Princess Ida - WikiHQ

Princess Ida; or, Castle Adamant is a comic opera with music by Arthur Sullivan and a libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It was their eighth operatic collaboration of fourteen; the next was The Mikado. Princess Ida opened at the Savoy Theatre on 5 January 1884 and ran for 246 performances. The piece concerns a princess who founds a women's university and teaches that women are superior to men and should rule in their stead. Prince Hilarion, to whom she was betrothed in infancy, sneaks into the university, together with two friends, with the aim of collecting his bride. They disguise themselves as female students but are discovered, and all soon face a literal war between the sexes.

The opera satirizes feminism, women's education and Darwinian evolution, which were controversial topics in conservative Victorian England. Princess Ida is based on a narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson called The Princess (1847), and Gilbert had written a farcical musical play, based on the poem, in 1870. He lifted much of the dialogue of Princess Ida directly from his 1870 farce. It is the only Gilbert and Sullivan opera in three acts and the only one with dialogue in blank verse.

Though its original run was modestly profitable, by Savoy opera standards Princess Ida was not considered a success, partly because of a particularly hot summer in London in 1884, and it was not revived in London until 1919. Nevertheless, the piece is performed regularly today by both professional and amateur companies, although not as frequently as the most popular of the Savoy operas.

Background

Genesis

Scene from Gilbert's 1870 play, [[The Princess (Gilbert play)|The Princess: Hilarion and his companions, disguised as women (but played by women impersonating men) meet Princess Ida and her students.|thumb|right|350px]]

Princess Ida is based on Tennyson's serio-comic narrative poem of 1847, The Princess: A Medley. Gilbert had written a blank verse musical farce burlesquing the same material in 1870 called The Princess. He reused a good deal of the dialogue from this earlier play in the libretto of Princess Ida. He also retained Tennyson's blank verse style and the basic story line about a heroic princess who runs a women's college and the prince who loves her. He and his two friends infiltrate the college disguised as female students. Gilbert wrote entirely new lyrics for Princess Ida, since the lyrics to his 1870 farce were written to previously existing music by Offenbach, Rossini and others.

Tennyson's poem was written, in part, in response to the founding of Queen's College, London, the first college of women's higher education in the United Kingdom, in 1847. Thus, women's higher education was in the news in London, and Westfield is cited as a model for Gilbert's Castle Adamant.

Increasingly viewing his work with Gilbert as unimportant, beneath his skills and repetitious, Sullivan had intended to resign from the partnership with Gilbert and Richard D'Oyly Carte after Iolanthe, but after a recent financial loss, he concluded that his financial needs required him to continue writing Savoy operas. He also gave his consent to Gilbert to continue with the adaptation of The Princess as the basis for their next opera. The musical establishment, and many critics, believed that Sullivan's knighthood should put an end to his career as a composer of comic opera – that a musical knight should not stoop below oratorio or grand opera. Having just signed the five-year agreement, Sullivan suddenly felt trapped.

By the end of July 1883, Gilbert and Sullivan were revising drafts of the libretto for Ida. Sullivan finished some of the composition by early September when he had to begin preparations for his conducting duties at the triennial Leeds Festival, held in October. In late October, Sullivan turned his attentions back to Ida, and rehearsals began in November. Gilbert was also producing a one-act drama, Comedy and Tragedy, and keeping an eye on a revival of his Pygmalion and Galatea at the Lyceum Theatre by Mary Anderson's company. In mid-December, Sullivan bade farewell to his sister-in-law Charlotte, the widow of his brother Fred, who departed with her young family to America, never to return. Sullivan's oldest nephew, Herbert, stayed behind in England as his uncle's ward, and Sullivan threw himself into the task of orchestrating the score of Princess Ida.

Production

left|thumb|upright|[[Rosina Brandram|Brandram as Blanche]]

Princess Ida is the only Gilbert and Sullivan work with dialogue entirely in blank verse and the only one of their works in three acts (and the longest opera to that date). The piece calls for a larger cast, and the soprano title role requires a more dramatic voice than the earlier works. The American star Lillian Russell was engaged to create the title role of Princess Ida, but Gilbert did not believe that she was dedicated enough, and when she missed a rehearsal, she was dismissed. The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's usual female lead, Leonora Braham, a light lyric soprano, nevertheless moved up from the part of Lady Psyche to assume the title role. Rosina Brandram got her big break when Alice Barnett became ill and left the company for a time, taking the role of Lady Blanche and becoming the company's principal contralto. The reviewer for the Sunday Times wrote that the score of Ida was "the best in every way that Sir Arthur Sullivan has produced, apart from his serious works.... Humour is almost as strong a point with Sir Arthur... as with his clever collaborator...." The humour of the piece also drew the comment that Gilbert and Sullivan's work "has the great merit of putting everyone in a good temper." The praise for Sullivan's effort was unanimous, though Gilbert's work received some mixed notices.

Aftermath

Sullivan's close friend, composer Frederic Clay, had suffered a serious stroke in early December 1883 that ended his career. Sullivan, reflecting on this, his own precarious health and his desire to devote himself to more serious music, informed Richard D'Oyly Carte on 29 January 1884 that he had determined "not to write any more 'Savoy' pieces." Sullivan fled the London winter to convalesce in Monte Carlo as seven provincial tours (one with a 17-year-old Henry Lytton in the chorus) and the U.S. production of Ida set out.

right|thumb|250px|[[W. S. Gilbert|Bab illustration for Princess Ida]]

As Princess Ida began to show signs of flagging early on, Carte sent notice, on 22 March 1884, to both Gilbert and Sullivan under the five-year contract, that a new opera would be required in six months' time. Sullivan replied that "it is impossible for me to do another piece of the character of those already written by Gilbert and myself." Gilbert was surprised to hear of Sullivan's hesitation and had started work on a new opera involving a plot in which people fell in love against their wills after taking a magic lozenge – a plot that Sullivan had previously rejected. Gilbert wrote to Sullivan asking him to reconsider, but the composer replied on 2 April that he had "come to the end of my tether" with the operas:

Gilbert was much hurt, but Sullivan insisted that he could not set the "lozenge plot". In addition to the "improbability" of it, it was too similar to the plot of their 1877 opera, The Sorcerer, and was too complex a plot. Sullivan returned to London, and, as April wore on, Gilbert tried to rewrite his plot, but he could not satisfy Sullivan. The parties were at a stalemate, and Gilbert wrote, "And so ends a musical & literary association of seven years' standing – an association of exceptional reputation – an association unequalled in its monetary results, and hitherto undisturbed by a single jarring or discordant element." However, by 8 May 1884, Gilbert was ready to back down, writing, "...am I to understand that if I construct another plot in which no supernatural element occurs, you will undertake to set it? ... a consistent plot, free from anachronisms, constructed in perfect good faith & to the best of my ability." The stalemate was broken, and on 20 May, Gilbert sent Sullivan a sketch of the plot to The Mikado. Princess Ida was not revived in London until 1919. Some of these events are dramatised in the 1999 film Topsy-Turvy.

thumb|upright=1.0|left|Caricature of [[Charles Darwin contemplating a bustle, in Fun, 1872]]

Musical and textual analysis

The opera satirizes feminism, women's education and Darwinian evolution, all of which were controversial topics in conservative Victorian England. In the 15 years between the time that Gilbert wrote The Princess and the premiere of Princess Ida, the movement for women's education had gained momentum in Britain, with the founding of Girton College (1869) and Newnham College (1871) at the University of Cambridge; and Somerville (1878) and Lady Margaret Hall (1878) at the University of Oxford. Westfield College, a women's college in Hampstead, London, opened in 1882.

As in Patience and Iolanthe, the two previous Gilbert and Sullivan operas, Princess Ida concerns the war between the sexes. In Patience, the aesthetic-crazed women are contrasted with vain military men; in Iolanthe, the vague and flighty fairies (women) are pitted against the ineffective, dim-witted peers (men); and in Ida, overly serious students and professors at a women's university (women) defy a marriage-by-force ultimatum by a militaristic king and his testosterone-laden court (men). Princess Ida is one of several Gilbert plays, including The Wicked World, Broken Hearts, Fallen Fairies and Iolanthe, where the introduction of males into a tranquil world of women brings "mortal love" that wreaks havoc with the status quo. Stedman calls this a "Gilbertian invasion plot".

Sullivan's score is majestic, and a sequence of songs in Act II, sometimes known as the "string of pearls", is particularly well loved. Sullivan used chromatic and scalar passages and key modulations throughout the score, and commenters have called the Act II quartet "The World Is But a Broken Toy" one of Sullivan's "most beautiful, plaintive melodies." Although Gilbert's libretto contains many funny lines, Tom Lehrer performs a parody of the same song called "The Professor's Song". Music from the overture of Ida is heard in Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers.

Versions of the text

Princess Ida was not revived in London during the authors' lifetimes, and there were no substantive changes to the text after the premiere. The one alteration was purely cosmetic: the first act had originally been called a "Prologue". It was re-designated Act I, with a consequent renumbering of the remaining acts.

At around the time of the first London revival, in 1919, there were changes to the running order of Act III. As written originally, the sequence of Act III is as follows:

right|thumb|400px|"Jump for Joy and Gaily Bound!" (from Act II)

"Death to the invader"
Princess Ida addresses the girls and then dismisses them
"I built upon a rock" (Princess)
The girls re-enter, shortly followed by King Gama
"When e'er I spoke sarcastic joke" (King Gama, Ladies' Chorus)
Dialogue in which the Princess agrees to let her brothers fight for her
"When anger spreads his wing" (Double chorus)
Dialogue preceding the fight
"This helmet, I suppose" (Arac, Guron, Scynthius, Chorus)
"This is our duty plain" (Chorus during the fight)
Dialogue and finale

As re-ordered in the 1920s, the running order is as follows:

"Death to the invader"
Princess Ida addresses the girls and then dismisses them
The girls re-enter, shortly followed by King Gama
"When e'er I spoke sarcastic joke" (King Gama, Ladies' Chorus)
Dialogue in which the Princess agrees to let her brothers fight for her
"I built upon a rock" (Princess)
"When anger spreads his wing" (Double chorus)
"This helmet, I suppose" (Arac, Guron, Scynthius, Chorus)
Dialogue preceding the fight
"This is our duty plain" (Chorus during the fight)
Dialogue and finale

thumb|[[Winifred Lawson as Princess Ida, 1922]]

The Chappell vocal score was re-issued to conform to this revised order.

The other significant change is that, at some point in the 1920s, it became traditional to delete Lady Blanche's Act II song, "Come, mighty must" (although it continued to be printed in the vocal score). The song is included in the 1924 D'Oyly Carte recording, but on none of the three recordings the company made after that (1932, 1955, 1965).

History of productions

Princess Ida was not as successful as the Gilbert and Sullivan operas that had preceded it. In the midst of the unusually hot summer of 1884, Richard D'Oyly Carte closed the Savoy Theatre for a month, starting in mid-August. The opera had been running for seven months, a short period by the partnership's past standards. The opera re-opened for just three weeks, starting in mid-September, before giving way to a revival of The Sorcerer (revised) and Trial by Jury. Gilbert designed the costumes himself. Act I and Act III sets were by the Drury Lane designer Henry Emden, while the Act II set was by Hawes Craven. A New York production ran briefly in 1884, and there was a second American production in 1887. The U.S. courts held that the act of publication made the opera freely available for production by anyone. In Australia, Princess Idas first authorized performance was on 16 July 1887 at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne, produced by J. C. Williamson.

Provincial tours of Princess Ida began in early 1884 and ended by mid-1885. The opera was revived on tour in December 1895, remaining in the touring repertory through 1896. It re-appeared in late 1897 or early 1898, and from then on was never out of the D'Oyly Carte touring repertory through the early years of the twentieth century. The first London revival, however, did not come until 30 December 1919. From then on, it was included in every D'Oyly Carte touring season until the company disbanded at the outbreak of war in 1939. New costumes were designed by Percy Anderson in 1921. For the 1954 revival, the Act II line "And the niggers they'll be bleaching by and by," was changed to "And they'll practice what they're preaching by and by," to accommodate the sensibilities of modern audiences, following similar changes in other Gilbert and Sullivan works. After the 1954 revival, Princess Ida was an irregular presence in the D'Oyly Carte repertory. While it never went unperformed more than two or three seasons at a time, it was usually performed only in London and a few other major cities. The demands of the title role were considered unusual by Gilbert and Sullivan standards, and often the Company brought in guest artists to play it. The company's final performances of the opera were in February–April 1977. The company's reduced repertory in its final five seasons did not accommodate it.

The film director Ken Russell staged Princess Ida for English National Opera in 1992, conducted by Jane Glover. The radical contemporary concept involved an American-Japanese theme park version of Buckingham Palace, with a chorus of Madonna lookalikes (led by Rosemary Joshua as Ida) studying in the Tower of London; Gama (alternating Nickolas Grace and Richard Suart) operated a sushi chain. The production, unanimously reviled by critics, was quickly dropped from ENO's repertoire. Other professional companies have produced Princess Ida, including American Savoyards in the 1950s and 1960s, Light Opera of Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s, New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players since the 1980s, Ohio Light Opera (which recorded the piece in 2000), the Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in 2003 and 2009, and others.

The following table shows the history of the D'Oyly Carte productions in Gilbert's lifetime:

{|class="wikitable"

!Theatre!!Opening Date!!Closing Date!!Perfs.!!Details

|nowrap rowspan=2|Savoy Theatre||5 January 1884||15 August 1884|| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="2"|246||rowspan=2|First run

|15 September 1884||9 October 1884

|Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York||nowrap|11 February 1884||nowrap|22 March 1884||align=center|48||rowspan=2|Authorised American productions

|Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York||nowrap|22 November 1887||align=center| ||3 wks

Historical casting

The following tables show the casts of the principal original productions and D'Oyly Carte Opera Company touring repertory at various times through to the company's 1982 closure.

{| class="wikitable" style="width: 65em; font-size: 90%; line-height: 1.2"

!Role!!Savoy Theatre 1884!!Fifth Avenue 1887!!D'Oyly Carte 1920 Tour

|King Hildebrand||Rutland Barrington||Sgr Brocolini||Sgr Brocolini||Fred Billington||Leo Sheffield

|Hilarion||Henry Bracy||Wallace Macreery||Courtice Pounds||Henry Herbert||Arthur Lucas

|Cyril||Durward Lely||W. S. Rising||Phil Branson||Strafford Moss||Derek Oldham

|Florian||Charles Ryley||Charles F. Long||Stuart Harold||Leicester Tunks||Sydney Granville

|King Gama||George Grossmith||J. H. Ryley||J. W. Herbert||Henry Lytton||Henry Lytton

|Arac||Richard Temple||W. Ainsley Scott||Joseph Fay||Sydney Granville||Frederick Hobbs

|Guron||Warwick Gray||James Earley||N. S. Burnham||Fred Hewett||Joe Ruff

|Scynthius||William Lugg||E. J. Conley||L. W. Raymond||George Sinclair||George Sinclair

|Princess Ida||Leonora Braham||Cora S. Tanner||Geraldine Ulmar||Marjorie Stone||Sylvia Cecil

|Lady Blanche||Rosina Brandram||Genevieve Reynolds||Alice Carle||Bertha Lewis||Bertha Lewis

|Lady Psyche||Kate Chard||Florence Bemister||Helen Lamont||Mabel Graham||Gladys Sinclair

|Melissa||Jessie Bond||Hattie Delaro||Agnes Stone||Beatrice Boarer||Nellie Briercliffe

|Sacharissa||Sybil Grey||Eva Barrington||Edith Jennesse||Myfanwy Newell||Nancy Ray

|Chloe||Miss Heathcote||Eily Coghlan||Miss Branson||Anna Bethell||Winifred Downing

|Ada||Miss Twyman||Clara Primrose||Miss McCann||Ethel Gledhill||Nell Raymond

{| class="wikitable" style="width: 65em; font-size: 90%; line-height: 1.2"

!Role!!D'Oyly Carte 1929 Tour!!D'Oyly Carte 1939 Tour||Savoy Theatre 1954!!Savoy Theatre 1975

|King Hildebrand||Joseph Griffin||Sydney Granville||Fisher Morgan||Kenneth Sandford||Kenneth Sandford

|Hilarion||Derek Oldham||John Dudley||Thomas Round||Philip Potter||Colin Wright

|Cyril||Charles Goulding||John Dean||Leonard Osborn||David Palmer||Ralph Mason

|Florian||Leslie Rands||Leslie Rands||Jeffrey Skitch||Alan Styler||Thomas Lawlor

|King Gama||Henry Lytton||Martyn Green||Peter Pratt||John Reed||John Reed

|Arac||Darrell Fancourt||Darrell Fancourt||Donald Adams||Donald Adams||John Ayldon

|Guron||Richard Walker||Richard Walker||John Banks||Anthony Raffell||Michael Rayner

|Scynthius||L. Radley Flynn||L. Radley Flynn||Trevor Hills||George Cook||Jon Ellison

|Princess Ida||Winifred Lawson||Helen Roberts||Victoria Sladen||Ann Hood||Valerie Masterson

|Lady Blanche||Bertha Lewis||Evelyn Gardiner||Ann Drummond-Grant||Christene Palmer||Lyndsie Holland

|Lady Psyche||Sybil Gordon||Margery Abbott||Muriel Harding||Valerie Masterson||Julia Goss

|Melissa||Nellie Briercliffe||Marjorie Eyre||Beryl Dixon||Pauline Wales||Pauline Wales

|Sacharissa||Nancy Ray||Maysie Dean||Cynthia Morey||Anne Sessions||Anne Egglestone

|Chloe||Beatrice Elburn||Ivy Sanders||Margaret Dobson||Jennifer Marks||Marjorie Williams

|Ada||Nancy Hughes||Marjorie Flinn||Maureen Melvin||Elizabeth Mynett||Rosalind Griffiths

thumb|upright=1.15|Left to right: [[J. M. Gordon, Norris, Lawson, Sheffield, Lytton, Eileen Sharp and Fancourt – publicity shot for the 1924 recording]]

Recordings

Princess Ida has received fewer professional recordings than most of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company recorded the piece four times, in 1924, 1932, 1955 and 1965, but the later two recordings have not been as well received as the earlier two. The BBC broadcast the piece in 1966 and 1989, but the recordings are unavailable. Ohio Light Opera recorded the opera in 2000.

The 1982 Brent Walker Productions video is considered to be one of the weakest of the series. More recent professional productions have been recorded on video by the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival.

1924 D'Oyly Carte – Conductors: Harry Norris and George W. Byng
1932 D'Oyly Carte – Conductor: Malcolm Sargent
1955 D'Oyly Carte – Conductor: Isidore Godfrey
2000 Ohio Light Opera – Conductor: J. Lynn Thompson

Notes

References

Also, five supplements, privately printed.

External links

Princess Ida at The Gilbert & Sullivan Archive
Princess Ida at The Gilbert & Sullivan Discography
1912 libretto, with illustrations by W. Russell Flint, at the Internet Archive
Biographies of the people listed in the historical casting chart
"Tennyson's The Princess", annotated by Alexander Scutt, with a prologue and materials about the Gilbert connections (2013)
Photos and information about the 1954 production of Ida
D'Oyly Carte Prompt Books at The Victoria and Albert Museum