Ethel Smyth Overture from The Wreckers

In 1882, while in Florence, English composer Ethel Smyth (1856-1944) met the American philosopher and poet Henry Brewster (1850-1908). By 1890, Smyth and Brewster had not only become intimate friends but also close professional collaborators.

The Wreckers (1906), begun in the fall of 1902, is Smyth’s third opera and her first collaborative work with Brewster. The 3-act opera is based on a legend, discovered by Smyth in 1886, that communities in Cornwall would loot the ships that crashed on the rocky shore. In Smyth and Brewster’s telling, the village is led by a Wesleyan Methodist pastor, Pascoe, who along with his community believes they are God’s chosen people, and that the crashing of ships is God’s way of providing for them. Rather than an act of God, however, it turns out that these shipwrecks are part of a sinister community-wide plot in which the villagers darken the lighthouses, loot the wreckage, and kill any survivors. Pascoe’s young wide, Thirza, is conflicted by this practice and, with the help of her lover Mark, conspires to re-light the beacons and defy the community. They are caught and condemned to die by drowning in one of the caves below the sea.

The Overture introduces many of the opera’s main themes, which, like Wagner’s leitmotivs, are associated with the main characters or with important ideas. Smyth describes the opening theme as being ‘indicative of abrupt savage energy.’ This is later countered by a Cornish melody associated with the hero and tenor, Mark, along with themes associated with Thirza and Pascoe.

Written originally with French libretti, The Wreckers premiered in German translation in Leipzig on 11 November 1906. Subsequent performances in English translations took place in 1908; and although concert versions of the opera were performed in the 1920s and 1930s, it was not revived for the stage until 2006.

While the opera’s reputation has suffered from Smyth’s historical marginalisation as a female composer, scholar Eugene Banks hailed The Wreckers in no uncertain terms as the “most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten.”