The Classical Music Book

236 WOMEN COMPOSERS

looting and their faith. Mark has

been secretly lighting beacons

to warn ships off the rocks.

When the villagers discover

that a night of plundering has

been sabotaged by Mark and

Thirza, they condemn them to

death as “adulterers and traitors,”

imprisoning them in a sea cave

that fills with water at high tide.

As the waves rise, the lovers sing

their final duet, a bridal song: “Our

last ecstasy thy embrace, O sea!”

Bringing the opera to life

Smyth’s inspiration for the opera

had been a walking holiday in

Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

Here, she had heard tales of the

wreckers of old and of the religious

revival in 18th-century Cornwall led

by the founder of the Methodists,

John Wesley. A sea cave called

Piper’s Hole in the Isles of Scilly

had given her the idea for the cave

in which the lovers Thirza and Mark

meet their death. Her librettist, as

with her two previous operas, was an

old friend, Henry Brewster. The son

of a Bostonian father and English

mother, Brewster had been raised

in France and was more at ease

writing in French than in English,

so they decided that the libretto

would be in French, which Smyth

also spoke and wrote fluently. The

libretto was composed through

correspondence between Brewster

in Rome and Smyth in Surrey.

The music, meanwhile, was firmly

rooted in the German tradition.

Trained in Leipzig, as a composer

Smyth belonged to a lineage that

passed from Beethoven through

Brahms—whom Smyth, throughout

her life an avid social networker,

had known in Leipzig—to Mahler,

just two years her junior. With such

a clear Germanic background, the

influence of Wagner (himself born

in Leipzig) was inescapable,

despite Smyth once protesting,

“I never was, nor am I now, a

Wagnerite in the extreme sense

of the word.” The Wreckers shows

clear Wagnerian traces, such as

the rich orchestration, evoking the

coast and seascapes of Cornwall,

and the use of “leitmotifs”—musical

themes associated with particular

individuals and emotions. At the

same time, the drama has a marked

Between whiles I would lie

on the [Cornish] 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.

Ethel Smyth

Wreckers seize cargo from a ship

that has foundered on the Cornish

coast, in an etching from the 1822

book Scenes in England by the

Reverend Isaac Taylor.

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