Overture (The Wreckers)

Smyth walked in Cornwall in 1886 and collected accounts of coastal villages that had lived off wrecked ships; nearly twenty years later she and Henry Brewster turned the material into an opera, written in French and finished in 1904. No French or English house would take it, and the premiere was given in German translation as Strandrecht at the Neues Theater in Leipzig on 11 November 1906. Thomas Beecham staged it in London in 1909; the original French text was not heard until 2022. The overture, which Smyth recorded herself in 1930, entered concert programmes far earlier.