235
Two composer sisters, Nadia (left)
and Lili Boulanger, pose together in- Nadia was also an influential
teacher, whose students included
Aaron Copland and Philip Glass.
by the opera but sympathized
with the composer, writing later:
“knowing what I do about the
difficulties of opera composers,
especially plus the handicap of
sex, the astonishing fact about
it was that it existed at all.”
By then Smyth had embarked
on her own career as an opera
composer. Crucial encouragement
had come from the German
conductor and Wagner champion
Hermann Levi, a friend for whom
Smyth had played on the piano
one of her earlier choral works,
Mass in D (1891). Impressed by the
drama of the music, Levi told her:
“You must at once sit down and
write an opera.”
Taking up the challenge, in 1894
Smyth completed her first opera, a
comedy called Fantasio, staged in
Weimar in 1898. Her second, Der
Wald (The Forest), was produced
in Berlin and London in 1902 and
a year later at the Metropolitan
Opera in New York—the first opera
by a woman to be performed there.
By the time Smyth wrote The
Wreckers, her third opera, she waswinning wide recognition, though
it was still difficult to get the work
staged in her own country. For the
British, opera was chiefly an upper-
class entertainment put on by
foreigners in London during the
social season. When Smyth first
submitted The Wreckers to the
Royal Opera House in Covent
Garden, the managing committee
told her: “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 a broad.”A Cornish tale
Completed in 1904 and first
performed two years later in
Leipzig, The Wreckers is set in
a remote village on the coast of
Cornwall in the late 18th century.
The villagers are “wreckers,” whomake their living by luring ships
onto the rocky shore and plundering
them. The drama of the opera
centers on two lovers, Thirza and
Mark, who are opposed to this
thievery. Thirza is the young wife
of Pascoe, leader of the wreckers
but also the village preacher—a
dual role not at all incongruous to
most of the villagers, who see no
contradiction between their ❯❯See also: La traviata 174 –175 ■ The Ring Cycle 180 –187 ■ Tosca 194 –197 ■ Peer Gynt 208–209 ■ Peter Grimes 288–293 ■
L’Amour de loin 325 ■ blue cathedral 326MODERN 1900 –1950
Other key works1891 Mass in D
1894 Fantasio
1914 The Boatswain’s Mate
1924 Entente cordialeEthel Smyth The daughter of a French mother
and a British major-general, Ethel
Smyth was born in the English
county of Kent in 1858. At the
age of 19, she went to Germany
to study music at Leipzig
Conservatory, where her fellow
students included Grieg, Dvorˇák,
and Tchaikovsky. Back in England,
she started to win recognition for
musical composition in the 1890s,
championed by such diverse
figures as the exiled French
Empress Eugénie (widow of
Napoleon III) and the playwright
George Bernard Shaw. In 1910,
Smyth met the women’s suffragecampaigner Emmeline
Pankhurst (possibly a lover of
the openly lesbian composer)
and devoted the next two years
to the Suffragette cause. In later
years, she was hampered by
deafness and so turned to
writing instead of music. She
was made a Dame of the British
Empire in 1922 and died in 1944.US_232-239_Dame_Ethel_Smyth.indd 235 27/03/18 4:49 PM