Page 238 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained

236 WOMEN COMPOSERS

looting and their faith. Mark has As the waves rise, the lovers sing Wreckers seize cargo from a ship
been secretly lighting beacons their final duet, a bridal song: “Our that has foundered on the Cornish
to warn ships off the rocks. last ecstasy thy embrace, O sea!” coast, in an etching from the 1822
When the villagers discover book Scenes in England by the
that a night of plundering has Bringing the opera to life Reverend Isaac Taylor.
been sabotaged by Mark and Smyth’s inspiration for the opera
Thirza, they condemn them to had been a walking holiday in The music, meanwhile, was firmly
death as “adulterers and traitors,” Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. rooted in the German tradition.
imprisoning them in a sea cave Here, she had heard tales of the Trained in Leipzig, as a composer
that fills with water at high tide. wreckers of old and of the religious Smyth belonged to a lineage that
revival in 18th-century Cornwall led passed from Beethoven through
by the founder of the Methodists, Brahms—whom Smyth, throughout
John Wesley. A sea cave called her life an avid social networker,
Piper’s Hole in the Isles of Scilly had known in Leipzig—to Mahler,
had given her the idea for the cave just two years her junior. With such
in which the lovers Thirza and Mark a clear Germanic background, the
Between whiles I would lie meet their death. Her librettist, as influence of Wagner (himself born
on the [Cornish] cliffs, buried with her two previous operas, was an in Leipzig) was inescapable,
in soft pink thrift, listening to old friend, Henry Brewster. The son despite Smyth once protesting,
the boom of the great Atlantic of a Bostonian father and English “I never was, nor am I now, a
waves against those cruel mother, Brewster had been raised Wagnerite in the extreme sense
rocks, and the wild treble in France and was more at ease of the word.” The Wreckers shows
cries of the seagulls. writing in French than in English, clear Wagnerian traces, such as
Ethel Smyth so they decided that the libretto the rich orchestration, evoking the
would be in French, which Smyth coast and seascapes of Cornwall,
also spoke and wrote fluently. The and the use of “leitmotifs”—musical
libretto was composed through themes associated with particular
correspondence between Brewster individuals and emotions. At the
in Rome and Smyth in Surrey. same time, the drama has a marked

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