By:

• David Griffiths

Instrumentation:

six principal roles, six child roles and a chorus

Availability

• This work has a score, a recording and a resource

Programme Note

The Secret Suffragette tells the story of the composer’s great, great grandmother Mary Muller who campaigned for women’s rights in the 1800s. There are six principal roles, six child roles and a chorus in the cast.

“Hers was a great story,” says Griffiths. “She fled a violent marriage and met a widower Dr Stephen Muller on the boat coming out to New Zealand in 1849. She became his housekeeper and subsequently married him. Behind his back she took up the feminist cause and under the pseudonym Femina started campaigning for women’s property rights. She was successful too. She never got round to telling her husband about her secret life and he died before she was ‘outed’.”

New Zealand’s best known women’s rights activist, Kate Sheppard, called Muller “New Zealand’s pioneer suffragist”.

Text Note:

Text by librettist, Lynn John

Performance History

	20 Aug 2009	Presented by the voice students and orchestra of the Music Department of University of Waikato, and directed by John Davies with Music Director James Tennant at the Gallagher Concert Chamber in Hamilton
		James Tennant
	21 Aug 2009	Presented by the voice students and orchestra of the Music Department of University of Waikato, and directed by John Davies with Music Director James Tennant at the Gallagher Concert Chamber in Hamilton
		James Tennant
	22 Aug 2009	Presented by the voice students and orchestra of the Music Department of University of Waikato, and directed by John Davies with Music Director James Tennant at the Gallagher Concert Chamber in Hamilton
		James Tennant
	22 Aug 2009	Presented by the voice students and orchestra of the Music Department of University of Waikato, and directed by John Davies with Music Director James Tennant at the Gallagher Concert Chamber in Hamilton
		James Tennant
	01 Oct 2009	Presented by the voice students and orchestra of the Music Department of University of Waikato, and directed by John Davies with Music Director James Tennant at the Gallagher Concert Chamber in Hamilton
		James Tennant