Les naufrageurs is a French-language opera in three acts composed by Dame Ethel Smyth to a libretto by Henry Brewster, telling of the plundering of ships by Cornish villagers.

Tales of Cornish villagers who on stormy nights lured passing sailing ships onto their rugged coast were commonplace in the nineteenth century.

It was after a taking a walking tour in Cornwall in 1886 that the idea came to her, and for several years she visited places where the wrecking crimes were said to have been committed, interviewing anyone with evidence or memories of them.

[1] Fuller quotes from Smyth's memoirs about the pull of the subject matter: Eventually she passed her notes on to Henry Brewster, a personal friend and writer, so that he could write a libretto.

Charles Reid: "For five years Ethel Smyth, wearing mannish tweeds and an assertively cocked felt hat, had been striding about Europe, cigar in mouth, trying to sell her opera to timorous or stubborn impresarios.

[5] 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.

But it was in an inferior German translation and with severe cuts insisted upon by the conductor, Richard Hagel, particularly in the third act, which Smyth felt was turned into an "incomprehensible jumble".

When Hagel still refused to restore the cut material Smyth "took the extraordinary step of marching into the orchestra pit, removing all the parts and the full score … making further performances in Leipzig impossible.

"[1] Back in England, with Beecham's support, the opera was given at His Majesty's Theatre on 22 June 1909 with Clementine de Vere Sapio as Thirza, John Coates as Mark, Arthur Winckworth as Pascoe, Lewis James as Lawrence, and Elizabeth Amsden as Avis.

Smyth said of Mahler, "He was far and away the finest conductor I ever knew, with the most all-embracing musical instinct, and it is one of the small tragedies of my life that just when he was considering The Wreckers at Vienna they drove him from office.

A pivotal one was a semi-staging at the BBC Proms on 31 July 1994, in English, with Anne-Marie Owens as Thirza, Justin Lavender as Mark, Peter Sidhom as Pascoe, David Wilson-Johnson as Lawrence, Judith Howarth as Avis, Anthony Roden as Tallan, Brian Bannatyne-Scott as the Man, and Annemarie Sand as Jack, together with the Huddersfield Choral Society (chorus-master: Jonathan Grieves-Smith) and the BBC Philharmonic conducted by pioneering Smyth interpreter Odaline de la Martinez.

The Prom was recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall and released on the Conifer Classics label as a double CD, and re-released by Retrospect Opera in 2018.

[13][14] Three years later, in November 2018, The Wreckers was staged by Arcadian Opera at the Roxburgh Theatre, Stowe, Buckinghamshire, in England, to mark the centenary of women's suffrage in the United Kingdom and Smyth’s role in that victory.

This critically acclaimed production was conducted by Justin Lavender, who had sung the role of Mark in the Proms performance and recording, and was directed by Alison Marshall.

The performance was in Smyth’s own English translation; Mark was sung by Brian Smith Walters, Thirza by Jennifer Parker, Avis by April Frederick and Pascoe by Steven East.

The company afterwards gave a semi-staged performance in London as its annual contribution to the BBC Proms, and Ticciati went on to conduct the opera again in Berlin still in the original language: the German premiere of Les naufrageurs.

Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe presented the 1909 English version,[18] whereas the Meiningen Court Theatre's production, conducted by Killian Farrell, drew on John Bernhoff's German translation from 1906.