DEYO, Ruth Lynda

Ruth Lynda Deyo was an American pianist, composer, intellectual, lecturer, and artist drawn to mysticism and the occult. She began her music career at the age of nine, when she performed a recital of her own compositions in the Assembly Hall of the Women’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. Thereafter, she studied under William Mason and Edward MacDowell, two highly regarded composers and teachers from the Romantic period in New York. In the latter half of her life, she moved to Egypt. The rich culture inspired Ruth to write, in collaboration with her husband Charles, her grand opera entitled "The Diadem of Stars". The opera is in three acts, and the score over seven hundred pages. The work is based around Egyptian superhuman characters based on historic figures, with an overarching theme of achieving global peace. Ruth continued to work toward full production, but she suffered a series of strokes. She passed away in 1960 at the age of seventy-five without her opera ever having been completely staged.