The last time America heard an Ethel Smyth opera was at NYC's Metropolitan Opera. Die Wald (The World) opened June 1903. It has taken 119 years to hear another one. Houston Grand Opera presents Ethel Smyth The Wreckers (1906), an absolute marvel. Where has she been and what has taken so long?

Ethel Smyth was an exceptional woman by any standard in any age. She was a Dame of the British Empire, the only woman composer until 2016 to have a work performed at the Metropolitan Opera and London's Royal Opera, an ardent suffragette, a beloved friend and rebuffed lover of Virginia Woolf, a friend and colleague to Brahms and Arthur Sullivan, a writer of several autobiographies that were best sellers in their time, an honorary Doctor from the University of Oxford, and a lover of tweeds, cigars, and sheepdogs.

Feisty, incorrigible, headstrong to a fault, she was too much for the eminent Victorians and uptight Edwardians. Her music, often praised, was more likely damned with faint praise. She was a “lady composer,” an English lady composer, and that combination was looked upon as unseemly, if not a dead end of a career. When she wrote passionate or violent passages, she was scorned as not feminine enough; when she penned lilting love songs, she was panned as too feminine. She couldn't win, and her works were brutally neglected even during her lifetime.

Lately she has found needed respect, but only a handful of her works have been recorded – mostly in the last five years – but the damage has been done. She isn't mentioned in the mother of all musical encyclopedias Grove Dictionary of Music (and that's a British publication); and she's nowhere to be found in Mayer's The Met, Abbate and Parker's A History of Opera, Batta's Opera, or the definite synopsis tome Kobbė's Opera Book. Smyth receives a short citation in Rosenthal's and Warrick's Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music and one sentence, in the Annals section, in Brockway and Weinstock's The World of Opera. She gets better coverage on Google.

So, to HGO's eternal credit, here is her masterpiece, or the work she most esteemed and thought would outlast her. That's an understatement. Unless things change, it is the only work she'll be known for. And that's a damn shame, for the opera's complex harmonies, jagged rhythms, expert lush orchestrations, those climatic chorus numbers, and thrilling theatricality, is truly unique in the opera rep. It is a rare gem, given a gorgeous setting under HGO's master hands. This is Tiffany quality.

Yes, there are wisps of Wagner, Elgar, Bizet, the diaphanous transparency of Debussy, but in 1906 who wasn't influenced by these giants. The touches of English folk music add piquant charm, but the whole work has its own special quality, a turbulence and driving force that's unbeatable. Some of her phrases don't go where you might think they should go, they throw you off but in a good way. Maybe it's the English translation that veers against the music. The original was written in French by her lover and librettist Henry Brewster, because they both thought that the suave Parisians, where they hoped the opera would premiere, would be more accepting of a woman composer. They weren't. The opera premiered in Leipzig. Symth wrote her own English translation later. This version is by Amanda Holden, and the scanning is choppy and rhymes incessantly. It doesn't flow with Symth's odd phrasing.

The Wreckers is very distinctive, sounding like no one else's music. The preludes to each act are especially effective, tone poems to rival Richard Strauss or Benjamin Britten: a storm scene and aftermath, a rocky promontory above the Cornish coast, a clammy cave that will be the lovers' tomb. It’s all highly evocative, windswept then jaunty, brutal then gentle as a sea breeze, dramatic then homespun. The chorus work, a Smyth specialty, under director Richard Bado, is exemplary – full throttle then hushed with deadly pallor. Under the loving hands of maestro Patrick Summers, the orchestra dynamics are equally impressive, with subtle textures spinning underneath, such as oboes and bassoons purring or the horns caressing a sea shanty or prayer. Smyth is a master orchestrator, as good, dare I say, as any man.

We're in a hardscrabble village on the Cornish coast where the religious community, slapping the face of God, wrecks ships for their salvage, justifying their action to feed themselves. The preacher's wife Thirza (mezzo Sasha Cooke, she of the velvet sheen) loves Mark (tenor Norman Reinhardt, not much vocal sheen opening night). Lighthouse keeper's daughter Avis (soprano Mané Galoyan, high-strung with excellent voice to match) also loves Mark, but he has ditched her for Thirza, and that brings the necessary drama.

Whenever a storm brews, the lighthouse is extinguished and the wayward ships crash on the rocks, easy pickings for the villagers, who show no compunction in killing anyone on board. (And they're supposed to be the forerunners of Methodists.) However, someone has been lighting warning pyres on the cliff that steer the ships to safety. Who's the traitor?

Avis blames the Preacher Pascoe (baritone Reginald Smith, Jr., of the booming voice) to implicate Thirza. The love triangle is a good one, with the chorus as another character ready to denounce, threaten, or bring the culprit to swift justice. To save the innocent Pascoe, the lovers declare their guilt and their illicit affair to the stunned villagers, who demand that they be chained inside the cave to drown with the rising tide. In a stunning coup de theatre, they face the morning sun together as the waves crash around them. It's an ending as visually clever as Aida's.

Cooke's powerful and silvery voice matches her tempestuous character, rather like a salt-encrusted amoral Carmen. She's in a loveless marriage to a prig of a preacher twice her age. She wants love. Reinhardt was absent opening night, in voice and character. This demanding part needs a Seigfried to do Smyth justice. He was overwhelmed by her.

Galoyan was bitch supreme as Avis, shimmying around and then flirting with innocent local Jack (mezzo Sun-Ly Pierce, very fine in the pants role). She goes mad with love with conviction. Smyth gives Avis a touch of Bizet's “Habanera” in her sultry tempting of Mark. The other characters, Lawrence the lighthouse keeper, Tallen the pub owner, and Harvey, Lawrence's brother-in-law, were perfectly seaworthy as sung by Daniel Belcher, Paul Groves, and Luke Sutliff.

HGO's production of The Wreckers is a stunner, from its expressionistic scrim of raging storm to the atmospheric rock sets and cloud projections by Christopher Oram, lit with mist and firelight by Marcus Doshi. The stone walls of the harbor were so authentic, the iron mooring rings dripped rust deposits. (In the credits, just so you know, the exquisite withy pots [lobster or crab traps made of willow] and the line baskets were handmade in Cornwall. They are works of art.)

Dame Ethel Smyth is the unheralded girl in the chorus who goes on stage and becomes a star. What a knockout. What a performance. When is the next Smyth opera to be scheduled, HGO? No one should have to wait another 119 years.

The Wreckers continues Sunday, October 30, at 2 p.m. and Saturday, November 5; Wednesday, November 9, and Friday, November 11, at 7:30 p.m. at Wortham Theater Center, 501 Texas. For more information, call 713-228-6737 or visit hgo.org. $20 - $210.