This year’s Glyndebourne season opens with a new production of Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, conducted by Robin Ticciati and directed by Melly Still. The first opera by a female composer to be performed at the festival, it has a difficult history and a somewhat ambiguous reputation. Begun in 1902 to a French libretto by Smyth’s sometime lover Henry Brewster, it was first performed in Leipzig, in German, in 1906, in a much cut version that Smyth loathed, before being heard in London in 1909 with the libretto in an English translation by Smyth herself, considered so problematic that posthumous attempts have been made to rewrite it. An urtext edition by Martyn Bennett going back to the original French version is given here.
Though The Wreckers has long been a rarity, huge claims have been made for it as the most significant English opera between Purcell’s death (1695) and Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945), a work that The Wreckers is widely thought to anticipate. Smyth presents us with an at times chilling portrait of a devout yet hypocritical Cornish community plundering ships lured on to nearby rocks, only to find its skewed values challenged when Thurza, the disaffected wife of the pastor Pasko, begins an affair with the fisherman Marc.
