In honour of International Women’s Day on 8 March – when BBC Radio 3 will offer a mostly female playlist – here is my selection of essential operas by women, from 17th century works up to the present day. There is some astonishing music that opera companies ought to produce more often. (Looking further afield, here’s a list of 500 of them .) . In the operatic canon, the cliche is that female singers are used only for vocal display and extravagant sensuality, and have few opportunities to sing stories written for them by women. Yet that’s simply not true – even if gender equality among the genre’s composers has been unbalanced. Rather, it’s a reflection of how operatic culture has largely ossified around handfuls of 18th- to early 20th-century works. Start your journey through an alternative operatic history with the following pieces.

Caccini’s piece, which was performed in Florence in 1625, is the earliest surviving opera written by a woman. It’s a dazzling, virtuosic work that inhabits and transcends the early conventions of the genre.

Only fragments of Agnesi’s dramma serio, a piece first heard in Milan in 1753, survive, but what has is tantalising.

Although we can’t currently hear her music, this remarkable royal wrote numerous operas, and was praised by Carl Maria von Weber. I’ve found a review of a performance of her La Casa Disabitata, composed in 1835 and staged in Dresden three years ago. James Jolly in Gramophone enthusiastically describes seeing the piece for the first time, and I want to hear more!

Not only one of the most famous singers of the 19th century, Pauline Viardot was also an important composer. Her five “salon operas” include Cendrillon – which she wrote in 1904 at the age of 83. Lobby your local opera company to stage the entire show.

Here is the mighty edifice of Smyth’s The Wreckers – first heard in Leipzig in 1906 and later taken up by Thomas Beecham in the UK – in which echoes of Britten, Wagner and Richard Strauss have been heard. But Smyth is a composer with her own voice, and this sea-tossed tale of Cornish smugglers creates its own tempestuous momentum.

One of Musgrave’s most powerful operas, from 1977, is a viscerally communicative piece that generations of opera-goers in the UK – and in the US, where Musgrave now lives – should have the chance to experience in the opera house.

It’s not just operas of previous centuries by women that have been appallingly underrepresented: Lutyens’s 1967 modernist music-drama, based on a play by Elias Canetti, is still awaiting its premiere. It is one of her biggest achievements and a piece the world deserves to hear.

Weir is one of the master music-dramatists of our time. All of her operas – from the 10-minute work for solo singer, King Harald’s Saga (1979) to the full-length Miss Fortune (2011) – have a distilled, direct but mysterious drama. Based on Ludwig Tieck’s short story, Blond Eckbert is an acme of her enigmatic music-drama.

Saariaho’s three operas (so far) have become classics of the contemporary repertoire. L’amour de Loin (2000), her first, is a transfigured vision of medieval love and longing that she turned into one of the most sensual experiences you can have in the opera house.

And then there’s Alice. As the Guardian’s interview with Netia Jones suggests, this piece promises to enchant, entrance and delight when it has its UK premiere on 8 March.