The Wreckers (opera) her friend Mary Dodge. Describing the opera in the "New Grove Dictionary", Stephen Banfield notes "Its greatest strength is in its dramatic strategy, strikingly prophetic of (Britten's) "Peter Grimes" in details such as the offstage church service set against the foreground confrontation in Act 1." However, Amanda Holden makes the point that, musically, Smyth is "no Wagnerite, she makes use of his motivic technique, while the texture, orchestration, and even some of the music's dramatic density, show knowledge of the works of Richard Strauss ... but it also slips too readily into operatic convention." Old tales of Cornish villages where,
Peter Grimes the scene changes. At the hut, Grimes impatiently drives the ever silent John into changing out of his Sunday clothes and into fisherman's gear, and then becomes lost in his memories of his previous, now dead apprentice, reliving the boy's death of thirst. When he hears the mob of villagers approaching, he quickly comes back to reality, stirred both by a paranoid belief that John has been "gossiping" with Ellen, so provoking the "odd procession", and at the same time feeling defiant. He gets ready to set out to sea, and he tells John to be careful climbing down the