Our second visit to the works of Gilbert and Sullivan sees us return to Iolanthe for our first offering. Lord Chancellor who is the main protagonist (“The law is the true embodiment”). is appealed to by the peers to decide who will have the hand of Phyllis with whom they are all smitten. The Lord Chancellor hesitates to act upon his own regard for Phyllis due to his position as her guardian. In Act Two, The Lord Chancellor arrives dressed for bed and describes a nightmare caused by his unrequited love for Phyllis (“Love, unrequited, robs me of my rest”).
Princess Ida; (or, Castle Adamant) is a comic opera with music by Gilbert and Sullivan. It was their eighth operatic collaboration of fourteen. Princess Ida opened at the Savoy Theatre in January 1884, for a run of 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. The prince to whom she had been married in infancy sneaks into the university, together with two friends, with the aim of collecting his bride. They disguise themselves as women students, but are discovered, and all soon face a literal war between the sexes. The opera satirises feminism, women’s education and Darwinian evolution, which were controversial topics in conservative Victorian England. By Savoy Opera standards, Princess Ida was not considered a success due, in part, to a particularly hot summer in London in 1884, and it was not revived in London until 1919.
The Mikado (or, The Town of Titipu) is a comic opera in two acts and is the ninth of fourteen operatic collaborations. It opened in 1885, in London, where it ran at the Savoy Theatre for 672 performances, the second-longest run for any work of musical theatre and one of the longest runs of any theatre piece up to that time. The Mikado is the most internationally successful Savoy opera and has been especially popular with amateur and school productions. Setting the opera in Japan, an exotic locale far away from Britain, allowed Gilbert to satirise British politics and institutions more freely by disguising them as Japanese.
The little list song is a clasic of it’s type but courted controvesry with some of it’s references such as “the lady novelist” (referring to writers of fluffy romantic novels; these had been lampooned earlier by George Eliot) and “the lady from the provinces who dresses like a guy”, where guy refers to the dummy that is part of Guy Fawkes Night, meaning a tasteless woman who dresses like a scarecrowe. In the 1908 revival Gilbert allowed substitutions for “the lady novelist”. To avoid distracting the audience with references that have become offensive over time, lyrics are sometimes modified in modern productions. Changes are also often made, especially in the little list song, to take advantage of opportunities for topical jokes. Richard Suart, a singer well known in the role of Ko-Ko, published a book containing a history of rewrites of the little list song, including many of his own.
The Mikado’s song – “A More Humane Mikado” was almost ommitted from the opera. Gilbert had come to dislike it, but was persuaded by the cast to re-instate it for the first night. It has proved to be a great crowd pleaser ever since.
