The Wreckers

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Opera at Bard

The Wreckers

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The Wreckers

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The Wreckers

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The Wreckers

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The Wreckers

Program Notes

Leon Botstein

It is hard to imagine an opera whose argument is more pertinent to our times than Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers. This is because Smyth, both in the choice of the story and the man- ner of its musical setting, forged a synthesis between art and politics with uncanny power. That synthesis mirrors her life and work. Born in 1858, she lived an unbelievably full life (recounted in her sprawling but spellbinding memoirs) and crossed paths with any- one who was somebody. She died in 1944, a legend in her own time, an authentic pioneer and iconoclast.

The Wreckers, which was premiered in 1906 in Leipzig, is Smyth’s finest achievement because of her brilliant exploitation of the potential political and moral impact of oper- atic form. In this work, music and drama, consistent with Romanticism and particularly the Wagnerian model, become more than pleasant distraction and entertainment. The human predicaments that evolve on stage transcend the personal, and the music turns the spectacle of opera into an experience of ethical and political recognition that con- tests the confines of narrow aesthetic criteria.

Smyth’s own extraordinary courage as an individual—a woman composer and a lesbian political activist who defied dominant expectations and norms—defines the work. In the foreground is the alarming power of fundamentalist religious conceit within a close-knit community. The very opening line of the opera (sung by the chorus) states the claim: “God’s chosen people shall not pay the price of sin, for Jordan’s wave has washed them white.” Persuaded of their status as God’s elect, as instruments of a divine truth that trumps the logic of human reason, ethics, and law, the chorus—the community— assumes the right to wreak violence on others, to steal, plunder, and kill with impunity. They are persuaded that they are doing God’s work and pursuing a higher good. This insu- lates them from any sense of wrongdoing, sin, or guilt.

One of the consequences, as Smyth understood all too well, is the evisceration of any notion of a rule of law that protects the freedom of the individual, the sanctity of every human life, the right to life, liberty, and therefore dissent. Throughout the opera, the ideal of the secular state in which religion is construed as a private choice, and the priority of individual and Enlightenment traditions of religious tolerance—including the protection of atheism and agnosticism (all contexts indispensable to the life and work of an artist)— are powerfully present by their terrifying absence on stage. The audience witnesses the failure of individual idealism and the willful destruction of love and hope by collective fanaticism.

Smyth chose as the subject of her opera the psychological and political allure of absolutist religious faith and doctrine, especially within communities defined by carefully guarded isolation. The parallels with our own time are all too obvious and painful. They range from the doctrinaire factions in American Christianity that seek to control the public realm, to the intolerant ultra-Orthodoxy within the Jewish religion that threatens secular democ- racy in Israel, to the violence of Islamic fundamentalism. The opera is set in an isolated community in Cornwall that possesses a religiously based, fanatical self-regard that leads it to justify theft and murder as God-given rights and virtues. Led by its own pastor, vio- lence becomes the instrument of realizing God’s will. The opera depicts the conse- quences of mass hysteria and populist justice, draconian in its nature, against those who resist the imposition of a moral code based solely on perceived divine justice, not human justice. The toxic roots of this fanaticism are ignorance, poverty, and economic despair. And Smyth’s victims of that extremism are deeply sympathetic characters—young ideal- ists who should, by any human standard of ethics, be protected, if not by law then by ties of family and affection. But all these are subordinated to doctrine and the will of the majority.

Though the story is fictitious, the existence of wreckers on the British coast was a histor- ical fact. In small, desperately poor villages, bands of villagers formed secret cadres that at critical moments extinguished the beacons established on the coast to guide ships, thus forcing them onto the rocks. They then plundered the cargo and murdered the crews. The time period in which Smyth chooses to set the opera suggests that she knew of the great Methodist minister John Wesley’s unsuccessful attempt to stop the practice of wrecking. But Smyth’s minister, Pascoe, uses religious enthusiasm for a very different end.

Richard Wagner was inordinately proud of his thin credentials as a revolutionary during the heady days of 1848. Ethel Smyth, in contrast, possessed real courage. She was arrested and went to prison for advocating for the right of women to vote. Smyth conducted her life, whether in sports, politics, or art, with fearless zeal, pride, and conviction. That The Wreckers is the finest opera written in modern history by a woman before World War II is a matter of fact, and not a qualified compliment, since the range of choice, owing to the recalcitrant prejudice against women composers, is narrow indeed. But the legitimate desire to rectify a longstanding prejudice against the few female composers who man- aged to establish themselves is not the primary reason that The Wreckers merits revival. The story Smyth chose is brought to life with music of extraordinary stylistic and dra- matic range, from the Debussy-like painterly sensibility of the opening of Act 2 to the intense post-Wagnerian musical drama driven by the deft employment of the chorus and orchestra. Amidst it all are moments of folklike evocation of rural England.

When a work of the scope and magnitude of Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers is brought back in a fully staged professional production more than 100 years after its first performance, inevitable questions come to mind. Why this long neglect? Does some sort of flaw or inferiority justify the work’s obscurity? Furthermore, even if the work possesses powerful qualities, can a revival be successful and provide The Wreckers a foothold in the repertory? One cause for optimism is the fact that this 2015 SummerScape production follows a con- cert performance by the American Symphony Orchestra in Avery Fisher Hall in 2007 at which the power of the music, the timeliness of the story, and the opera’s potential as theater were evident.

Cases of neglected or forgotten works are complex. Too often we assume that special pleading or an elaborate explanation is required for neglected works; they don’t “speak for themselves.” But we conveniently forget that well-known “masterpieces” survive the ages not only on account of excellence and originality but because historical circumstances assisted their endurance, just as circumstances hindered the careers of certain composers and important and compelling works. We conveniently forget the large number of com- positions that had immediate success but have since been forgotten. Works that endure may do so because they lend a sense of coherence and comprehensibility to a historical community, or they succinctly exemplify a nation or sensibility at a crucial moment. In some cases, such as Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto, advocacy by a singularly famous artist, long after the composer’s death, helps. Conversely, if works do not immediately match the expectations of their contemporary audience, they are set aside and can be reclaimed at a later time. This was the case with the late Beethoven string quartets.

Or, if single works possess none of the advantages that have traditionally marked success —such as mirroring the aesthetic prejudices of a culture with a dominant musical legacy, or even being composed by a white European man—they may never come in for consid- eration as worthy of repeated performance. Nearly all of the operas produced at SummerScape fall into this category, as does much of the repertoire of the Bard Music Festival. The neglect of The Wreckers has multiple sources. Before Benjamin Britten’s suc- cess as an opera composer, English opera was an object of disregard even inside England. Elgar, the most famous composer of English music’s renaissance, never wrote an opera, despite the enormous impression Wagner had made on him. Although many noncomic English operas were written, particularly during the first half of the 20th century (notably by Frederick Delius and Ralph Vaughan Williams), they never seemed to have taken hold. The public’s taste was clearly weighted toward the German, Italian, and French operatic repertoire. Ironically, Delius, the best known of English opera composers, experienced, just as Ethel Smyth did, whatever success he did have in Germany; his stage works received their greatest response in German-language productions.

The English lack of support for native opera was difficult enough, but added to that in Smyth’s case were the realities of being a Victorian woman. The often brutally restricted lifestyle of British women at that time is so well known as to be a cliché, though it is just as certain that Victorian women of a certain class resembled the ladies of Upstairs Downstairs or Downton Abbey about as much as 21st-century American women resemble the idealized housewives of 1950s television. After all, Smyth lived in an age of repression but also the era of the suffragettes, women who risked social and physical danger for the sake of human rights. Of these Smyth was a notable member; indeed her activities along- side her friend Emmeline Pankhurst landed her in prison.

Even among the extraordinary women of the time, however, Smyth stood out in her lifestyle and achievements. Born to wealth, she lived a complicated and varied life. Her remarkable circle of friends (some of whom were also her lovers) included Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, the wife of her teacher, one of Brahms’s closest friends and pupils, and herself a musician of considerable talent. Smyth also befriended the wife of the arch- bishop of Canterbury, the wife of Queen Victoria’s private secretary, former Empress of France Eugenie, millionaire Mary Dodge, and most famously, Virginia Woolf. She was an accomplished sports enthusiast. She held her own in the company of the great English musicians with whom she was acquainted; among the admirers of her music were Sir Thomas Beecham, Arthur Nikisch, and Bruno Walter. Besides The Wreckers, Smyth’s operas included The Boatswain’s Mate and the earlier Fantasio and Der Wald, both of which received their first performances in Germany. (Der Wald was also the first and only opera composed by a woman to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.) On her 75th birthday in 1934, under Beecham’s direction, her work was celebrated in a festival, the final event of which was held at the Royal Albert Hall in the presence of the Queen. Heartbreakingly, at this moment of long-overdue recognition, the composer was already completely deaf and could hear neither her own music nor the adulation of the crowds.

The greatest appeal of The Wreckers is not a Puccini-like lyrical or melodic element, but the drama as manifested in the interaction of solo voices, chorus, orchestral sound, and storyline. Its libretto, unlike that of Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet (1907), is not based on the work of a great author such as Gottfried Keller; the text itself, by Smyth’s some- time (and only male) lover Henry Brewster, possesses little in the way of redeeming poetry, especially in its somewhat awkward English-language version (it was originally written in French). As is the case with many great operas, the vacuum created by the weakness of the libretto opens up a wide field for the power of music to project the story and its compelling personal and moral dimensions. The sonic canvas that Smyth pro- duces, primarily through the use of orchestra and chorus, gives the opera its memorable character. To contemporary audiences this was, as George Bernard Shaw observed, a mat- ter of some irony. Many artists, including Elgar, called for a vigorous, muscular, masculine music indicative of the ideal of the British imperial character; these are precisely the qual- ities found in abundance throughout the corpus of Smyth’s work.

The music of The Wreckers is both distinctive and eclectic. The opera contains ballads and ensemble pieces of affecting simplicity and dramatic touches vaguely reminiscent of both German and Italian practices. At moments, the dominant German romantic stylistic frame is offset by the influence of French modernism. The entire opera is shaped by a powerful display of orchestral writing, memorable motivic recurrences, and a brilliant use of chorus; the final scenes of Acts 1 and 3 are particularly memorable. They are on a par with the finest moments in the operatic repertory. Smyth’s treatment of the recitative- like passages that advance the storyline and link the separate musical events are designed to provide opportunities for visual and dramatic theater.

Regardless of the many diverse reactions it will provoke, The Wreckers stands as a signifi- cant achievement from the European fin de siècle. It is distinguished by its casting of love and death, the perennial twin subjects of opera, into a commentary about community, social change, and the cost of inherited tradition—especially religion—that is all-too- thoughtlessly accepted. This is an opera in which Smyth, given her own political engagement, sought to speak not only to her musical colleagues but also to the wider public. She was doing more than seeking professional recognition for her abilities and achievements as a composer; she sought to offer a synthesis of art and politics. And she succeeded.

One final, curious note. If the subject matter (not the story) of The Wreckers seems vaguely familiar, perhaps it is because the topic was visited again more recently in a medium more popular than opera: film. Alfred Hitchcock chose the same subject matter (based on Daphne du Maurier’s novel) for Jamaica Inn, the last film he made in Britain. Whether Hitchcock was aware of The Wreckers is unclear, but his choice suggests that Smyth’s sub- ject is one of enduring interest, and an astonishingly fitting vehicle for what must legiti- mately be considered the masterpiece of a truly remarkable artist and individual.

Synopsis

Act 1

A Cornish fishing village on a cliff above the sea. On their way to church, the villagers are drinking outside the tavern. Their preacher, Pascoe, chastises them for drinking on the Sabbath. He tells them that this is why the Lord has stopped sending them ships to plunder. Lawrence, the lighthouse keeper, has another explanation: he has seen beacons burning on the cliffs and is certain someone is warning ships of the danger. The villagers vow to find the traitor among them and destroy him. Mark, a young fisherman, had been courting Avis, the daughter of the lighthouse keeper. His affections have now turned toward Pascoe’s young wife, Thirza. Unaware that Avis is spying on him, he serenades his new love while the other villagers are in church, and Avis is furious to discover that Thirza returns Mark’s feelings. The villagers leave church inspired by Pascoe’s fiery sermon to commit further bloody acts of plunder. The preacher scolds his wife for not attending the service, but Thirza responds that she can no longer endure the merciless ways of the wreckers. A storm is brewing and a ship is drawn onto the rocks. The men of the village anticipate the bounty soon coming their way. Avis denounces Pascoe as the traitor who has been warning the ships of danger. The men agree to keep a close watch on the preacher as they prepare for the grim task ahead.

Act 2

A desolate seashore at the base of the cliffs. Mark is collecting driftwood. He is the person responsible for the warning beacons. Just as he is about to light his fire, he hears Thirza calling. She hurries to him, warning that other vil- lagers are close by and that if he lights the fire they will see the flames and come to trap him. The lovers embrace. At first Mark is intent on lighting his beacon, but when Thirza declares her love for him he stops, realizing he is putting her in danger as well. Mark begs her to leave Pascoe and run away with him. She is reluctant at first, but gradually yields to his pleading. Triumphantly they seize the torch and ignite the bonfire together. Pascoe arrives just in time to see the lovers making their escape. He briefly sees his wife’s face in the moonlight and he collapses on the beach. He is still unconscious when Avis and the men from the village arrive. Finding Pascoe near the beacon they are certain that he is the traitor.

Act 3

The interior of a huge cave. A court of villagers has been convened and Lawrence has appointed himself as prosecu- tor since he was one of the men who discovered Pascoe, apparently red-handed. Pascoe refuses to acknowledge the court and ignores their questions. Avis declares that he is the victim of witchcraft, as he is clearly still under the spell of his young wife, Thirza. The evi- dence seems clear. The crowd howls for Pascoe’s death, but at that moment Mark bursts in and confesses that he was the one who betrayed them. Thirza also steps forward to acknowledge her share of the guilt. Avis tries to save Mark by claiming he spent the night with her, but the lovers are determined to meet their fate together.

Bard SummerScape Presents

The Wreckers

By Ethel Smyth

American Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by Leon Botstein, music director
Directed by Thaddeus Strassberger

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Evening at the Opera Package

Make an evening of it with dinner and tickets to the opera. Join us on Friday, July 24 or Friday, July 31 for a delicious three-course dinner at the Spiegeltent, and a ticket to The Wreckers (with no ticketing fees).

Currently available:

The Wreckers: July 24 or July 31

$80 Parterre seating (save $60); $100 Orchestra seating (save $50)

Joining us from New York City?

Out-of-Town packages are available for select performances during SummerScape. Packages include round-trip transportation from New York City to Bard in our SummerScape Coach, three-course lunch/dinner at the Spiegeltent, and your ticket to the performance (with no ticketing fee).

Currently available:
The Wreckers: July 24, July 26, and August 2 performances
$100 Parterre seating (save $60); $125 Orchestra seating (save $50)