Peter has arranged and edited music for many years, often for performance by groups he has conducted, but in recent years to produce saleable editions. Those include two scores of music by Imogen Holst to be printed by Faber music – her Violin Concerto and the concert overture Persephone – and works by Ethel Smyth, including overtures to her operas Fantasio and The Boatswain’s Mate and her Symphony for Small Orchestra. These arrangements and editions are listed, amongst others, on the Compositions page.
It is indeed Ethel Smyth who is now taking Peter’s focus. He started a PhD in April 2025 at Surrey University working on Smyth’s first opera, Fantasio, supervised by Smyth expert Dr Christopher Wiley.
The music, and the life, of British composer Ethel Smyth, 1858-1944, are receiving renewed interest both within and beyond the musicological community. In particular, she is becoming increasingly recognised as a significant British opera composer in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century period, the one immediately prior to Benjamin Britten and the so-called British operatic renaissance of the 1940s. She wrote a total of six operas, but yet to receive adequate investigation is her inaugural work in that genre, Fantasio, composed between 1892 and 1894, and revised between 1898 and 1901. It was produced twice in Smyth’s life, in Germany, in 1898 and 1901, but there has never been a production since then, and therefore never in her native England. For many years the manuscripts of the opera have resided in the British Library in London, and have received little interest from editors, scholars or performers.
Peter’s PhD project aims, firstly, to fill this significant gap in our knowledge of Smyth’s operatic oeuvre, and therefore of our understanding of her starting point for composing in that genre; and, secondly, to investigate how a critical edition of Fantasio can be prepared, given that her full score revision of the opera’s second act has been lost, and thereby explore the boundaries of the relationship between composer and composition with that of editor and edition. He will look into whether it would be considered acceptable to create an edition of the first version, but if not, what kind of version can be produced? One of the revised version of Act 1 and the original version of Act 2? Is it possible to re-construct the full score of Act 2 and present that alongside Act 1’s revision?
He will create a critical edition of the opera (which will also double as a performing edition), and then write about the work: its history, its background and, crucially, to delve into why the piece has lain dormant for so long. Smyth ripped up some scores of Fantasio (possibly the orchestral parts) to use to aid the fertilisation of some roses in her garden! Partly for this reason it has been assumed that she thought it of irredeemably low quality – but Peter isn’t so sure …