Overture to The Wreckers

Ethel Mary Smyth was born in London on April 22, 1858, and died in Woking, Surrey, on May 8, 1944. She was the first composer to be made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1922. Smyth wrote her opera The Wreckers in 1902-04 on a libretto, originally in French (as Les Naufrageurs), by her frequent collaborator Henry Brewster. It was first produced in Leipzig two years later, premiering in a German-language version as Das Standrecht on November 11, 1906; it was produced at Covent Garden in English in 1909. The performances on February 2 and 3, 2024, of the Overture to The Wreckers are the first BSO performances of any music by the composer.

The score of the Overture to The Wreckers calls for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, 2 percussion (triangle, cymbals, tambourine, snare drum, bass drum), harp, organ, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). The overture is about 10 minutes long.

“I am the most interesting person I know,” Ethel Smyth mused proudly in her memoirs, “and I don’t care if anyone else thinks so.” Allergic to understatement, Smyth lived her life on exuberant terms. English by birth, she enjoyed a cosmopolitan lifestyle that took her to Germany, France, Italy, and Egypt. Dressed in her signature tweed suit, and often accompanied by one of her beloved Old English sheepdogs, she became a fixture of European social and artistic circles, known for her eccentric habits (cigar smoking, mountain climbing, bicycle riding) and loquacious conversational style. So forceful was Smyth’s personality that it seemed inseparable from her musical voice: in the words of her friend Virginia Woolf, “she has spun these coherent chords harmonies melodies out of her so practical vigorous, strident mind.”

In many ways, Smyth rejected the social norms of her era. She was an openly queer person who had relationships with Woolf and activist Emmeline Pankhurst, among others. She was an outspoken feminist and advocate for women’s rights; in 1912, she spent two months in London’s Holloway Prison due to her participation in the Suffragette movement. And she was a female composer in a time when women were thought to be incapable of writing good music—as she once frustratedly observed, “a critic’s first and last thought” regarding a woman who wrote music “is her sex.” Yet in other ways, Smyth embraced convention. Born to an affluent British family, she attended conservatory in Leipzig, where she crossed paths with composers including Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Antonín Dvoˇrák, and Johannes Brahms. In the U.S., she cultivated friendships with elite figures including the Boston arts patron and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner and the painter John Singer Sargent. She was, in effect, an insider-outsider: a rebelliously free spirit who also performed her music in Queen Victoria’s drawing room, and who, in 1922, was named a Dame of the British Empire.

Given Smyth’s outsize personality, it is little surprise that she was drawn to the extravagant art form of opera, writing six such works over her career. The third and best-known of these, The Wreckers, was inspired by a trip to the Isles of Scilly, off the coast of Cornwall, in the late 1880s. There, she came across what she later recalled as a “weirdest and most fascinating” sight: Piper’s Hole, a coastal cave of “unearthly” strangeness. She was further entranced upon learning some unsavory local history: in the 18th century, coastal villagers would “wreck” passing ships by luring them to the shore, murdering their crews, and plundering their valuables. This, Smyth thought, was an ideal premise for an opera. In 1903, she enlisted her friend (and sometime lover), the Boston-born writer Henry Brewster, to write a libretto loosely based on this historical subject. While Brewster wrote, she returned to Cornwall, where she would, she later recalled, “lie on the cliffs, buried in soft pink thrift, listening to the boom of the great Atlantic waves against those cruel rocks, and the wild treble cries of the seagulls.” The opera was completed in 1904 and was premiered in Leipzig (as Das Standrecht) in 1906.

The Wreckers is a bleak tale of love, violence, and betrayal amid the desperate and disempowered. Smyth relished the shock value and ethical topsy-turviness of Brewster’s plot, praising it as “devoid of conventional morality.” A community of villagers, united by both religious zealotry and impoverished circumstances, turn to “wrecking,” justifying the practice on religious grounds. When a young fisherman, Mark—who happens to be pursuing an illicit relationship with the pastor’s wife, Thirza—begins to warn ships’ crews of the danger, the village turns on the couple as traitors. After enduring a vengeance-motivated trial, they drown in one of the eerie caves that had captivated Smyth’s imagination.

The overture to The Wreckers evokes the twinned forces—the physically powerful sea and the socially powerful church—that govern the villagers’ lives. Its opening gesture, of three ascending notes followed by a torrent of dotted rhythms, arrives with the force of a wave crashing against a rocky shore. Initially presented in unison by the strings, woodwinds, and brass, the restless motif bobs and weaves through the orchestra. (Later in the opera, this motif forms the basis of a chorus titled “Haste to the Shore,” in which the villagers gleefully plan their next wrecking scheme.) Its initial appearances in the overture are often juxtaposed with the jarring sound of ascending tritones (known in an earlier era as the “devil’s interval”)—foreshadowing that, despite its sanction by the church, the practice of wrecking has malevolent underpinnings.

A calmer mood soon pervades. The English horn ushers in a mournful rendition of a Cornish folk song; it is passed on to the strings, where it blooms into a serene, lush major key. But the respite is brief, and the wreckers’ theme returns. An atmosphere of increasing agitation culminates in a glorious, hymn-like tune, characterized by rhythmic and melodic unity. The orchestra becomes a choir, its evenly paced phrases punctuated by elegant pauses. The overture swells in grandeur, reaching a celebratory conclusion. If most of the overture is structured similarly to that of an Italian opera, presenting the opera’s melodic “greatest hits” one by one, its rapturous ending evokes Smyth’s Germanic training in its boldness and bombast.

Although the overture to The Wreckers is rarely heard today, it is not quite right to think of the opera as a forgotten work, or of Smyth as a forgotten composer. Smyth was a strong self-advocate, and her music was performed with some regularity during her lifetime in both Europe and the United States. The Metropolitan Opera produced another of her operas, Der Wald (The Forest), in 1903; it would remain the only opera by a woman that the company produced for more than a century. All six of her operas were produced during her lifetime. The Wreckers was presented in Prague and London, and its overture became standard fare at the London Proms concerts throughout the early 20th century. It was only after her death, in 1944, that her music receded from public view. But in recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in her work. Her music is revived with increasing frequency, and in 2022, a larger-than-life statue of Smyth was unveiled in her hometown of Woking. Clad in a jacket and tie, she conducts an unseen orchestra with outstretched arms—a fitting representation of an artist who relished the limelight, and whose life and legacy are well worth commemorating.

Lucy Caplan

Lucy Caplan is Assistant Professor of Music at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her first book is Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera, published by Harvard University Press in fall 2024.