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Home , Charles Santley, The Lily of Killarney

Howard Glover’s Ruy Blas: harbinger of English Romantic Opera’s demise?

Russell Burdekin,

Adapted from a paper given at the Music in Nineteenth Century Britain Conference,

Canterbury Christ Church University, July 5, 2019. (September 27, 2019 - minor update and corrections)

( Two further supporting articles were written, one on the composer, Howard Glover, see http://englishromanticopera.org/composers/glover/Howard_Glover_Life_and_Career.pdf and the other on the various 19th century English adaptations of Victor Hugo’s play, Ruy Blas, see http://englishromanticopera.org/operas/Ruy_Blas/Victor_Hugo_Ruy_Blas_ and_its_19th_century_English_adaptations.pdf )

English language opera from the 19th century is not often heard today but that is not for lack of compositions. The century can be roughly divided into three. The first third was a fragmented effort mainly of adaptations and imitations with ’s the only original work still occasionally performed. The next phase, which is the focus of this talk, is sometimes labelled English Romantic Opera. It began in 1834 with the reopening of the English Opera House and proceeded in fits and starts during the next 30 or so years producing over 70 largely original , of which ’s is probably the best known. The closure of the Pyne-Harrison company in 1864 essentially marked its end, although there were a few further operas over the following two years under a short lived successor organisation. There was then a gap of nearly 10 years until Frederick Cowen’s Pauline for the Company in 1875. Cowen (241-242) put its failure partly down to its use of the dialogue and song model that was the typical format for English Romantic Opera. Although probably not justified, it underlined that that phase of English opera was over.1 For the remainder of the century major English language operas were anchored in through composed European models of various flavours.

I’m going to talk about Howard Glover, his opera, Ruy Blas, and its London history, some of the broader issues contributing to the decline of English romantic opera in the 1860s as it tried unsuccessfully to respond to changing times and the particular problem highlighted by his opera. This posed a dilemma that English romantic opera was unable to surmount and which led to its demise.

1 Charles K. Salaman, “English Opera (Concluded)”, Musical Times (1 June, 1877): 271), “musical recitation...is nevertheless now required in [English Opera’s] composition” 1

William Howard Glover2 William Howard Glover was born in 1819 in London the second son of Julia Glover one of the best known actresses of the first half of the 19th century. His father was probably John Howard Payne, American actor, playwright and author, including the words of Home Sweet Home. Glover had a good musical education on the continent and in 1842 was reported as having an opera Attila staged in Frankfurt but by the next year he was back in Britain. A rather patchy career followed including teacher, singer, violinist, pianist, conductor, critic, impresario, librettist and composer but he never made a solid success of any of them despite his obvious abilities. Partly this was due to his poor financial skills, ending up bankrupt at least three times, but also to a certain volatility of temperament. It was said of him that he stood in his own light. Even so, things took a decided turn for the worse in 1865 when accusations were made that he used his position as critic for the Morning Post to claim falsely that certain singers would take part in the concerts that he organised and on occasion to get them to perform for no fee. Because of his position, singers were said to be reluctant to complain. He left the Morning Post, some said sacked, removing his only stable source of income.

In 1868 to try to revive his fortunes, his friends paid for him and his family to go to the United States where he took up a position as conductor at Niblo’s Garden in New York. However, as Joseph Bennett (20) wrote “the habits of years could not be shaken off, and the only change was a change of place”. In 1874 a benefit concert was promoted in New York to relieve the family’s hardship. A year later he died leaving his wife and 12 children destitute. So not the happiest of lives. Ruy Blas was his only published serious opera although he also composed at least four cantatas, two operettas and a comic opera as well as numerous songs.3

The progress of Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas in London4 Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas was first staged in Paris on 8 November 1838 at the Théâtre de la Renaissance. In brief, a Spanish grandee, Don Sallust, exiled by the Queen, plots revenge by getting his servant, Ruy Blas, to impersonate an aristocrat, Don Cesar, in order to gain the Queen’s love and trust. After this has been achieved, Sallust engineers a compromising situation between Blas and the Queen to force her abdication. Blas kills Sallust but takes poison when the Queen will not forgive his deception until too late. For all that it has a convoluted and unlikely plot, Hugo included some highly charged scenes and speeches.

It seems to have been mooted for performance in London in 1840 but nothing came of it and a licence to perform it in 1845 was refused. The reason for these refusals was not any inherent problem with the play but a sensitivity that allusions might be made to Prince Albert. In 1852

2 See Burdekin (Howard Glover) for a detailed description of Glover’s life, including supporting references. 3 He appeared to have composed only one other opera, Attila (1842) but only a few excerpts were ever sung in London. His best known cantata was Tam O’Shanter (1855), Others included Hero and Leander (1850), which was originally planned as an opera, one for the marriage of the Princess Royal to Prince Frederick William of Prussia(1858) and Comala (1859). His comic opera, Aminta, the Coquette, was given in London in 1852. His operettas included Once too often (1862) and Palomita (1875). 4 See Burdekin (Victor Hugo’s) for a detailed description of the play’s British history. 2

it was again submitted for performance in French at the St James and this time allowed. However, Queen Victoria saw it and was not amused. She complained about the Queen falling in love with a footman in livery. The play was hastily withdrawn after 3 performances and a proposed English version was aborted. Eventually an English version was given at the Marylebone Theatre in 1858, which included a happy ending with the prospect of Ruy Blas’ marriage to the Queen. Three further versions followed, the best known being that of Edmund Falconer at the Princess’s Theatre in October 1860. The manuscript5 sent to the censor included the adjoining drawing to reassure him that Ruy Blas’s uniform would be that of a retainer and not of a footman.

Glover’s opera Ruy Blas Glover’s opera was scheduled to open Pyne and Harrison’s 1861 season at Covent Garden on 21 October. All too typical of Glover it actually appeared 3 days late, the singer (193) complaining that he only received his part two days before the premiere. Glover wrote his own libretto but drew on Falconer’s version that essentially followed Hugo but omitted an act and two scenes that were peripheral to the main action. Glover rearranged some episodes and added a young page to be able to inject more musical variety. Instead of poison, Ruy Blas dies of stab wounds inflicted by Don Sallust but in Glover’s version this happens when the Queen is trying to restrain Blas. Blas dispatches Sallust over the balcony and after some prevarication of her part receives the Queen’s pardon before he dies. Glover added a passing patrol alerted by the body in the street trying to force their way in in order to include a choral element to the finale. At one performance, William Harrison, the Ruy Blas, accidentally stabbed Charles Santley, the Don Sallust, during the struggle. Luckily it wasn’t serious.

The opera ran for about a month although cuts were being made after only a few performances. Then, in early 1863, it suffered the indignity of being revived in a shortened form as a curtain raiser to the pantomime. Pyne and Harrison took it on tour in May and June 1863 and excerpts were given at the Festival in September. No further performances have been found. James Davison of The Times (29 Oct 1861: 9) and the Musical World and a friend of Glover was fulsome in his praise, “helped confirm the good opinion derived from a first hearing”, except for commenting on a “superabundance of dialogue”, a frequent complaint about English opera. The Era (27 Oct 1861: 10) wrote of “the first Act [being] brought successfully, and even brilliantly, to an end” and thought that “every one who has heard [the opera] once would be eager to hear again”. However, Baily’s Monthly Magazine (1 Nov 1861: 373) while noting its apparent first night success, doubted if it was “likely long to hold a place in public favour”. Charles Santley (193) spoke of it having “one or two effective numbers but was not a success”, which is borne out by its performance history. We will return to the opera after taking a brief look at the decline of English romantic opera as reflected in the fortunes of the Pyne-Harrison company.

5 British Library, Western Manuscripts, Add MS 52995 W 3

The Pyne and Harrison company and the failure of English Romantic Opera and William Harrison first mounted their London season of English opera in 1857 at the Lyceum but moved the next year to Covent Garden, which they used usually from October to March outside of the main Italian opera season. English opera’s fortunes were very volatile even at the best of times with several managements going bankrupt over the years. These financial problems sometimes translated into hurried and poorly staged productions which exacerbated the position. Prior to Pyne and Harrison’s 1861 season the Observer (13 Oct 1861: 6) wrote of “The uncertain and anxious responsibilities of English opera management”. English opera lacked the rich supporters that Italian opera enjoyed while incurring many of its expenses. Its position received a further setback when its royal patronage ended abruptly with the death of Prince Albert on December 14, 1861. This brought to an end the possibility of a subsidy, which Prince Albert had been trying to engineer, and may well have been the turning point in their fortunes even though masked for a time by the success of ’s early in 1862.6 By the end of the following season, they indicated that they were likely to terminate their enterprise when their lease expired at the end of the 1864 season (The Standard, 23 March 1863:3). This they did and were fortunate to get out while still solvent. The root problem was a failure to draw sufficient audiences. Several reasons were cited for this.

The Morning Post (21 Mar 1864) (presumably Glover, who obviously had an axe to grind) but also others7 thought it was the lack of variety of performers and operas. Pyne and Harrison’s position as lead soloists as well as the managers was seen as a discouragement to other singers to join. They were also said to have relied too much on works from Balfe and Wallace, who provided 9 of the 12 new English operas produced during their tenure. The few new faces, like Glover, rarely tried or were rarely tried a second time. One potential new talent, , was reported as writing an opera, The Sapphire Necklace, for Pyne and Harrison’s 1864 season but their closure precluded any performance and he does not seem to have completed it.

However, the Morning Post article claimed a deeper malaise in the assumption that the English opera model was still valid or in its rather tortured language that Pyne and Harrison had made “the fatal error of supposing that a state of things belonging to an earlier and entirely different period could be carried forward with all the old success by merely extending the sphere of action”. We now unpick this a little.

English Opera was very much a child of the Georgian Era with its roots in ballad operas such as The Beggar’s Opera of 1728. Dialogue and song was the predominant format by the early 19th century. The plots were usually melodrama with a happy ending sometimes rather contrived as in Balfe’s Joan of Arc. The dialogue, as in Glover’s case, was often overlong as librettists took their lead from spoken drama8 and often facile and clumsy as the meagre rewards

6 Pyne and Harrison appeared to reject the impact of Prince Albert’s death in their end of season address on March 22, 1862 that pointed to a successful season even “though for a time an unavoidable gloom was cast over us in the irreparable loss of the great Patron...the Prince Consort” (The Era 23 Mar 1862:13). 7 The Examiner (26 Mar. 1864: 200), The Standard (21 Mar 1864: 3) 8 The Standard (13 June 1859: 6) thought that the use of dialogue encouraged librettists to attempt to cover too much. The performances were also undermined by indifferent acting and speaking skills - The Times (11 Nov 1864: 8), The Examiner (26 Mar 1863:200) 4

did not attract either talent or care. The songs were simple, often strophic ballads, and tended to be generalised in content and emotion often with a strong nostalgic feel. Their strength was in melody for their aim was to generate sales of the vocal scores to the wider domestic audience as publisher’s fees were the main source of a composer’s income at this time. This militated against emotional and dramatic intensity, which showed up starkly when compared to the latest continental operas of Verdi and Gounod. It was no doubt why the Examiner (26 Mar 1864: 200) in its obituary for the Pyne and Harrison company gave the answer “None whatever” to the question “what music have we which will live in the operas?”.

Glover’s Ruy Blas’s part in this failure Glover’s Ruy Blas was a mild attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to strike out in a new direction. While it was hardly new for English opera to take a current popular play as a starting point, Hugo’s play was definitely richer fare than usual. This was more Verdi territory, who apparently considered it at one point. Perhaps Glover recognised that tastes were changing following the success of Verdi’s , (also based on Hugo) and La Traviata in the 1850s. However, he backed away from meeting the challenges of the play’s powerful speeches and radical sentiments. For example, as with most other adapters, he attempted to cloud the moral implications of a relationship between Blas and the Queen as a married woman. However, he did resist having a happy ending, the only English Romantic Opera that did not have one but the music still looked to domestic sales and included the “maudlin ballads” that he had previously complained of (Morning Post 21 Dec 1859: 4).

Amongst the critical responses was an interesting comment from the Morning Post (26 October 1861), one assumes by someone other than Glover although the awkward language suggests that it might be. It remarked that “a grand serious subject like that of ‘Ruy Blas’ loses by the interchange of media”, i.e. the move back and forth between dialogue and music, because it interrupted the concentration. The dialogue and song format, as then conceived, lacked the ability to increase and sustain musical tension. Some tried to compensate for this by including extended episodes of music, recitative and song at critical junctures – itself an admission of dialogue and song’s shortcomings. A notable example of this was Edward Loder’s Raymond and Agnes (1855) but his death in 1859 meant that he was never able to build on it and perhaps give English opera a new impetus. While the Morning Post (13 June 18549: 5), presumably Glover, praised the opera he did not see it as an attempt to break out of the form’s straitjacket and something to be emulated by other English opera composers such as himself. In fact, he singled out the ballads as its chief virtue. Some English romantic opera was through composed but it still focussed mainly on individual numbers and suffered from the same anodyne qualities.9

Thus not only did English opera not reach the emotional and musical heights of much continental opera but its current format meant that it was unlikely ever to do so. The problem was that dialogue and song format was often seen as intrinsic to English opera, a symbol of

9 Arnold Smith saw this musical and emotional tepidness as the result of the restrictive middle class morality that overtook the . However, even back in 1825, the Quarterly Music Magazine (1825: 411) had judged English singing inferior to Italian because it lacked passion, a question that was still preoccupying Edward Dent a 100 years later. 5

Englishness for some and to be defended against foreign predominantly Italian opera. However, this antagonism seems to have weakened in the 1860’s perhaps because of the wider availability of Italian opera in London (Gruneisen 4) that might have undercut the past divisive political and social criticism and weakened any appeal to nationalist sentiment.

While one might understand why English Romantic Opera changed comparatively little over its 30 years, the country was most decidedly changing. The 1850s and 1860s, sometimes called the high noon of Victorianism (Clark 31), were a period of transition during which, under a comparatively calm and prosperous surface, Britain finally turned its back on the violence and instability of the Georgian era and moved towards the recognisable trappings of the modern state with its mass society and mass culture. The rapid growth of population together with its rising prosperity and the revolution in transport changed the nature of audiences. The expanding press provided them with greater information and opinion. The theatre started to cast off its doubtful reputation and there was a resurgence of theatre going and theatre building. The music hall came into being and its numbers grew rapidly. New forms of entertainment such as Offenbach’s opera bouffe and small scale chamber operas appeared and old forms, such as burlesque, were reinvigorated. Melodramas with their copious music became more sensational. Operettas continued to thrive and orchestral music began to make an increasing impact. Outdated and moribund English Romantic Opera was unable to sustain its audiences in the face of such competition, particularly given that, in 1865, Wallace died and Balfe retired, thus removing its two mainstays.

However, dialogue and song did not die. Opera Bouffe, operettas, comic opera and later musical comedy and musicals10 all used it and continue to use it. These typically needed fewer and cheaper resources while still providing the catchy, sentimental songs but without the often plodding and overlong dialogue. There were no pretensions to compete with serious through composed continental operas, which increasingly began to be seen as “art” and something apart from the general run of entertainment. English romantic opera’s dilemma was in being too prim and lightweight for the former but too expensive and earnest for the latter and caught between them disappeared.

10 Kurt Ganzl included key English Romantic operas as examples of musicals and Michael Hurd (312) implied much the same. However, while the formats have much in common, English Romantic Opera required singers with high standards of vocal training, even if it did not always get it, whereas musicals tended to use singing actors, nowadays often miked. Further English Romantic Opera was seen for much of its history, at least in some quarters, as a complementary art form to Italian Opera, something that the musical was not. However, more recently this relationship has come under greater scrutiny and challenge (e.g. the discussion in Block (“Broadway Canon”; Enchanted Evenings xiii – xviii, 3-16) and some musicals have become part of opera house repertoires, e.g. Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd at the . 6

Bibliography

Bennett, Joseph. Forty Years of Music. London: Methuen & Co., 1908. Block, Geoffrey, “The Broadway Canon From 'Show Boat' To 'West Side Story' and The European Operatic Ideal”, Journal of Musicology, Vol 11, No. 4 (Autumn 1993): 525- 544. Available at https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e14f/793fcc699af56143f58db21f324c487f2f88.pdf (1993) [Accessed June 27, 2019] Block, Geoffrey, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical From Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (New York: OUP, 2009) Burdekin, Russell. Howard Glover’s Life and Career. Available at http://englishromanticopera.org/composers/glover/Howard_Glover_Life_and_Career.pd f (September 2021) [Accessed September 20, 2021) Burdekin, Russell. Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas and its 19th century English adaptations. Available at https://www.englishromanticopera.org/operas/Ruy_Blas/Victor_Hugo_Ruy_Blas_and_i ts_19th_century_English_adaptations.pdf (September 2021) [Accessed September 20, 2021) Clark, G. Kitson, The Making of Victorian England. (London: Methuen, 1985) Cowen, Frederic, My Art and My Friends. (London, Edward Arnold, 1913) Dent, Edward J., “On the Composition of English Songs”, Music & Letters. Vol. 6, No. 3 (Jul. 1925): 224-235. Gänzl, Kurt, The Musical: A Concise History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997) Gruneisen, C.L., The Opera and the Press (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1869) Hurd, Michael, ‘Opera 1834 - 1865’, The Romantic Age, 1800-1914: Music in Britain. ed. By Nicholas Temperley (Oxford: Basil Blackwood Ltd., 1988): 307–29. Mero, Alison, “The Climate for Opera in London”, Musicians of Bath and Beyond. ed. by Nicholas Temperley Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2016): 58-73. Santley, Charles, Student and Singer (London: Edward Arnold, 1893) Smith, Arnold Ian, The Essence of Victorian Opera (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2014)

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