1 Shaw, ‘The Author's Apology’, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with their Prefaces, 1 (London, 1970), 236.

2 Ethel Smyth, A Final Burning of Boats (London, 1928), 185.

3 Arthur S. Leonard, ‘ASO & Botstein Present “The Wreckers” by Ethel Smyth’, http://newyorklawschool.typepad.com/leonardlink/2007/09/aso-botstein-pr.html.

4 Celia Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship (Cambridge, 2006), 60.

5 There are several versions of the score: an autograph full score and copyists' scores in the British Library, a version with French and German text published in Leipzig by Bretikopf & Härtel in 1906, and a vocal score with German and English text published in London and Vienna in 1916. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from the text and all musical examples are taken from the 1916 vocal score.

6 Smyth, What Happened Next (London and New York, 1940), 233. Captain Thomas Algernon Smith Dorrien (sometimes Dorrien-Smith) was then the Lord Proprietor of the islands.

7 R. Heath, A Natural and Historical Account of the Islands of Scilly; Describing Their Situation, etc. (London, 1750), 61. Here, and in other quotations from eighteenth-century sources, I have regularised the spelling of words where ‘f’ is printed for ‘s’.

8 Smyth, What Happened Next, 235.

9 These are the sources listed in the ‘Note’ to the published English libretto: H. B. Brewster, Ethel Smyth and Alma Strettell, The Wreckers (Les Naufrageurs): Cornish Drama in 3 Acts (London, 1909), [2]. As it was published by Smyth after Brewster's death, I am presuming that it was Smyth who added the ‘Note’, a section on ‘Musical Analysis’ and several annotations to the text.

10 Elizabeth Wood also suggests Vernon Lee's tale of Welsh wreckers, Penelope Brandling: A Tale of the Welsh Coast in the Eighteenth Century (1903), as an influence. See Wood, ‘Sapphonics’, in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and Gary C. Thomas (New York, 1994), 51. Smyth's plot drew on a popular formula: Henty's morality tale idealises a young heroine, brought up with the physical strength and courage of her brothers, who outwits the wreckers and brings them to trial, for which they are sentenced to penal servitude for life. His book opens with the following: ‘The coast of Cornwall had a bad reputation among sailors a century back; not only were they naturally formidable anddangerous, but mariners cast upon them could expect but little aid, the inhabitants viewing all that came on shore as their natural spoil, and devoting their efforts to collecting plunder rather than saving life. It was generally believed that many an unfortunate, who had managed to reach the shore alive, had been murdered for the sake of his valuables; and it was certain that vessels had been lured to their destruction by false lights exhibited among rocks’. G. A. Henty, The Wreckers of Pendarven (1893; repr. Launceston, Cornwall, 1979), 47.

11 Smyth, What Happened Next, 234.

12 Smyth, What Happened Next, 237. There are distinct similarities in the plot with d'Indy's moralistic opera L'étranger, premièred in Brussels on 7 January 1903, which dramatises the love of a local woman for a ‘Stranger’ who personifies Christian charity. Together they brave a storm to rescue fishermen drowning during a storm, but perish in the attempt. This is possibly why Brewster refers to Thirza as ‘l'étrangère’ (see n. 95 below). My thanks to Steven Huebner for pointing out the parallels.

13 Estimated figures given in R. L. Bowley, The Fortunate Islands: The Story of the Isles of Scilly, 8th edn (St Mary's, 1990), 188.

14 Heath, A Natural and Historical Account of the Islands of Scilly, ii.

15 Heath, 105; extract from the lease granted to Godolphin in 1698 quoted in Bowley, 193.

16 William Borlase, Observations on the Ancient and Present State of the Islands of Scilly, and Their Importance to the Trade of Great Britain: In a Letter to the Reverend Charles Lyttelton, LLD Dean of Exeter, and FRS (Oxford, 1756), 133. ‘[T]hese Twelve Men may not perhaps want Discernment, but as far as I could learn, they want Authority, want Rules and Precedents, want power to compel the Payment of small Debts, want Penalties and Punishments for the Stubborn and Wicked, a Bridewell for the Idle, and a regular, strict Administration of Justice and Law for all.’

17 Heath, A Natural and Historical Account of the Islands of Scilly, 109. G. Forrester Matthews has studied accounts of court cases before the Council of Twelve and reports that on one occasion in 1755 it did prosecute a murder case even though it had no authorisation to do so. Other cases he reports are for theft, assault or breaking the Sabbath. See The Isles of Scilly: A Constitutional, Economic and Social Survey of the Development of an Island People from Early Times to 1900 (London, 1960), chapter 2.

18 Heath, A Natural and Historical Account of the Islands of Scilly, 88.

19 Edwin Lewis Davis (1813–94) is recorded as the Principal Lightkeeper on St Agnes in the censuses of 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871 and 1881, and may still have been the lightkeeper when Smyth visited in 1886. Coincidentally, Davis had a daughter named Thirza, born 1849 – the only Thirza on the islands in her time – who emigrated to Melbourne by 1874, when she is recorded as having married. See Pioneer Index, Victoria 1836–1888 (Melbourne, 1998), CD-ROM.

20 Defoe, Appendix to Letter III, A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (London, 1762), online at A Vision of Britain through Time, www.visionofbritain.org.uk.

21 The number of wrecks is estimated by Dr Chris Wilson on The Wreckers, BBC Timewatch documentary (BBC, 2007); on the increase in the shipping trade see John G. Rule, ‘Wrecking and Coastal Plunder’, in Albion's Fatal Tree, ed. Douglas Hay et al. (London, 1975), 168. Records of shipwreck in the Royal Cornwall Gazette from 1801–21 account for at least fifty-seven wrecks within range of the islands in those twenty years: something like three per year. Statistics compiled from extracts from the Royal Cornwall Gazette 1801–21 published in Michael Tangye, Scilly 1801–1821: Through War and Peace (Redruth, 1970). Rev. George Woodley reported in 1822 that because of the lighthouse, recent advances in hydrography and ‘a beneficent and ever-watchful Providence’, ‘much of the terror which formerly hung around these Isles is dissipated’. A View of the Present State of the Scilly Islands: Exhibiting Their Vast Importance to the British Empire [etc.] (London, 1822), 337.

22 Heath, A Natural and Historical Account of the Islands of Scilly, 86, reiterated in John Troutbeck, Survey of the Ancient and Present State of the Scilly Islands (Sherborne, [1796]) quoted in Richard Larn and Clive Carter, Cornish Shipwrecks, 3 vols. (Newton Abbott, 1969–71), III, 26–7.

23 Quoted in Bella Bathurst, The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas, False Lights and Plundered Ships (London, 2005), 15.

24 Many writers limit the definition of Scillonian wrecking to salvaging cargo rather than causing a ship to founder. See, for instance, Bowley, The Fortunate Islands, 112.

25 J. G. Uren, Scilly and the Scillonians (Plymouth, 1907), 77. A. K. Hamilton Jenkin in a lecture on wrecking presented in London in 1931 (probably in response to the performance of The Wreckers a few weeks before) repeated the story of Parson Troutbeck of the Scillies, known to petition, ‘We pray Thee, O Lord, not that wrecks should happen, but if wrecks do happen, Thou wilt guide them into the Scilly Isles for the benefit of the poor inhabitants’. See ‘The Cornish Wreckers’, The Times, 20 October 1931, 17, and Jenkin's book, Cornish Seafarers: The Smuggling, Wrecking and Fishing Life of Cornwall (London, 1932), 87. Smyth's opera was reviewed in The Times on 25 September 1931, 10.

26 Defoe, Appendix to Letter III, A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain.

27 See Richard West, Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures (New York, 1998), 326. J. H. Andrews describes the Tour as ‘not a work of scholarly research but a collection of memories of different dates, hastily assembled and given a garnishing of borrowed detail to lend conviction to its weaker sections’. ‘Defoe and the Sources of His “Tour”’, Geographical Journal, 126 (1960), 275.

28 See Philip Payton, Cornwall: A History (Fowey, 2004), 170.

29 A ‘Clergyman from Penzance’ was quoted in The Times in 1818 reporting that ‘Natural depravity and the custom of centuries have inspired the inhabitants of the coast with a rapacity for plundering … wrecks’. ‘When the news of a wreck flies along the coast, thousands of these people are collected near the fatal spot, armed with pick axes, hatchets, crow-bars, and ropes, not for helping the sufferers, but for breaking up and carrying off all they can. The moment the vessel touches the shore, she is considered as fair plunder.’ The text of The Wreckers echoes a sentence at the end of the letter that begins ‘Inheriting from their ancestors an opinion that they have a right to such spoils as the ocean may place within their reach, many among the more enlightened inhabitants secure whatever they can seize, without any remorse’. See ‘The Wreckers’, The Times, 22 September 1818, 3.

30 John Wesley, A Word to a Smuggler (London, 1743), [1].

31 Smyth, ‘Note’ to H. B. Brewster et al., The Wreckers, [2].

32 Adam Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) wrote that ‘The smuggler … would have been in every respect an excellent citizen had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature never meant to be so’. Smith, quoted in Christopher Hill, Liberty against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies (London and New York, 1996), 110. Smuggling was certainly rife in the Scillies in the eighteenth century and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that whole villages and even clergy conspired in what they saw as a form of tax avoidance.

33 Smyth, What Happened Next, 234.

34 ‘If a man be found lying with a woman married to a husband, then they shall both of them die … so shalt thou put away evil from Israel’ (Deut. 22:22). All biblical quotations are taken from the King James version.

35 Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Music: Britain, 1876–1953 (Manchester, 2001), 16.

36 The specification that the ships are foreign is not present in Brewster's libretto, but appears in Smyth's 1909 English text in references to ‘foreign craft’ and to ‘A traitor leagued with the foreign ships’. See H. B. Brewster et al., The Wreckers, 11.

37 H. B. Brewster et al., The Wreckers, 4.

38 H. B. Brewster et al., The Wreckers, [3].

39 Smyth refers to this theme as ‘The Bach chorale’, her theme no. 6, designated ‘an old Church melody’ (see H. B. Brewster et al., The Wreckers, 4).

40 The original is ‘Erschienen ist der herrlich Tag / Dran sich niemand gnug freuen mag / Christ, unser Herr, heut triumphiert / All seine Feind gefangen fürht / Halleluja!’. Bach's harmonisation of the chorale (BWV 67.4) appears in F-sharp minor as ‘The Day Hath Dawned, the Day of Days’ in The 371 Chorales of Johann Sebastian Bach, ed. Frank D. Mainous and Robert W. Ottman (New York, 1966), 17. The translation of the German text is by Arthur Tozer Russell.

41 The Wreckers, Conifer Records 75605-51250-2, 1994.

42 Smyth, What Happened Next, 235.

43 H. B. Brewster, Les naufrageurs: drame en trois actes, en vers; Buondelmonte: drame en quatre actes, en vers (Paris, 1911), 27. Smyth composed her opera to this libretto, but performances have been presented to German and English translations.

44 Smyth, What Happened Next, 235.

45 Lyn Pykett, ‘Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Representations of the Female Artist in the New Woman Fiction of the 1890s’, in Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, ed. Nicola Diane Thompson (Cambridge and New York, 1999), 135.

46 In his lifetime Brewster published The Theories of Anarchy and of Law: A Midnight Debate (London, 1887), The Prison (London, 1891), The Statuette and the Background (London, 1896) and L'âme païenne (Paris, 1902).

47 Brewster, letter to Smyth, c. 1890, quoted in Harry Brewster, The Cosmopolites: A Nineteenth-Century Family Drama (Wilby, 1994), 221. Harry Brewster (1910–99), grandson of H. B. Brewster, was author of Classical Anatolia (1993) and River Gods of Greece (1997), among others.

48 Ethel Smyth, Impressions That Remained: Memoirs (London, 1919), 366, 312.

49 Smyth, Impressions That Remained, 315.

50 Smyth, quoted in Harry Brewster, The Cosmopolites, 123.

51 Harry Brewster, The Cosmopolites, 128, 129.

52 Smyth wrote to Brewster, ‘No – it cannot be – can never be. I have been too mistaken – have sinned too deeply’. Letter to Brewster dated 5 December [1885?], quoted in Harry Brewster, The Cosmopolites, 130.

53 Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother (New York, 1914), 409, quoted in Martin Halpern, ‘Henry B. Brewster (1850–1908): An Introduction’, American Quarterly, 14 (1962), 465.

54 Smyth, Impressions That Remained, 466.

55 Henry Brewster, letter to Smyth, 27 March 1891, quoted in Halpern, ‘Henry B. Brewster’, 479.

56 Henry Brewster, letter to Smyth, c. 1890, quoted in Harry Brewster, The Cosmopolites, 221–2.

57 Louise Collis, Impetuous Heart: The Story of Ethel Smyth (London, 1984), 52 (a paraphrase of Smyth). During her marriage Mary Benson attempted to suppress her lesbian sexuality, but after her husband's death she established a household with her lover, Lucy Tait. See Rebecca Jennings, Love and Sex between Women since 1500 (Oxford, 2007).

58 Smyth, As Time Went On (London, 1936), 211. Smyth in her early life believed that she was descended from Edward Smyth, Bishop of Down and Connor, but was later delighted to discover that she did not, in fact, have a bishop in her family tree (see Harry Brewster, The Cosmopolites, 222).

59 Smyth, from a letter to Mrs Benson quoted in Collis, 52.

60 Henry B. Brewster, The Theories of Anarchy and of Law: A Midnight Debate (London, 1887), xii. Harry Brewster claims that the voice of Wilfrid (the sceptic) is the closest to Brewster in thought, and it is Wilfrid who dreams of a ‘confederacy of equal states, an Olympus without a ruler’. Harry Brewster, The Cosmopolites, 172–3. Even Henry James found the book bewildering (see Harry Brewster, The Cosmopolites, 195).

61 In a letter to his wife, c. 1887, Brewster wrote, ‘A total change in the way of living is needed amongst the leisured classes. Kropotkin says, in The Coming of Anarchy [sic], that there should be four hours of manual work a day in the life of every one of us. Tolstoy says more or less the same thing. These are the men that interest me’ (Harry Brewster, The Cosmopolites, 184). See also George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Harmondsworth, 1986), 206. ‘[I]n its essentials Tolstoy's social teaching is a true anarchism, condemning the authoritarian order of existing society, proposing a new libertarian order, and suggesting the means by which it may be attained’ (217).

62 H. B. Brewster, Theories of Anarchy, 142–3.

63 Lee (Violet Paget), in Gospels of Anarchy and Other Contemporary Studies (London, 1908), names as ‘professed anarchists’ Stirner, Ibsen, Whitman, Brewster, Barrès and Shaw (359). She comments that Brewster's book ‘is on the whole a perfect gospel of anarchy, because, in the first place, the anarchical opinions, although they represent only one quarter of the doctrines represented, are those we are least accustomed to and consequently most impressed by; and because, in the second place, the very impartiality, the refusal to decide, to commend and condemn, leaves an impression of the utter vanity of all formula and system’ (36–7).

64 H. B. Brewster, quoted in Harry Brewster, The Cosmopolites, 187.

65 Shaw, quoted in Carole Seymour-Jones, Beatrice Webb: Woman of Conflict (London, 1993), 174.

66 Charlotte Wilson's explanations of her views to Karl Pearson in letters dating from 1884 and 1886, quoted in Mark Bevir, ‘The Rise of Ethical Anarchism in Britain, 1885–1900’, Historical Research, 69 (1996), http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprings/2588, 10, 11.

67 See Seymour-Jones, 175. For a discussion of anarchy among socialists, see Matthew Thomas, Anarchist Ideas and Counter-Cultures in Britain, 1880–1914 (Aldershot, 2005).

68 Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891), reproduced in Robert Graham (ed.), Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, (Montreal and New York, 2005), 213, 214 (emphasis in original).

69 In letters to his wife from America in 1889 Brewster wrote ‘a great deal about Tolstoy’, delighting in his representation of ‘the fullness of life in all its aspects’. But we only have this information second hand: see Harry Brewster, The Cosmopolites, 189.

70 Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is within You: Christianity Not As a Mystic Religion But As a New Theory of Life, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, 1894), 93.

71 Tolstoy, ‘Patriotism, Or Peace?’ (1896), Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence, trans. Aylmer Maude (Philadelphia, 1987), 145. In June 1895 the Peace Society named Tolstoy as ‘the foremost and most uncompromising peace advocate in the world’. See Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854–1945 (Oxford and London, 2000), 140.

72 See Heloise Brown, ‘The Truest Form of Patriotism’: Pacifist Feminism in Britain, 1870–1902 (Manchester, 2003), 8 et passim. The Boer War inspired ‘gusts of jingoism’: see Eric M. Sigsworth, In Search of Victorian Values: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Thought and Society (Manchester, 1988), 173.

73 Smyth, What Happened Next, 153.

74 Smyth, As Time Went On, 56.

75 Smyth, What Happened Next, 12.

76 Smyth, What Happened Next, 14. See the discussion of Ponsonby's friendship with Smyth in William M. Kuhn, Henry and Mary Ponsonby: Life at the Court of Queen Victoria (London, 2002). Kuhn describes Ponsonby as ‘such an unconventional woman’ (21), who had a carpentry shop, painted in watercolours, danced, acted and played pool. Mary Ponsonby was the wife of Henry Ponsonby, who was for most of his career Queen Victoria's private secretary.

77 Smyth, What Happened Next, 179. Smyth described ‘true marriage’ as one which could ‘go on growing in beauty to the very end’.

78 Smyth, What Happened Next, 30. In a casual postscript to a letter to her brother dated 20 November 1895 Smyth wrote ‘O, I forgot to say that H. B.'s wife is dead and at one moment we nearly decided to marry, but afterwards we reflected that “le mieux est l'ennemi du bien”, and that it was wisest to keep our friendship intact! I think I should hate marriage so dreadfully! Don't you?’ (What Happened Next, 137–8). Smyth's own maternal grandmother's second marriage ended in exile in Paris in legal separation and financial ruin. She was so disgraced that her name was unmentionable in Smyth's childhood. Intrigued by her grandmother's tenacity, as well as her musical gifts, Smyth decided that she was her favourite relative.

79 Caird, ‘Marriage’, Westminster Review, 130 (August 1888), 198.

80 Caird,197–8.

81 Olive Schreiner, quoted in Cate Haste, Rules of Desire: Sex in Britain: World War I to the Present (London, 1992), 9.

82 Smyth, quoted in Collis, Impetuous Heart, 72.

83 Fawcett, quoted in Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885–1914 (London, 1995), 134. Fawcett administered the conservative, non-militant wing of the women's movement.

84 On the ‘double moral standard’ see Bland, 127, et passim.

85 Henry Brewster, quoted in Harry Brewster, The Cosmopolites, 256. Yet Brewster could not tolerate any thought of Smyth's infidelity to him. In an astonishing piece of self-revelation, Smyth confessed in What Happened Next how in a stroke of revenge for her suspicions that Brewster was seeing another woman she told him she had spent the night with a man she met on a train. Although this was surely implausible, what followed from Brewster was ‘an outburst of frenzied suffering such as I never would have believed him capable of’ (252).

86 The same double moral standard applied in Britain. During the debate on the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), Lord Cranworth testified to parliament that ‘a wife might, without any loss of caste, and possibly with reference to the interests of her children, or even of her husband, condone an act of adultery on the part of the husband; but a husband could notcondone a similar act on the part of a wife. No one would venture to suggest that a husband could possibly do so’ (quoted in T. J. Edelstein, ‘Augustus Egg's Triptych: A Narrative of Victorian Adultery’, Burlington Magazine, 125 [April 1983], 209).

87 See Bill Overton, Fictions of Female Adultery, 1684–1890: Theories and Circumtexts (Houndmills and New York, 2002), 3.

88 Quoted in Barbara Leckie, Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857–1914 (Philadelphia, 1999), 25. English novelists' preference not to emulate European counterparts was despite Tolstoy declaring that adultery was ‘not only the favourite but also the only theme of all the novels’ (Bill Overton, The Novel of Female Adultery: Love and Gender in Continental European Fiction, 1830–1900 [London, 1996], 1).

89 Quoted in Paul Ferris, Sex and the British: A Twentieth-Century History (London, 1993), 23. There is no doubt that Smyth participated in the tradition of English self-censorship, both in writing an opera predicated on heterosexual relationships and, in her autobiographical writings, in privileging her relationship with Brewster while remaining silent about aspects of other sexual affairs. See Suzanne Raitt, ‘“The Tide of Ethel”: Femininity As Narrative in the Friendship of Ethel Smyth and Virginia Woolf’, Critical Quarterly, 30/4 (1988), 14.

90 Quoted in Eric Trudgill, The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (London, 1976), 242.

91 In an explanatory preface not published until 1912, Hardy defended his subject, and maintained ‘that a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties’. The issue was an acute one in Hardy's own life. Hardy, quoted in William R. Goetz, ‘The Felicity and Infelicity of Marriage in Jude the Obscure’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 38/2 (1983), 190.

92 ‘Jude the Obscene’, Pall Mall Gazette, 12 November 1895, quoted in Norman Vance, introduction to Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Ware, 1995), v. Jude was Hardy's last novel.

93 Queen Victoria in a letter dated 1868 quoted in Leckie, Culture and Adultery, 93.

94 See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London, 1995), 3.

95 H. B. Brewster, Les Naufrageurs, 65. Thirza is also ‘l'étrangère en disgrâce’ (61). Some sources describe Mark as a Breton fisherman. Stephen Banfield, in the entry on The Wreckers in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, suggests that both Thirza and Mark are from elsewhere, while in the 2006 production of the opera in Cornwall, Mark was described as a ‘Breton fisherman’ (see ‘Duchy Opera's Three-Year Project Comes to Fruition’, West Briton, 16 November 2006, 29). According to Brewster's text, Mark has known Avis since childhood, so has belonged to the community for many years.

96 H. B. Brewster et al., The Wreckers, 5.

97 Elizabeth Wood, ‘Gender and Genre in Ethel Smyth's Operas’, Musical Woman, 2 (1984–5), 497. Thirza ‘sings’ and so has a singing voice, as did Gissing's Thyrza in the novel of the same name (1887). There is otherwise little that would suggest the novel as a specific influence on The Wreckers (although Elizabeth Wood believes it is: see Wood, ‘Gender and Genre’, 500, and Wood, ‘Sapphonics’, 65). Thirza is an authentic Cornish name, the name of a game of ‘two and three’ or ‘round tag’. It is also the name of a city captured by Joshua in the Old Testament (see Notes and Queries, 12 [1965], 309).

98 Smyth uses the Baroque device of the ‘basso ostinato’, for instance, for the ‘wild Death Dance’ at the end of Act I, to characterise Pascoe in each act, and to represent ‘Death’ and‘Condemnation’ in Act III (see her notes to H. B. Brewster et al., The Wreckers, [3]–7). This contrasts with Thirza's aria in Act I scene 7 ‘Love, o thou shaft of gold’, the duet ‘Blaze, fire of love’ in Act II and Mark's ‘You ask me why?’ in Act III scene 2, each noteworthy for their melodic freedom, expressive dynamics and harmonic complexity. ‘To give the lovers the only overtly lyrical music in the opera was a stroke of genius, for it makes a perfect foil to the bigotry of all the other characters’. Humphrey Burton, ‘Opera: 1865–1914’, in The Romantic Age, 1800–1914, vol. 5 of The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, ed. Nicholas Temperley (London, 1981), 355.

99 In 1899 Florence Maybrick was tried for the murder by arsenic poisoning of her husband after he had discovered her adulterous affair. Scientific evidence presented seemed to afford grounds for her acquittal, but the judge (Fitzjames Stephens) convicted her. After a scandal ensued, her death sentence was commuted. In 1900 a new government promised to release her but she was not finally released until 1904. See George Robb, ‘The English Dreyfus Case: Florence Maybrick and the Sexual Double-Standard’, in Disorder in the Court: Trials and Sexual Conflict at the Turn of the Century, ed. George Robb and Nancy Erder (New York, 1999), 57–77.

100 Quoted in Leckie, Culture and Adultery, 30. Commentators on Madame Bovary have pointed out that Flaubert uses the definition of hysteria in the medical dictionary owned by Emma Bovary's husband.

101 See Gustave Flaubert, Emma Bovary, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London, 1992), 62.

102 ‘Queen's Hall’, The Times, 1 June 1908, 11. Some reviews of the opera portrayed Smyth as hysterical, Richard Specht observing that ‘If something about [The Wreckers] is feminine, then it would be this: that without exception the sound is taken high and sometimes too high; the unimportant is announced with the same urgent energy as the crucial’. See Elizabeth Kertesz, ‘Issues in the Critical Reception of Ethel Smyth's Mass and First Four Operas in England and Germany’, Ph.D. diss., University of Melbourne, 2000, 239, and elsewhere in her discussion of the work's climaxes. Translations are Kertesz's own.

103 Avis's ‘rat’ song (Act I scene 6) in Brewster's version includes a delicate play on the words ‘mors’ and ‘morts’ not translatable into English. Smyth's version is verbally more picturesque and invents bloodthirsty allusions to the murder of Thirza. See H. B. Brewster, Les naufrageurs, 19, and H. B. Brewster et al., The Wreckers, 16.

104 H. B. Brewster et al., The Wreckers, 7.

105 Scott, preface to Anne of Geierstein or The Maid of the Mist (1831), which features an Englishman in confrontation with a Vehmic tribunal.

106 H. B. Brewster et al., The Wreckers, 7. Derek Hyde argues that the ‘Solemn Psalm’ at this point ‘seems highly inappropriate’. See Derek Hyde, New-Found Voices: Women in Nineteenth-Century English Music (Aldershot, 1998), 153.

107 Matthew 26:42: ‘He went away again the second time, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done’. The cup is often referred to as the ‘bitter cup’. See Matthew 27:34: ‘They gave him vinegar to drink, mixed with gall’.

108 Wagner, from Newman's Wagner Nights, quoted in Roger Scruton, Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (New York, 2004), 192. There are many symmetries between Tristan and The Wreckers, including the Cornish setting, the symbolism of light and dark, the feature of the sea and sea crossings, the pivotal act of adultery and sexual liberation, and the correlation of love with death. Linda and Michael Hutcheon argue that death in Tristan is ‘desired, willed, willing, triumphant’ (Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, ‘Death Drive: Eros and Thanatos in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde’, this journal, 11/3 [1999], 288). See alsoLeonard B. Meyer's reference to the final cadence of Tristan, ‘probably the most famous instance of this cadence’, in Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Philadelphia, 1989), 288.

109 In the Psalms, the psalmist asks for God's face to shine upon him as a sign of his blessing (see Psalm 67:1). In Matthew 17:3 Jesus is ‘transfigured … and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light’ before God announced ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’ (17:5).

110 Charles Reid in Thomas Beecham: An Independent Biography, quoted in Kathleen A. Abromeit, ‘Ethel Smyth, The Wreckers, and Sir Thomas Beecham’, Musical Quarterly, 73/2 (1989), 200.

111 The Leipzig performance took place on 11 November (not 15 November as claimed in the notes to the recording and elsewhere) and the Prague performance on 12 December. Notoriously, two days after the Leipzig performance Smyth stole the scores and took the next train to Prague (see What Happened Next, 270–1). A full account of the work's performance history is given in Kertesz, ‘Issues in the Critical Reception of Ethel Smyth's Mass and First Four Operas in England and Germany’, 107–23.

112 Detlef Schultz, Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 12 November 1906, 2 quoted and translated in Kertesz, 256.

113 ‘Die Oper der Engländerin’, Berliner Tageblatt, 12 November 1906; Alfred Heuß, ‘Zur Opernsaison 1906/1907’; Leipziger Kalender (1908); ‘Kunstchronik: Neues Theater’, Leipziger Volkszeitung, 12 November 1906, all quoted and translated in Kertesz, 255.

114 In all, there were three performances of excerpts from the opera in London in 1908, arranged by Violet Gordon Woodhouse and funded by Brewster, shortly before his death on 13 June 1908. There was a performance by Nikisch and the London Symphony Orchestra (probably at Queen's Hall) of the prelude to Act II on Saturday 2 May 1908, the performance by Nikisch to the German text of most of Acts I and II at Queen's Hall on Saturday 30 May 1908 and a further performance of the prelude to Act II at a Queen's Hall concert on 28 November 1908. The Times reported that the 30 May performance, with the London Symphony Orchestra and Blanche Marchesi as Thirza, was ‘far better’ than the performance at Leipzig (see ‘Queen's Hall’, The Times, 1 June 1908). Smyth supplied a printed text in English for the 30 May concert. Whether this was the same as the text published in 1909 is uncertain, though critics' reports of the names of individual songs suggest that they were different. For the history of Beecham's patronage of The Wreckers, see Abromeit, ‘Ethel Smyth, The Wreckers, and Sir Thomas Beecham’, 196–211; Wood, ‘Gender and Genre’, 503; Kertesz, 107–23.

115 ‘The Wreckers’, Musical Times, 1 July 1908, 457.

116 By 1905 Smyth was hoping for a performance of Les Naufrageurs at Covent Garden under Messager with Emma Calvé as Thirza. As Elizabeth Wood has discovered, in about 1906 Calvé wrote to Smyth offering contacts for the translation of the opera from French to German. See Smyth, What Happened Next, 258, and Wood, ‘Sapphonics’, 64.

117 Wilde's Salomé (written in French in 1891) was banned in London in the midst of rehearsals. Strauss's Salome was only licensed for production in 1910 after Beecham personally appealed to the prime minister and only after ‘careful bowdlerising’ of the story. See Richard Findlater, Banned! A Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain (London, 1967), 95.

118 H. F. Frost, ‘Some Remarks on Richard Wagner's Music Drama “Tristan und Isolde”’, Proceedings of the Musical Association (1881–2), 148. A concert selection from Tristan was conducted by Wagner in London in 1877, when The Times reported that the plot was ‘one scarcely to be tolerated on the boards of an English theatre’ (‘The Wagner Festival’, The Times, 22 May 1877, 9). By the date of the first performance, critics could concede Wagner's genius but condemned his slur on all that was ‘pure and good’. The critic of the Musical World, for instance, wrote ‘We cannot enlarge upon the subject for obvious reasons, but we may and must protest against a stage exhibition which can have only one meaning and lead to only one train of thought; the meaning and the thought being alike condemnable. … What sort of “new art” can that be the supporting pillars of which are crime and lust?’ (D. T., ‘Tristan and Isolde at Drury Lane’, Musical World, 24 June 1882, 379).

119 Quoted in Nicholas De Jongh, Politics, Prudery and Perversion: The Censoring of the English Stage 1901–1968 (London, 2000), 44. On 29 October 1907 seventy-one authors and playwrights signed a letter to The Times protesting the system of censorship. Four months later, on 24 February 1908, Smyth – along with her friends Maurice Baring, Mary Benson's sons Arthur C. Benson and E. F. Benson, and Mary Ponsonby – joined painters, politicians, historians and playwrights to call again for the abolition of censorship. See ‘The Censorship of Plays’ (letter to the editor), The Times, 24 February 1908, 8. A concerted appeal by writers including Shaw for the repeal of censorship laws in 1909 was unsuccessful.

120 The English libretto published in 1909 marks twelve passages that Smyth asked Alma Strettell (1856–1939), a poet and experienced translator, to translate from the French. These are, in Act I scenes 5, 6 7 and 11, in Act II scenes 2 and 3 (including ‘Blaze, fire of love) and, in Act III, five segments including songs by Avis, Mark and Thirza and the final twenty-six lines. In most cases, Strettell's translations are faithful renditions of Brewster's verse. The remainder of the English text rarely departs from the sense of Brewster's whole, but varies line by line from the exactedness of a literal translation to a thorough rewording of the original. Smyth has also added and deleted stage directions, made minor cuts and compressions and added titles for some songs. She made further, though more minor, changes for the 1916 vocal score.

121 After the première of the 1909 production, J. H. G. B. (in ‘“The Wreckers”: A Rough Estimate’, Musical Standard, 26 June 1909, 403), reported that ‘we heard almost every word the characters uttered! Thus it was quite unnecessary to refer to the printed libretto while the English word was being spoken. That was an achievement indeed.’ After the following year's production another critic complained that most of the singers were unintelligible (see ‘Royal Opera: “The Wreckers”’, The Times, 2 March 1910, 10).

122 Roberta Montemorra Marvin, in her study of the censorship of Verdi's operas in London, found that prior to a performance of Un ballo in maschera in London the Lord Chamberlain required the word ‘adultery’ be altered to ‘perfidy’. Marvin deduces that the Lord Chamberlain judged operas by their texts and not their music, and that opera audiences were assumed to be more sophisticated and therefore less corruptible than those for drama or the music hall. See Roberta Montemorra Marvin, ‘The Censorship of Verdi's Operas in Victorian London’, Music & Letters, 82 (2001), 582–610.

123 J. H. G. B., ‘“The Wreckers”: A Rough Estimate’.

124 Filson Young, ‘The Wreckers’, Saturday Review, 26 June 1909, quoted in Kertesz, ‘Issues in the Critical Reception of Ethel Smyth's Mass and First Four Operas in England and Germany’, 256.

125 A. K. [Arthur Kalisch], ‘The Wreckers’, World, 29 June 1909, quoted in Kertesz, 256.

126 A. K. [Arthur Kalisch], ‘A Woman's Opera: “The Wreckers” in London’, Manchester Guardian, 23 June 1909, 7.

127 Shaw, review of W. E. Norris's Major and Minor, September 1887, quoted in Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship, 48. Ironically, Shaw's play Mrs Warren's Profession (1893) depicted a former prostitute in a realistic and didactic exploration of the subject of prostitution. It was banned at his first attempt to arrange a public performance, and not passed by the censor until 1924.

128 After the 1931 performance in London The Times reported that ‘most of the finest music is not that of individuals, but of the crowd of villagers who form the chorus, and it is in this that the opera shows a distinctively English style’. ‘Covent Garden Opera’, The Times, 25 September 1931, 10.

129 See excerpt from Schultz, ‘Theater und Musik: Strandrecht’, quoted in Kertesz, ‘Issues in the Critical Reception of Ethel Smyth's Mass and First Four Operas in England and Germany’, 204.

130 After the first performance of Tristan in London in 1882 The Times critic wrote that, ‘A sadder pair of lovers has, indeed, never been presented on the stage. Their passion is not happiness; it comes to them like a decree of fate, against which they vainly struggle and which leads them to death’. ‘Wagner's Tristan and Isolde’, The Times, 22 June 1882, 4.

131 Duchy Opera produced the work in Truro in November 2006. See ‘Breathing New Life into Wrecking Story’, Western Morning News (Plymouth), 3 November 2006, 6, and ‘Debating The Wreckers in Youth Workshop’, West Briton (Truro), 22 June 2006, 43.

132 Bella Bathurst, in her recent book on wrecking, concludes that the Cornish will ‘sell you the image of the false light, and tell you till the end of time that there is no such thing as a Cornish wrecker’ (Bathurst, The Wreckers, 253).

133 Harry Brewster, The Cosmopolites, 252. Harry Brewster also referred to a ‘ditch’ ‘too wide to span’ between H. B. Brewster and Smyth on the subject of religion.

134 Ethel Smyth, ‘“Better Late Than Never”’, Votes for Women, 18 November 1910, 99.

135 On 1 March and 4 March 1912, ‘bands of zealots’ (militant women suffragettes) gathered in London to demonstrate in Parliament Square before throwing rocks through the windows of shops and public properties with the intention of being sent to prison. Hundreds were arrested and all those convicted were sentenced, like Smyth, to two months with hard labour. See ‘Further Suffragist Outrages; Widespread Window Breaking; Many Arrests’, The Times, 5 March 1912, 8, and ‘Woman Suffrage; Suffragists in the Police Courts; Sentences of Hard Labour’, The Times, 6 March 1912, 6.