Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers: a cosmopolitan voice for English opera

Abstract

As debates raged about the parlous state of English opera in the first decades of the 20th century, the composer Ethel Smyth saw her opera The Wreckers staged in London. After writing two operas directed towards the German market and in an idiom steeped in the German Romantic tradition, Smyth consciously re-focused her style for The Wreckers, exploring the possibilities of creating opera that might simultaneously find favour in England and appeal to theatres on the continent.This paper will consider The Wreckers as an essay in a cosmopolitan style, that simultaneously employed internationally recognised tropes of Englishness. Written between 1903 and 1905, The Wreckers speaks to Smyth’s interest both in French opera as exemplified by Bizet and Massenet and in elements of verismo. The Wreckers has largely been viewed in the context of English opera and this paper aims to re-situate Smyth’s most significant opera within her cosmopolitan milieu.