Bard College is now streaming its 2015 production of Dame Ethel Smyth’s “The Wreckers.”
This English seaside opera predates Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” by decades, a tale of doomed love set against the backdrop of plundering land pirates, who lure unsuspecting ships onto the rocks of coastal Cornwall. The “pirates,” in this instance, are common villagers who justify their misdeeds as righteous Methodists. (Alas, some things never change.)
“The Wreckers,” Smyth’s third opera, is a product of the so-called English musical renaissance, a flowering that took place around the turn of last century, after an alleged dearth of native talent that reached back centuries – tradition holds, since the death of Henry Purcell – a charge that really was without basis. In 1904, Germany had only just derided England as “Das Land ohne Musik” (“The Land without Music”). Ironic, then, that “The Wreckers” would be given its first performance there, in Leipzig, in German translation, in 1906.
Why the timidity, England? Smyth’s second opera, “Der Wald,” which also received its premiere in Germany, had made it as far as New York City’s Metropolitan Opera in 1903. It would be the only opera by a woman composer presented by the Met for over a century! Why no performances at home? Eventually, “The Wreckers” would receive its English premiere in 1909, under the direction of Sir Thomas Beecham.
Smyth was not only a formidable talent, she was a formidable personality. Few were the men who could stand up to this tweed-wearing, cigar-smoking suffragette. After Smyth was arrested for putting out the windows of politicians who opposed a woman’s right to vote, Beecham visited her in prison, only to find her leading her sisters-in-arms in an anthem she composed, “March of the Women,” which she conducted through the bars of her cell with a toothbrush.
Beecham would conduct “The Wreckers” again in 1934 to celebrate Smyth’s 75th birthday. Sadly, by then she was unable to enjoy it, as by that time she was stone deaf.
Leon Botstein led the first U.S. performance of the opera, with the American Symphony Orchestra, in New York City, as recently as 2007! These forces brought “The Wreckers” to Bard College, of which Botstein is president, and where he is co-director each summer of the Bard Music Festival.
This year’s festival, which was to have been devoted to another remarkable woman, Nadia Boulanger, has been postponed to the summer of 2021.
For now, enjoy Dame Ethel Smyth’s “The Wreckers”:
A talk about the opera, with Leon Botstein:
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