They are the very models of the operetta's gentlemen
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4/10/2008 - 4/11/08
When it comes to steadfast theatrical popularity, nothing much matches the 14 operettas that librettist W.S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan wrote together. Not only were they wildly acclaimed in Victorian England and the late-19th-century world, but they have kept their glimmer.G & S, as both the composers and their output are known, have ridden endless waves of fad and fancy for more than a century. The operettas have the ability to extrude benign artistic tentacles and scoop up new fans without effort at any time and place. Today, 97 years after Gilbert's death and 108 after Sullivan's, they remain at the top of the performance tree. Beloved by professionals and amateurs alike, the works are regularly mounted in venues ranging from community theaters to world-famous opera houses.
There are Gilbert & Sullivan Societies in Cape Town, South Africa; Torrevieja, Spain; Weston-super-Mare, England; Hobart, Tasmania in Australia; and Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada. There are also societies in Rome, Geneva, Utrecht, Zürich, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Dallas, and Houston. Not to be upstaged are Yale University, Cambridge University, Brown University, and the University of Michigan. And those are just a few of the many that can be found on the Internet.
Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, New York City Opera, and English National Opera regularly mount selections from the canon. The Santa Fe Opera produced two G & S works in winter 2001 and 2002 — H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. It hasn't done one during the summer season. But you never know.
The London-based Carl Rosa Opera Company, currently touring the U.S. with a variety of G & S gems, performs The Mikado for the Santa Fe Concert Association at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 17, in the Lensic Performing Arts Center. A 10-year-old professional performing group, the Rosa revived the 19th-century touring company founded by violinist-conductor Carl Rosa and his wife, soprano Euphrosyne Parepa. The costumes in this particular production are from the delightful 1999 movie about Gilbert and Sullivan, Topsy Turvy, which faithfully recreated the original dresses made for The Mikado's 1885 premiere.
G & S are all over the Internet. Google "Gilbert & Sullivan" and you get more than half a million references. They range from Wikipedia articles to scholarly papers, from worldwide performance information to performer biographies, and from CD-DVD offers to blogosphere commentary. Information on all the operas can be found, too. One of the best and most accurate sites is The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, which can be found at http://math.boisestate.edu/GaS/.
Why did people flock to enjoy the operettas then, and why do they love them now? How did they make fortunes not only for G & S but also for impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte? (He built the Savoy Hotel and the Savoy Theatre in London's West End, where the operas reigned. He also established his own touring company that took the works global and survived until 1982; a new version of the company staged productions from 1988 to 2003.) In sum, why are the "Savoy operas" so popular?
For one thing, they are the epitome of sung, English-language high comedy. Their amusing plots and farcical situations, buoyed by Gilbert's clever lyrics and Sullivan's simple but memorable music, unfold predictably but slyly. Add to that their generally exotic settings, which are tanti-lizing — or everyday settings given a heightened gloss.
In addition, all the roles offer players of every age and type a chance to shine, sing, and chew the scenery. G & S wrote for specific actors, including Jessie Bond, Richard Temple, George Grossmith, Durward Lely, Leonora Braham, Rutland Barrington, and Rosina Brandram, so each part in each operetta is an example of typecasting at its finest and most demanding. Those who yearn to master the roles must field exquisite diction, good vocal control whether speaking or singing, and the ability to take and hold the stage against all comers. Of course, actors must also blend into the many ensembles when needed. G & S shows are nothing if not well-balanced.
The soprano ingenue is sure to get at least one sweet solo, sometimes with lots of coloratura, and a number of romantic duets with the young-hero tenor. Think of Yum-Yum and Nanki-Poo in The Mikado, Josephine and Ralph in H.M.S. Pinafore, and Mabel and Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance, and you'll get the idea.
The traditional "older woman" is always a comic character and a deep contralto, with the chance to drop humorous or naughty remarks everywhere while throwing her weight around: The Fairy Queen in Iolanthe, Lady Jane in Patience, Little Buttercup in H.M.S. Pinafore, and of course, Katisha in The Mikado.
The comic baritone parts, written for Grossmith, feature the tongue-twisting "patter songs" sung by such characters as Major-General Stanley in Pirates and John Wellington Wells in The Sorcerer. The other baritones, and the basses, are usually given characters of more stately or ironic humor, including Poo-Bah and Pish-Tush in The Mikado, Captain Corcoran in H.M.S. Pinafore, and the Chief of Police in Pirates.
Composer and librettist were famous feuders, so besides his work with Gilbert, Sullivan collaborated on musical theater with other authors, wrote a successful ballet for Queen Victoria's 1897 Diamond Jubilee, and also produced incidental music for plays. But he always wanted establishment approval and sought it with oratorios like The Golden Legend and the rather unwieldy grand opera Ivanhoe, with only modest success. When he received his knighthood in 1883, it was for his academic and serious works, not the operettas.
There's one more reason for the successes of G & S. For all their fun and frolic — what Gilbert called "topsy-turveydom" — the operettas have a satirical bent. They were topical and thus timely, with in-jokes that contemporary audiences adored, crafted with razor-sharp pens. That edge still comes through today.
H.M.S. Pinafore satirized their Lordships of the Admiralty, who were going through a bad publicity patch at the time. Patience poked fun at such proponents of the Aesthetic movement as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. The Mikado, for all its Japanese locale (Gilbert was inspired by an exhibition of Asian culture in London), is a sendup of stuffy British aristocracy. And so it went — and goes — with plenty of laughter in the background.
By the way: If you can't get enough of G & S, or The Mikado is sold out by the time you call the Lensic, the Carl Rosa Opera Company plays H.M.S. Pinafore at Popejoy Hall, on The University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 16. Tickets are $31 to $45; call 877-664-8661.
details
Santa Fe Concert Association presents the Carl Rosa Opera Company in The Mikado
7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 17
Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St.
$30-$85, 988-1234
Intercontinental cross-stitching
The comic opera The Mikado turns Japanese culture inside out to spoof late-19th-century Britain. An examination of some Japanese textiles in the collection of theum of International Folk Art shows that W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were not alone in using characters from foreign lands to make points easily understood by local audiences — Japanese artists played fast and loose with images of Westerners.
A pair of 19th-century fireman's trousers is decorated with two paintings of wide-eyed, red-headed men with beards, big noses, and bushy eyebrows. The paintings are part of a tradition that can be traced to Dutch and Portuguese traders during the 16th century, according to Tamara Tjardes, former curator of Asian and Middle Eastern collections at the museum and coauthor of One Hundred Aspects of the Moon: Japanese Woodblock Prints by Yoshitoshi.
In 19th-century Japan, foreigners were seen as inferior but exotic and mysterious, Tjardes said, and images like those on the fireman's pants weren't intended to be goofy. "There was a certain reverence for Western military might." The red-headed men probably represented power, much like the dragon on a fireman's coat, also in the museum's collection.
When The Mikado first opened in 1885, European and American designs and ideas hadn't yet influenced Japan, Tjardes added. But Westerners were already getting glimpses of Japanese textiles and ceramics through scenes depicted on woodblock prints. The Japanese aesthetic quickly became a powerful force in art, architecture, and design throughout Europe and the United States, as ideas bounced from Asia to the West and back again.
Europeans drew heavily on Japanese design to create Art Nouveau, a movement that was later embraced in Japan, Tjardes said. Japanese kimonos from the 1920s through the 1940s reflected Art Nouveau. Dutch de Stijl artists and German and Russian artists associated with the Bauhaus borrowed from Japan, and, in turn, Japanese designers and architects copied de Stijl and Bauhaus designs.
It took a while for anyone to realize how much cross-fertilization was taking place, Tjardes noted. "There was so much going on — such an expansion of boundaries. The change from a feudal society to an industrial society was extraordinary, and it pretty much had everyone's head spinning."
The Westernizing of Japan created a nostalgic, nationalistic backlash, Tjardes continued. "From the late 19th century through the mid-20th century, those who wanted nothing to do with the West recycled poetry and iconic stories on kimonos or on the linings of more somber outer robes." The most popular scenes were from the Heian period (794-1185). Japanese nationalists saw the Heian as an era that represented Japan's pure roots, before Chinese ideas and culture swept over the island, Tjardes explained.
Those two radically different reactions, embracing a trendy exoticism or rejecting all things Western and retreating into nationalism, ran through Japanese culture well into the first half of the 20th century, when the nationalists gained the upper hand, Tjardes said. And in many ways their long-simmering reaction set the stage for Japan's role in World War II. — Elizabeth Cook-Romero