The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (63 page)

Hysterically gag-filled, surrealist productions like Richard Jones’s at ENO or Hans Neuenfels’s at Salzburg do not make
Die
Fledermaus
any more amusing – in fact, they detract from what is essentially a boulevard farce which works best when played ‘for real’, with a cast whose members avoid the fatal temptation to fall over themselves trying to be funny.
Several attempts have been made to update the scenario and adapt the score into a musical-comedy style, substituting new titles like
Gay
Rosalinda,
A
Wonderful
Night
and
Champagne
Sec
; and there have also been frequent, if less drastic, redraftings of the libretto – the Met recently employed the veteran Broadway writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green, to little effect.

Every performance suffers from the weakness, both musical and dramatic, of the brief third act.
This weakness is often exacerbated by the tedious antics of the actor who plays the spoken role of the drunken jailor Frosch and who is traditionally allowed to spin the anticlimax out by ad libbing.

Recording

CD: Julia Varady (Rosalinde); Carlos Kleiber (cond.).
DG 415 646 2

Arthur Sullivan

(1842–1900)

The
Pirates
of Penzance,
or
The
Slave
of
Duty

Two acts. First performed New York, 1879.

Libretto by W. S. Gilbert

The
Pirates
of Penzance
was completed and first performed in New York, where Gilbert and Sullivan were presenting
HMS
Pinafore,
their first surviving full-scale collaboration.
Its score is more operatic in character and ambition than that of
Pinafore,
but in recent years has also been successfully translated into a rock idiom.

Plot

Having completed his apprenticeship and come of age, Frederic is ready to join the distinctly unfearsome pirates of Penzance and to marry his nursemaid Ruth – the only woman he has ever seen.
Instead, he decides to turn the pirates and their swashbuckling King over to justice and falls in love with Mabel, one of the daughters of Major-General Stanley, who is taking a holiday in the area.
The pirates’ plan to kidnap Major-General Stanley’s daughters is foiled when the Major-General tells the pirates that he is an orphan – a word that always sends the pirates into paroxysms of maudlin tears.

The police prepare to arrest the pirates.
Through Ruth, Frederic discovers that because he was born on 29 February in a leap year, he is legally only five and his apprenticeship will not lapse for another sixty years.
A ‘slave to duty’ and honour, Frederic is therefore bound to desert Mabel and return to his pirate indenture.
The pirates outwit the police, but yield when Queen Victoria’s name is invoked.
It then transpires that the pirates are in fact ‘all noblemen who have gone wrong’.
All is forgiven and Mabel and the under-age Frederic are united, as the pirates pair off with the rest of Major-General Stanley’s daughters.

What to listen for

The most famous number – in fact, only added at the very last minute – is Mabel’s gracefully Frenchified waltz song, ‘Poor wand’ring one’, a charming showpiece for coloratura soprano.
The Stanley girls’ chorus, ‘Climbing over rocky mountain’, is lifted from Gilbert and Sullivan’s first – and now otherwise totally lost – collaboration
Thespis.
Sullivan exploits his rare gift for counterpoint in Act II, where Mabel and Edith’s ‘Go, ye heroes, go to glory’ is matched against ‘When the foeman bares his steel’; the noble unaccompanied chorus ‘Hail, Poetry’ in Act I reminds one that Sullivan was also celebrated as the Victorians’ laureate composer of sacred anthems; and the passionate duet for Frederic and Mabel in Act II suggests that he was already aching for the broader emotional pastures of grand opera.

Major-General Stanley’s patter-song, ‘I am the very model of a modern Major-General’, has been much adapted over the years, including a brilliant version by the cabaret satirist Tom Lehrer, which incorporated the entire chemical table.

In performance

The
Pirates
of
Penzance
has always ranked as one of the most consistently popular of the G and S operettas, but it gained a new lease of life in 1980 when the American director Joseph Papp devised a brilliant rock version using synthesized instruments and turning the pirates into camply swashbuckling Errol Flynn types.
It proved a big hit on Broadway and in the West End.
Interestingly, Papp remained pretty faithful to Gilbert’s dialogue and avoided the temptation to introduce a lot of ephemeral contemporary gags.
Conventional D’Oyly Carte productions still provide plenty of innocent pleasure, however.
A little-known fact: Prince Charles played the Pirate King in a production at Gordonstoun School in 1967.

Recording

CD: Valerie Masterson (Mabel); John Reed (Major-General); Isidore Godfrey (cond.).
Decca 425 196 2

Iolanthe,
or
The
Peer
and
the
Peri

Two acts. First performed London and New York, 1882.

Libretto by W. S. Gilbert

Iolanthe
was simultaneously premièred in London and New York.
Resistance among peers to Gladstone’s Liberal reforms made the satire of the House of Lords highly topical at the time, and its political edge is still cutting.
Sullivan’s score is one of his most delightful and sophisticated.

Plot

After twenty-five years of banishment for the crime of marrying a mortal, the fairy Iolanthe is readmitted to Fairyland.
She reveals that her half-mortal son Strephon is in love with Phyllis, a ward of court who requires the Lord Chancellor’s permission in order to marry.
This he refuses to give, as he wishes to marry her himself.
Phyllis is also courted by the silly-ass Lord Mountararat and Earl Tolloler.
The fairies arrange for Strephon to stand for parliament, where he proves enormously successful.
When the Lord Chancellor persists in his desire to marry Phyllis, Iolanthe reveals that she is his long-lost wife and Strephon their son.
Fairy law requires that she dies as a result of this confession, but the Lord Chancellor’s simple amendment – ‘every fairy shall die who
doesn’t
marry a mortal’ – solves the problem.
Strephon marries Phyllis, the Queen of the Fairies marries Private Willis, the sentry outside the Houses of Parliament, and the rest of her brood all marry peers.

What to listen for

One of Sullivan’s strongest scores, and one which has much to offer a company of opera singers.
The overture is no mere medley, but a textbook example of sonata form, with a tune which does not recur when the curtain rises.
Some Wagnerian influence (via the Rhinemaidens) can be detected in the daintily sensuous music for the fairies and the brassy march
of the peers (via
Meistersinger
), while Iolanthe’s aria pleading for her son’s life, written a few days after Sullivan’s beloved mother had died, is perhaps the most heartfelt melody he ever composed.
The sparkle and vivacity of the long finale to Act I is pure operetta genius, with fourteen melodic episodes matched to some of Gilbert’s most deliciously silly rhymes: for example, ‘I ought to be more chary,/It seems that she’s a fairy‚/From Andersen’s library‚/And I took her for/The proprietor/Of a ladies’ seminary’.