After the splendour of Dame Ethel Smyth's Mass in D (Virgin Classics, 8/91) and an absorbing survey of her chamber music and songs (Troubadisc, 6/94) I was greatly looking forward to this recording of an opera which Nikisch and Beecham both admired, and which had a respectable success in her lifetime. It's the one work of hers that most people have heard of; occasional performances of its overture must have whetted many appetites: before I'd even started listening phrases like 'long-neglected opera vindicated' were hovering unbidden. The plot is strong, with opportunities for vivid characterization, dramatic conflict and powerful choral scenes. The wreckers of the title are not an outlaw band of criminals but the honest, God-fearing majority of the late eighteenth-century Cornish community among whom the drama is set. They are poor, and salvage rights (Strandrecht, the opera's German title) are their subsistence; their belief in this 'right' is as firmly held as their pious Methodism. Thirza, the young wife of their elderly leader and preacher is doubly an outcast, in that she lights beacons to warn vessels (and thus deprive her fellow-villagers of their living) and does so with the help of her lover. Like a Cornish Aida and Radames they are locked in a cave into which the tide rises as the final curtain falls.
Only this Aida is a mezzo-soprano. To give gravity to her idealism, sombre fatalism to her doomed love? Perhaps, but Smyth takes her very high as well as pretty low. The risk, and full-heartedly though Anne-Marie Owens throws herself into the role she cannot avoid it, is that she will sound at times matronly, at others taxed by the higher-ranging passages. It is, I feel, a miscalculation on the composer's part, and not the only one. The opera's dramatic grip is on the whole feeble: Smyth's compromise between a through-composed and an old-fashioned 'number' opera is awkward, and she slows the plot down fatally by her inveterate habit of preparing for each new scene by twiddling away at the principal motif of the preceding one, as though very pessimistic about how long it would take for singers to leave the stage and others to replace them. The wordsetting is often woodenly declamatory, though here one cannot wholly blame Smyth: she set the libretto in French, it was first sung in German, and the English text used here (her own: lamentable, at times barely comprehensible) was prepared a good deal later.
Worst of all, and most perplexingly for a composer who in other works seems so full of ideas, the melodic invention is weak. There's the jaunty main theme of the overture (if you can't remember it try whistling the signature tune to ''Hancock's Half Hour'': they're close cousins) and the more lyrical idea derived from it. The villagers have some effective, hymn-like counterpoint. Thirza's entrance music, curiously ornate and florid, is briefly striking, and her denunciation of the villagers, while they sing psalms off stage, makes one wonder whether Britten looked through a score of The Wreckers while preparing Peter Grimes. Avis (the jealous bitch who reveals Thirza's 'treachery') has a pretty, almost French operetta song. Pascoe's (Thirza's stiff-necked husband) defence of the divine right to look on while men perish and then to profit from their deaths has a certain strength until you realize that it's an orchestral piece to which the vocal line is an irrelevant distraction. Mark, Thirza's lover, has little to establish his character save a rather folky ballad with a peculiarly impenetrable text (''But even if to silence my pain thy token at length in the grave I prison it deep, at word from thy lips though 'twere softly spoken, at fall of thy step every charm would be broken''). The love music is grey, only fitfully rising to vociferous ardour. Many other pages consist either of characterless recitative or are so thin that, were there no evidence to the contrary, one would doubt whether Smyth was even a tolerably competent composer.
The performance is serviceable, but with mostly lyric voices where heroic ones are ideally needed: Peter Sidhom as Pascoe gives the clearest indication that the work might seem stronger with Wagnerians in the major roles. Smyth's orchestration, on this evidence, is more often coarse than imaginative, and the chorus is sometimes disappointingly recessed. Odaline de la Martinez's direction does all that enthusiasm and vigour can do for the piece, but I can't deny that I found it seriously disappointing, all the more so since Smyth's other works promise so much better.'