Everything you need to know about Ethel Smyth's 'The Wreckers'
Smyth's masterpiece is finally getting its moment in the sun
Ethel Smyth’s opera The Wreckers is everywhere at the moment. If you’re missing it at Glyndebourne there’s another opportunity to hear it (with much more affordable tickets) at the Proms this summer. And if you’re in the States, the Houston Grand Opera staging starts in October. I’m so excited that this opera is finally getting the recognition it deserves, and only hope that other opera houses will follow suit. So if you’re hearing The Wreckers somewhere this summer, this is everything you need to know.
A Cornish holiday inspired the opera
Smyth was an inveterate traveller, but there was one holiday which stayed in her memory ‘wrapped in a tissue of gold’ — her walking holiday to Cornwall in 1886. She was travelling with her newly married sister Violet, her husband Dick, and Hurry, their Golden Retriever. Ethel’s description of this holiday is utterly delightful, but I’d love to be able to read Violet’s account. Because they had wildly different ideas about what made a good holiday. Violet was naturally less intrepid than Ethel and preferred to stay away from cliff edges and out of tin mines. But ‘as regards climbing and what are called risky adventures’, Ethel, Dick and Hurry ‘were of one mind and body.’ And Ethel was not one to be held back by other people’s preferences. So rather than abandon their walks when Violet got too tired, Ethel’s solution was to put Hurry’s collar round Violet’s waist, ‘and Dick led her by the chain’, allowing Hurry to lumber freely along the coastal path with the boundless enthusiasm that only a Golden Retriever can muster. My heart goes out to ‘the exhausted Violet’, traipsing around after Ethel and Dick!
For Ethel, though, this was the holiday of a lifetime. She was completely captivated by the Cornish landscape, taking every opportunity she had to explore. One of the places that stuck most clearly in her mind was Piper’s Hole, a cave in the Isles of Scilly. Many years later, she described it so evocatively that you can almost smell the sea air:
Turning to the right you are in complete darkness, and the first of a bundle of torches is lit and stuck in an iron ring fixed in the cave wall, while the thunder of boulders pushed to and fro by the breakers seems hardly three feet above your head. As you go on the passage winds and narrows, and ever fresh torches are stuck into further rings, till the walls meet in a V point and you think this is the end of all things. Not at all; squeezing through a crevice the last torch is kindled and lo! a second cave, its floor a little blue fresh-water lake full of fishes. The guide waves his torch to and fro, almost touching the surface, but without disturbing the quiet circling movement below; then you realise with a slight shock that these tiny silver fishes are blind. And to complete a vision of the underworld…there, on the other side, attached to a massive chain, black and motionless, lies Charon’s boat!
Piper’s Hole left such an impression that twenty years later it became the setting for the opera’s climax. The two lovers, Mark and Thirza, are chained to the rocks and left to drown in a cave filled by the rising tide. But it wasn’t just the cave that provided a source for The Wreckers. Smyth combined a number of Cornish stories and legends about lawless wreckers — people who took valuables from shipwrecks — to make up the opera’s plot.
Smyth co-wrote the libretto with her partner, Henry Brewster
The Wreckers is essentially a drama about love and morality. It’s set in a Cornish fishing village, where the inhabitants live off plundered goods. But there’s a traitor in their midst. Somebody is lighting beacons on the cliff tops, warning ships away from the rocks. Determined to find out who the culprit is, the villagers keep a close watch on one another. Suspicion is rife. And in the midst of this is a trio motivated by love. Mark, a fisherman, has been courting Avis, the lighthouse keeper’s daughter. But he is also in love with Thirza, the wife of the village preacher — and she loves him in return. Driven wild by jealousy, Avis accuses Thirza’s husband of lighting the beacons, but at the last moment Mark admits he is the traitor. Thirza confesses her own complicity and the two are condemned to death, despite Avis’s desperate efforts to save Mark.
Smyth’s first ideas for the story were rooted in fragments of Cornish stories, but she worked out the details together with philosopher and writer Henry Brewster, with whom she had been in a relationship for some time. It’s hard to overstate how important this relationship was for her. She turned to him for his opinion on all things, and they had a voluminous correspondence numbering over a thousand surviving letters. Even after he died he remained an important absent presence in her life (as did his ghost, but that’s a story for another time). He had been her libretto advisor on earlier operas, but The Wreckers was their most substantial collaboration. They were often working in separate countries so the collaboration happened by letter, showing us just how carefully they worked out every single detail.
It took months of wrangling, through 1902 to 1904, to end up with the final form of the opera we have now. Smyth had a flair for the melodramatic — Brewster often had to clamp down on her love of dramatic clichés. He was not especially musical, so Smyth needed to guide him towards writing words that would work operatically as well as dramatically. But eventually they emerged with an opera of searing power. Most surprising about it, in some ways, is that there is no moral judgement of the characters. All of them subvert social norms. The wreckers claim to kill in God’s name, and it’s a pastor who leads the shipwrecking. Mark betrays his community, Thirza betrays her husband. But everybody in The Wreckers believes they are doing the right thing, and the opera tries to show all their actions without condemnation. When the opera premiered, critics were shocked that a woman would set a story of such ‘exceptionally nasty character’, particularly objecting to the insinuation that the church is complicit in the wrecking.
Smyth’s life inspired her music
Smyth led a life much stranger than fiction, and echoes of it are threaded all the way through The Wreckers. For a start, operatic love triangles usually feature two men fighting over one woman, but in this instance we’ve got two women wrangling over a man. It’s no coincidence, I think, that both Smyth and Brewster had been in a very similar triangle a few years before. When they met, H. B. was married to another woman, Julia. Smyth and Brewster wanted to have a three-way relationship; both of them cared deeply about each other and about Julia. But Julia was not prepared to open her marriage to include Smyth. The situation caused all three parties years of heartache, and cost Smyth one of her dearest friendships. Brewster and Smyth defied convention to be together, and in all of the letters the three exchanged throughout the affair it’s clear that they all strongly believed that they were acting as they believed was right — just like the characters in The Wreckers.
But there’s another woman behind the opera as well. In 1903 Smyth met Winnaretta Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac, with whom she fell head over heels in love. Winnaretta was one of the most important musical patrons in France, and Smyth was among the many composers she supported — alongside people like Poulenc, Tailleferre, Satie, Fauré, Debussy and Stravinsky. Their relationship was initially mutual, and Smyth wrote much of this opera in the throes of this new passion. But Winnaretta’s affections slowly cooled, leaving Smyth distraught and composing heartbreak in to her score instead. When Smyth had difficulties getting The Wreckers performed later down the line, she mused that it was perhaps because everything associated with Winnaretta was fated to end in disaster.
The Wreckers was originally Les Naufrageurs
The texts for Smyth’s first two operas, Fantasio and Der Wald, were written in German because it was much easier for composers to get operas performed in Germany than in England. Germany had more opera houses, and Covent Garden in London very rarely staged operas by British composers. But the German premiere of Der Wald had been a disaster, largely because of an unfavourable political climate, so it wasn’t clear that Germany would be the best hope for The Wreckers. The Covent Garden director was wildly enthusiastic about French works, so Smyth thought the opera stood a better chance of being programmed if the libretto was in French. Besides, Brewster was a Francophile and spoke fluent French, so was keen to work on a libretto in this language that he loved. And as far as Smyth was concerned, French suited her well because she was spending much of her time in France, enamoured with Winnaretta.
So The Wreckers began life as Les Naufrageurs. And the original language of a libretto really shapes the way the music is written. Smyth and Brewster devoted many of their letters to discussing where the emphases should fall and which lines worked in English but not in French. If there was a tussle over a favourite line, it was usually because Smyth had grown attached to a phrase written in English, but as Brewster pointed out, ‘Your lines don’t always bite in French.’
In the event, though, Les Naufrageurs was not staged. Covent Garden initially turned the opera down, on the grounds that:
To announce a new work by a new composer is to secure an absolutely empty house, and in future no opera will be produced here that has not established its success abroad. … Though of course, if Puccini brought us a new and untried work, it would be an entirely different matter.
The premiere was in Germany after all, as Das Standrecht. This prompted a mad dash to translate the libretto and revise the music to make sure it worked with its new language — and then when the opera was finally brought to England, Das Standrecht changed again to become The Wreckers. Glyndebourne’s production restores the original French libretto, realising Smyth and Brewster’s opera as they envisaged it 120 years ago.
There’s a vast range of musical influences in The Wreckers
One of the things I love most about this opera is the sheer range of musical influences that Smyth draws on. She had a wide and varied musical education and tastes, and it shows in the sophistication of her own musical language.
The first thing to say is that this is an overwhelming, passionate, tragic score. We get some idea of how powerful it is in performance from its first reviewers, who said of it that ‘Everything is terse; at the same time hammered in red heat; always the highest musical pressure gauge; everything tense to tearing point, strained to breaking point.’ Another felt that it ‘conquers you with the sword.’ To create this dramatic intensity, Smyth used all of the tools at her disposal.
In her own lifetime her music often got compared to German composers like Wagner and Beethoven — and there are obviously moments in both music and text of The Wreckers that nod to Wagner. But perhaps even more penetrating are the influences of French and Italian opera. Carmen was one of Smyth’s favourite operas, and there are traces of her character in both Avis and Thirza, with a clear quotation from Bizet’s music in one of Avis’s arias. Verdi is another reference point. There are snippets throughout that bear comparison to some of Verdi’s operas, and the plot is reminiscent of Aida, which also ends with the two lovers imprisoned and sentenced to death, one woman choosing to die with her lover while the other waits helplessly outside.
But then mixed in with all this Smyth gives us a rhythmic forcefulness and melodic clarity associated more with Protestant worship and the hymns that she would have grown up singing. And it’s all conjured up with superb orchestration. She gets sounds out of the orchestra that are absolutely terrifying. Smyth studied orchestration with Tchaikovsky, and it shows. If you love Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Swan Lake, then this is the opera for you.
The result is something that is, in the words of Smyth’s friend Maurice Baring, ‘so individual as to be almost disagreeable.’ Smyth sounds like nobody else. I can’t think of any other composer capable of writing music like this, and certainly no other composers working in Britain in the early twentieth century.
The Wreckers was a really important moment in British music history
When Smyth penned The Wreckers, English opera was in a dire state. Comic operas by Gilbert and Sullivan were enduringly popular, but there was no public subsidy for opera houses. Touring opera companies would only take a risk on native opera after it had enjoyed success abroad. As a result, operas by English composers were only rarely heard in England, sparking great debate among musicians and the musical press. English opera needed a figurehead, and The Wreckers was another step towards Smyth becoming that figure.
Covent Garden’s 1902 production of her second opera, Der Wald, had been a success. The critics announced that she had ‘given us the thing that we have wanted so long — a really fine opera by a native composer’, optimistically forecasting that ‘the millennium of British composers is rapidly approaching’. When Covent Garden didn’t accept The Wreckers immediately, Smyth rallied the press to her cause, turning the rejection in to a campaign for state-subsidised opera. And when they finally got to hear The Wreckers, reviewers deemed it ‘a new opera of first-rate importance’, ‘a composition of great power, poignancy, and a sombre beauty that is all its own’, and quite possibly ‘the best opera ever written by an English composer.’ Even those who were more reserved agreed that Smyth was among the most important composers in England, and one of England’s brightest hopes if it wanted a national opera school.
These pre-war moments got lost too easily. They were messy, experimental, and fleeting — The Wreckers was not published, making it extremely difficult for the opera to gain any kind of foothold in the repertoire. It was performed a few more times, but when Odaline de la Martinez conducted the full opera at the Proms in 1994 she still had to make a workable score herself. Without these moments, though, the story of British music doesn’t make sense. Britten and Peter Grimes, for example, didn’t just emerge from a void — he built on decades of work by Smyth and her contemporaries.
Just as importantly, exploring this period raises some serious questions about the lack of women composers on programmes today. Smyth was once a celebrity — why is it still unusual to hear her work performed? Why are there still works of hers in need of a premiere recording? Why is there not a full edition of her works? Or publication of her letters and diaries? This material is out there if we want to make it a part of our history. There isn’t a lack of music written by women composers. If we’re not playing these pieces now, it’s because we’re choosing not to. And it’s not just Smyth. There’s a whole century of music by British women that we’re only just starting to hear. Which is one of the reasons I’m excited to see companies staging The Wreckers. I hope it signals something of a sea-change for these composers, because there are so many astonishing works to discover, from Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s songs to Alice Mary Smith’s cantatas. Their lives and music have much to say to us, if we choose to listen.
Wherever you’re getting your Wreckers this year, enjoy! If you want to hear the opera in full, you can buy Odaline de la Martinez’s recording from Retrospect Opera. And if it piques your interest for more Smyth, I strongly recommend checking out The Prison, recorded for the first time in 2020.
If you want to find out more about Smyth and her operas, I recommend (with the caveat that these are all paywalled!) writing by Elizabeth Kertesz on The Wreckers, Amy Zigler on Der Wald, and Elizabeth Wood on Fête Galante. Otherwise I've written more (not paywalled) about Smyth and The Wreckers for the Guardian here and on Substack here. You can also catch up on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Music Matters’ on The Wreckers here.