In his autobiographical sketch, “A Mingled Chime,” the late British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham offered this assessment of the British composer Dame Ethel Smyth: “Ethel Smyth is without question the most remarkable of her sex that I have been privileged to know. I have been told that here and there in the world there have been observed a few examples of that same fiery energy and unrelenting fixity of purpose... It may be, but they have never come my way.”

Born in 1858, Smyth became a composer against her family’s wishes, and it took both courage and dogged determination for her to succeed in getting her large-scale choral and operatic works performed in an era when most in the music business did not take female composers very seriously. That was before they met Dame Ethel, who convinced legendary conductors like Arthur Nikisch, Bruno Walter, and Sir Thomas that her music had merit.

Smyth’s opera “The Wreckers” had its premiere performance in Leipzig on today’s date in 1906, and was soon championed in England by Sir Thomas Beecham, who thought it her masterpiece. “It remains,” wrote Beecham in 1944, the year of Smyth’s death, “one of the three or four English operas of real musical merit and vitality written in the past forty years.”