Virginia Gabriel

Virginia Gabriel was born in 1825 in Banstead, a village south of London. Her father was an army general. She had a much better musical training than most women of her time. She studied the piano with famous pianists, among them Thalberg, and composition with the Italian opera composer Mercadante.

She was trained to write large works for choir and orchestra. But publishers would not risk printing such works by a woman. They only wanted her songs. The Skipper and his Boy was written around 1860 for a famous singer of the day. It was her first big success. After that, publishers competed for the right to print her songs. She published several hundred, and they were sung in homes in Britain and America. She also wrote songs for men’s voices, which few women composers did at that time.

In 1867, at 42, her small comic opera Widows Bewitched ran for several weeks in London. She did not give up on large works. Even when she was well known, she had to pay to print her cantata Dreamland herself. In 1873 her cantata Evangeline, based on a poem by Longfellow, was a success at a festival in Brighton, and then in London.

In 1874, at 49, she married George March, who wrote the words for most of her small operas. Only three years after their wedding, she died in London, at 52. A newspaper wrote that she had been much liked and had a kind heart.

A music historian has written that Virginia Gabriel did more than anyone else to show that women could write songs as good as men’s.