Ethel Smyth’s expressive music brings Victorian Cornwall to life

The redoubtable British composer Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) found inspiration for her third opera The Wreckers after a walking tour in Cornwall in 1886. It was premiered in 1906 and its subject is the plundering of cargoes from ships driven against the rocks.  

The locals, living a hardscrabble existence on an inhospitable coastline, welcome the wrecks — but their actions tilt to illegitimacy when they switch off the lighthouse. Yet someone has lit warning fires, and the local community is furious. God is surely on their side, driving ships onto the rocks, and this closed world of chapelgoers wants revenge.

Smyth asked her previous collaborator and friend Henry Brewster to prepare a libretto on this dramatic subject, which in some ways anticipates Britten’s Peter Grimes. A Francophile American poet, Brewster produced a French libretto, including sexual yearning and romance. The idea was to aim for the French-speaking world, but despite the best efforts of Smyth — a forceful figure in tweeds and stylishly cocked hat, later a leading suffragette — it attracted no interest.

She then tried friends in Leipzig. There it managed a string of performances in a German translation, with cuts, in 1906. Having failed to get the cuts reinstated, Smyth then took the extraordinary step of marching into the orchestra pit, removing all the parts and the full score, and caught a train to Prague, making further performances in Leipzig impossible.

The transfer to Prague turned out to be an under-rehearsed failure, but Smyth did not give up and in 1909 Sir Thomas Beecham organised its first British performance. Even then, the composer was dissatisfied with the length of time he allowed for rehearsals.

Here now in Glyndebourne we see it performed in its original French libretto without cuts, and this autumn the Houston Grand Opera is creating a production in a new English translation by the late Amanda Holden. There is something to be said for performing it in English, because the story is sufficiently complex to require an understanding of the libretto. If Puccini, born in the same year as Smyth, were presented with this libretto, he surely would have insisted on changes because there is a great deal of plot to absorb in the first act.  

The Wreckers warmed up in the second act when love and yearning appear, and by the end of Act 3 the opera felt like a great success. This is where Marc (superbly sung by Mexican tenor Rodrigo Porras Garulo) and his lover Thurza (beautifully sung by the American Mezzo Karis Tucker) are condemned to be left to the rising sea after he has admitted to lighting the warning fires.

Thurza, the wife of the pastor (Philip Horst), won ’ t let her husband touch her, and the self-righteous preacher is sent almost demented by repressed desire. He comes under suspicion himself after refusing to speak in his own defence, having being found in compromising circumstances. The colourful Avis (an excellent portrayal by Lauren Fagan) tries to provide her beloved Marc with a false alibi, claiming that they slept together that night. Her father, the level-headed Laurent (sung with superb French intonation by James Rutherford), manages to calm the guilty confusion, leaving Smyth ’ s powerful and expressive music to draw this complex story to a close.

Under the baton of Robin Ticciati, the music showed beautiful colours, particularly in the two final acts, and the chorus was magnificent. This may not be the neglected masterpiece that some claim, but after a slow start it made for a thrilling evening in Melly Still ’ s atmospheric production. Congratulations to Glyndebourne for putting this intriguing opera on stage and giving Dame Ethel’s music a new lease of life.

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