The recent spat about “sexism in Hollywood” asked, inter alia, why so few films bother themselves with depicting women’s lives. It is hardly something you could say about opera: women have been its main concern from the start of the seventeenth century.Nonetheless, until now very few operas by women have made much impact. One very early exception is being performed next week at the Brighton Early Music Festival: The Liberation of Ruggiero from the Island of Alcina, written in 1625 by Francesca Caccini. The daughter of the composer Giulio, Caccini was part of opera’s earliest flowering: her father had written one of the very first examples, Euridice, which was first performed in 1602, and the family was embedded in the Florentine musical establishment. Francesca, bo