National Orchestra of Wales

Dame Ethel Smyth's Opera, The Wreckers, produced in Leipzig in 1906, and in London in 1909, is about the wild Cornish coast-dwellers of the eighteenth century. The piece now to be played is the Prelude to the Second Act of the Opera.
The Composer has herself given a description of the background of the story and of the music, thus:
'Thirza, the beautiful young wife of the elderly headman of a Cornish village in the eighteenth century, is detested by the community, which she in turn abhors. She has a lover, Mark, whom she has persuaded to light warning beacons down the coast on stormy nights, when it is the habit of the wreckers to extinguish the lighthouse lantern in order that ships may founder on the rocks. Having gathered (in Act I) that suspicion is rife, Thirza steals forth in the night to warn her lover, who she knows will be lighting a beacon in a distant creek. A great love-scene ensues, in which she consents to flee with him, and, as a final act of defiance, kindles the bonfire with her own hands, while both sing the melody, "Flame of love", on which this Prelude is based. Its purport is a summary of their love story'.
In the end, the lovers are imprisoned by the sea in a cave, and are united only in death.