So ran the lead in an unsigned review in the New York World on March 12, 1903. To this day, Der Wald bears the distinction of being the only opera by a woman composer that the Met has presented.

Miss (eventually Dame) Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), the daughter of an English general, was said to move in aristocratic circles and under the patronage of royalty. She had studied composition at the Leipzig Conservatory, where she had been encouraged by Brahms, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky and Clara Schumann. Her Mass in D had its premiere at London’s Albert Hall in 1893. Too, she was literary: she wrote the libretto of Der Wald, in German because she thought it likelier to be performed in one of that country’s many opera houses (as her previous opera, Fantasio, had been, at Weimar in 1898). She was to publish "eight witty volumes of memoirs" and became, for a time, close to Virginia Woolf. According to the Grove Encyclopedia of the Opera, her fourth stage work, The Boatswain’s Mate (1916), which remained in the repertory until World War II, forms "an important if unacknowledged link between Romantic music drama and the realism of Peter Grimes."

Der Wald had its premiere in Berlin in 1902, and was presented in London and Strasbourg as well as in New York during its brief season of notoriety. (Rumors, then current in New York, of a production in Vienna under Mahler came to nothing.) In Berlin, its reception was lukewarm at best, but the opera broke attendance records at Covent Garden.

About 75 minutes long, Der Wald played at the Met on double bills, before Il Trovatore, then, at the second performance, after La Fille du Régiment. At the premiere, the society audience displayed its enthusiasm by showing up at 7:45 – the parterre boxes of the "Golden Horseshoe" tended not to fill until 9:00, after the evening meal – and they departed soon after Der Wald, for a gala dinner party given at Sherry’s restaurant by the composer’s sister, Mrs. Charles Hunter, with the British ambassador and his wife, and the entire cast, as guests of honor. The critics and the gallery remained – it was canny of impresario Maurice Grau to use a brilliantly-cast Trovatore (Lillian Nordica, Louise Homer, Emilio De Marchi, Giuseppe Campanari) as bait to lure an audience to the new work.

The Met performances of Der Wald were given much admired sets and lighting and a gala cast headed by Johanna Gadski, David Bispham and Georg Anthes, with Luise Reuss-Belce as the villainous Iolanthe, and were conducted by Alfred Hertz. Smyth told the press that the singing was better in New York than in either Berlin or London, that she valued American opinion highly, and that she hoped the work would have a popular success – "I care more for the verdict of the people in the galleries than for the opinion of any other public." Perhaps it was the curiosity aroused by so exotic a composer, but Der Wald scored something of a popular triumph. The box office for that evening was $10,390.60 – the only night of the year that the house total reached five figures. The second performance, with Marcella Sembrich in La Fille du Régiment, earned a more than respectable $7,316.40, at least two thousand dollars more than La Fille had drawn at any of its six previous representations that year, when it had been paired with Pagliacci.

The press was attentive. Just before the premiere, an article published in the World on March 8 stated: "Miss Smyth … has attended all the rehearsals, has given to the singers minute directions, has advised with conductor Hertz on the proper reading of the score, has given orders to the scene painter, the ballet-master and the costumer, and has periodically managed the stage. She prescribed the setting of the scene – a glade in a primeval forest with a tangled mass of cypress trees; the costumes – of an indefinite period in the middle ages; the personal appearance of the personages – Iolanthe, "terrible and beautiful, her garb suggesting her adventurous demoniacal character"; the dance, "rough and rustic."

The World added, "The tone of the work has suggestions of modern symbolism and ancient pantheism." This put Der Wald in the thick of post-Wagnerian opera.

Smyth told the Evening Sun that she had crossed the Channel overnight to catch the Metropolitan’s manager, Maurice Grau, in Paris. She reached Paris at 7 in the morning, phoned Grau’s hotel at 8, pleading that she had to catch the boat-train home at 11. Catch it she did, signed contract in hand. "I told him it was one act long and could fit on any sort of bill, in any kind of house." She brought clippings and box office statements from the record-setting London premiere with her. "You are certainly a businesslike woman," Grau said.

To the World, the businesslike woman said, "I have always thought if I did anything worth while I should like to see it presented in America. From what I have heard, I hold in regard American treatment and receptivity and shall await American judgment eagerly."

Smyth knew she was good copy and what good copy was worth. She made herself available and quotable to the press of New York, and they responded with sufficient gallantry to ensure widespread curiosity and full houses. Her rumored royal connections and the popularity of her sister, drew high society. Everything a composer could wish for at a premiere was done, and the ovation at the end would have done credit to a new work by Verdi.

We have a summary of the plot in Smyth’s own words, for the New York World: "It is a short and tragic story of paradox framed in the tranquility and unendingness of nature, represented by the forest and its spirits. As the curtain rises, these spirits or elemental forces, under the aspect of nymphs and hamadryads, are seen engaged in ritual observations round an altar in the wood. Unshackled by time, they sing their own eternity and the brevity of things human. They fade away, the altar disappears, and the play begins.

"A peasant girl, Röschen [Gadski], is engaged to a young woodcutter, Heinrich [Anthes]. The … wedding is fixed for the following day. A peddler sells his wares. There is general jollity and the peasants dance. In the distance the horn of Iolanthe sounds. The merriment ceases; terror-stricken, the peasants fly….

"Iolanthe [Reuss-Belce] is a woman of cruel instincts and unbridled passions, supposed to be a witch, and dreaded with superstitious fear. She has complete sway over Count Rudolf [Bispham], the liege lord of the country. Struck by Heinrich’s good looks, she tries to make him enter into her service at the castle….

"Her fascinations fail, however, to prevail over Heinrich’s love for Röschen. She seeks the revenge of the scorned woman. The peddlar denounces Heinrich as the slayer of a deer…, and this gives to Iolanthe a chance to compel the young woodcutter to obey or to punish him for his indifference. Heinrich … prefers life which is deathless and mighty to life which is weak and brief…. Iolanthe gives the word and Heinrich is slain.

"The scene changes back to its first appearance, and the Spirits of the Wood take up their ritual where it was interrupted by the incursion of things transient."

Two things make this fable unusual – the moral stated by the forest beings and, second, that it is a woman, not a man, who says, "Love me – or else." This is rather rarer in opera than the reverse situation. The plot suggests a combination of Norma with Tannhäuser. By seeking such subtle emotional resonance and cutting herself down to 75 minutes, Smyth was setting herself a hurdle that, perhaps, could hardly have been surmounted by anyone.

The New York Press remarked: "It means symbolism, but the Metropolitan audience last night discovered nothing except the death of a plain poacher."

In any case, few New York critics liked the opera, but many were impressed by Smyth’s technical skill. Whether the music evidenced "femininity" was a matter of no little disagreement.

The Telegraph: "This little woman writes music with a masculine hand and has a sound and logical brain, such as is supposed to be the especial gift of the rougher sex. There is not a weak or effeminate note in Der Wald, nor an unstable sentiment."

The World: "Her work is utterly unfeminine. It lacks sweetness and grace of phrase. Wagner was never so ruthless in his treatment of the human voice."

The Daily Mail dissented: "The charm and quaintness of it will appeal more than its attempt to mirror intense human emotion and to this extent it is feminine, according to all tradition."

The Commercial Advertiser thought Der Wald fell between stools: "It has been often and truly said that whenever a woman composer strives to take the sex element out of her work if she succeeds she surpasses in masculinity anything that a man might do. Miss Smyth seems to have worked chiefly with this end in view, but, while she has eliminated the feminine element from her music, the gentleness and sentimentality which one would expect to find in the work of a woman, her substitute is far from having the real masculine flavor. Her moments of passion become moments of blatant noise…."

Since no recording of any part of Der Wald is available, we must depend on written description to tell us what it sounded like.  

The most enthusiastic account comes from the Telegraph: "The cause of woman took an immense stride forward last night… [I]f the composer has more like it, in manuscript or in contemplation, it is to be hoped that she will turn them over to Heinrich Conried [the Met’s incoming impresario], and so brighten his first year of tenancy at the Metropolitan….

"Der Wald – The Forest – although of but a single act, is one of the most ambitious compositions of the last decade. Its loftiness of purpose and seriousness of design are supplemented by a wealth of musical ideas, and a skill of construction which result in a strongly rounded whole… Since Richard Wagner gave individuality to German opera, this one comes nearest embodying the spirit of the school.

"Miss Smyth‘s … harmonic scheme is elaborate, masterly and convincing. She has an excellent sense of tone color, and a deft and confident way of applying it. She is not afraid to use the brass and heavy strings, her climaxes are strongly developed, and her fortissimo passages are of great quality and body….