07/29/2026
📊 Why are there still so few women among opera composers, conductors, and directors? It is not a question of talent.
The numbers reveal a persistent imbalance.
🎶 In the 2023–24 season, works by women accounted for only 7.5% of the repertoire performed by 111 orchestras worldwide. The remaining 92.5% was written by men.
🎭 Across Australia’s five largest opera companies, men received 95% of conducting appointments over sixteen seasons. In productions of canonical operas, the share of women conductors fell below 1%.
🎫 In eleven of the largest opera companies in the United States, women held only about 5% of conducting positions and 15% of directing positions.
And this is not a question of talent.
✍️ Women have been composing music and creating operas for centuries. But their access to professional education, publication, theatres, and influential networks was restricted. Their works were performed during their lifetimes and then disappeared from the repertoire: scores were not republished, names were left out of textbooks, and the canon continued to reproduce itself.
📉 In one study of global orchestral programming, the 49 most frequently performed composers were all men. Beethoven received 971 performances. Florence Price, the most frequently performed woman on the list, received only 61.
👑 Yet women were writing opera long before our time. In the eighteenth century, Maria Antonia Walpurgis, Electress of Saxony, composed operas, wrote her own libretti, and performed the leading roles herself.
Their music existed. It did not disappear because it was weaker. It simply stopped being programmed.
🌟 We are not waiting for the system to change on its own. The Muffled Voices Festival creates a space where music by women composers returns to the stage and artists are paid for their work rather than charged for the opportunity to participate.
🙏 We do not simply produce operas. We change the repertoire — and, with it, the statistics.
