The Wreckers at Annandale

Sitting in the audience for Ethel Smyth's The Wreckers at Bard's Fisher Center this afternoon, it required more discipline than I possess not to think about Peter Grimes. A lot. Because it begs the question: if, in the 20th century, you were going to write an opera about a coastal village in England a hundred+ years before, is it a given that it will be an exploration of insularity and alienation? I suppose the odds are pretty good, but still...

Wreckers weather at Fisher Ctr

The Wreckers is about a hardscrabble 18th century village on the rockbound coast of Cornwall that has figured out this racket where, during storms, they extinguish the light in the lighthouse, thus vastly improving the odds that ships at sea will be driven onto the rocks. They let nature take its course, and gather up whatever washes ashore for resale. They also routinely snuff survivors. They do this with enthusiasm, and justify the whole enterprise by inventing a fairly broad interpretation of Christian religious doctrine, mostly based on the Old Testament and the whole Chosen People thing. I doubt Jesus would have approved, but they seem to have lost those chapters, so Pillar of Fire it is. Except when it gives us away, then snuff that too.

The drama revs up when a local fisherman decides he objects, and starts lighting bonfires on the shore at inconvenient times. In the judgement of the Village this is tantamount to starving their children, and they have a point there. But he also falls in love with the wife of the village parson -- whose theological off-roading is the raison d'etre for the whole thing -- and she with him, being like-mindedly uncomfortable with profiting by tragedy, much less helping it along.  They nearly run off together, possibly to America or southern Africa, where they probably imagine nobody ever heard of the Chosen People scam, but instead they end up [SPOILER ALERT] dying in a cave at high tide. It's their punishment for not getting with the program. Kind of like Aida, if Aida happened in a place with tides.

Katharine Goeldner, as Thirza the Parson's Wife, and Neal Cooper, as Mark the Village Rejectionist, have some fairly Brunnhilde/Siegfried-esque music to sing, and they managed the power and intensity required just fine. Louis Otey, as Pascoe, the village parson firm in his theological convictions but not quite so firm on the moral backbone part, was conflicted where he needed to be -- hitting up the lighthousekeeper's daughter; deciding he'd rather not have his wife tied to a post in a cave and drowned. Mr. Otey was singing under the weather, but you couldn't tell. He has a tree-trunk baritone that served the role well, and the bearing to match. Sky Ingram, as Avis, the flame-haired, jealousy-driven lighthousekeeper's daughter, has a bright soprano, and she fielded the lyric passages she's given beautifully and the more tonally complex passages with equal skill.

As in Peter Grimes, the chorus has a lot to do, both together as the collective Village, and separating out (again as in Grimes) into individual voices/characters or factions as the drama required. And this was a big chorus, about 50 strong. They had a big, full-bodied sound to match, and were well-balanced throughout, and they were fully engaged dramatically.

And more power to them, because that set can't have been easy to move around on, comprised as it is of a tumble-down ziggurat of shipping crates, interspersed by the odd loose plank. (There's a net over the orchestra in case any of these go rogue.) Set designer Erhard Rom has left the singers literally no flat, open space to work with, so there's a lot of concentration spent in minding footing. In a way this works -- characters pick their way over uneven ground in the same way you'd pick your way among algae-slick rocks at the sea shore -- and I suppose it works as metaphor as well. Still, it looks like hard labor.

Smyth's librettist, Henry Brewster, didn't leave much more than a thumbnail to hang an opera on -- you get the feeling there's a lot of detail gone missing in these characters' relationships, and a lot gets left for the audience to take as read. Director Thaddeus Strassberger fills in as best he can in the personenregie, but I'm not sure it's enough to make compelling drama of the whole. What saves it is Smyth's music, which inhabits this interesting late-Romantic space, with big crunchy orchestration, finely-detailed post-Wagnerian lyricism, and the occasional flash of similarity to her English contemporaries. (Although it's interesting that she eschewed the Cecil Sharpe route, and opted to write (if I'm not mistaken) her own traditional songs to put in her characters' mouths.)

As he often does, conductor and festival director Leon Botstein is making a case for a neglected work. There are three more performances through August 2nd. It's worth hearing him out.

Postscript

During intermission, standing in the lobby of the Richard B Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, I got a text from the Envoy telling me our uncle died this morning. He and my aunt (who died in 2005) gave financial support to the Fisher Center project in its early stages, though neither of them were ever able to experience the finished product. So I suppose it was the best of all possible places to learn of his passing. Safe home, Uncle David.

The Richard B Fisher Center for the Performing Arts