Ethel Smyth, The Wreckers (1906)

In addition to being a composer, Smyth was a writer and a suffragette of some note. But I think she is destined to be known primarily as the answer to the trivia question "who was the first female composer to be produced at the Metropolitan Opera?" (with her opera Der Wald). I've certainly been curious to see her work for a long time; it's not exactly frequently produced, but here is this.

The story is there's this village in Cornwall where the economy is based on letting ships crash on the rocks and then plundering them. Is that a better or worse economic system than capitalism? It's hard to say. But now there is a problem, because SOMEONE has been lighting beacons to warn ships away. So there's this fisherman named Mark who used to court a woman named Avis, but now he's in love with Thirza, wife of Pascoe the preacher, and she with him, making Avis jealous. She accuses Pascoe of having lit the beacons, but the truth is still unclear. However! Then it turns out that the actually guilty parties are Mark and Thirza. The villagers think Pascoe is guilty and put him on trial, but Mark and Thirza confess. Avis tries to save him, but no go. So the lovers are condemned to death, and that is that.

It's a kind of interesting premise: the sort of cultist-like villagers all frame the situation in religious terms; I've never seen an opera quite like it. But it doesn't really DO that much with the idea; you kind of expect it to do more in terms of questioning the morality of the situation, but it mainly just takes it for granted. Weird.

Well, but it's really not a great opera. The performance is fine, but I'm not sure any performance was really going to save it.  It does occasionally build up kind of a head of steam and get sort of dramatic, but the conventionally romantic music is mostly sort of anemic, and the libretto is extremely poor: it keeps trying to be "poetic" at the expense of actually saying anything interesting or drawing on real human emotion. You would think the reasons would be obvious, but from the text, it's difficult even to tell WHY Mark and Thirza are rebelling. And goddamn, the characters just babble on and on and on to little effect. I'd call this at best a C+ opera; I was glad to have the chance to experience Smyth's work, but I'm not overly taken with her as a composer.