkerstroom Music Festival was founded 15 years ago by acclaimed ballerina Rona Sonnenburg, now deceased. For the past 10 years it has been chaired by Van der Merwe.
A focus on women in classical music is timely for the Wakkerstroom Music Festival and South African audiences.
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