Wilde Opera Nights
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WILDE OPERA NIGHTS W. S. GILBERT AND ARTHUR SULLIVAN’S OR, BUNTHORNE’S BRIDE CONDUCTED BY GIL ROSE STAGE DIRECTION BY FRANK KELLEY GILBERT AND SULLIVAN’S PATIENCE 1 DIRECTOR’S WELCOME Oscar Wilde didn’t spare his fellow literary types his razor- sharp quips. He once said “all art is quite useless” For the final installment of our Wilde Opera Nights season, we turn to a subject near and dear to our hearts: satirizing artists! And who brings a more Wildean sensibility to the task than the famous duo of Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert? Their comic operas, replete with wit, wordplay, and wacky happenings, bring us face-to-face with the ridiculousness of human society, laughing all the way. Patience; or, Bunthorne’s Bride romps through the Victorian circles that Wilde both frequented and mocked— and in fact, the rumor persists that Wilde himself was one of the inspirations behind the characters of Bunthorne and Grosvenor. PHOTO CREDIT: IRENE HAPUT It’s only natural that we’d come full circle on our voyage, where the master of wit becomes its object! And we return again to the fair isle of Britain, where traditions and social sensibilities are paramount, where culture and decorum are ripe for both admiration and mockery. Flowery verses, reveries, sighing maidens, infatuation, and marching military boots are the COVER IMAGE © TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM classic ingredients of high art and of silliness! So sit back and laugh—but you might want to look over your shoulder. It could easily be you too, lover of art, that finds yourself looking in the mirror of absurdity. In the end, Wilde says, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” No matter what, it’s my pleasure to share the foibles and rewards of art and life with you. Cheers, Gil Rose, Artistic & General Director GILBERT AND SULLIVAN’S PATIENCE 1 DIRECTOR’S NOTE “Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera, Patience, was performed for the first time in New-York What interests me in this wonderfully textured look at humanity is the struggle at the Standard Theatre, last evening, with such excellence as to leave no room for between conformity or “movements” and non-conformity or “individualism”. doubt that it will become a favorite with the public.” (New York Times September 23, Oscar Wilde, whom many claim (probably erroneously) is the model for Bunthorne, 1881) was the most memorable and outspoken of the individualists of the 1880s He preached freedom from moral restraint and the limitations of society. He believed Patience; or Bunthorne’s Bride was a huge success in London where it ran for 578 that “man makes the times-the times do not make the man.” “Art is superior to performances (across two theaters in London, the Opera Comique and the Savoy), Nature” and “an artist’s life is his most important body of work.” All of these could the longest save for The Mikado. The producer Richard d’Oyly Carte, wanting to easily be imagined as Bunthorne’s outlook. replicate that success in America, yet being concerned that audiences there would not appreciate the subject matter of the operetta, recruited Oscar Wilde to pave Save for Patience, everyone is either conforming to a mass hysteria for things the way with a series of lectures on the Aesthetic movement. This proved to be “aesthetical” or belonging to a regiment, the most conformist of life-styles. At another instance of his savvy business acumen. The New York production had 177 the end of the play it is Bunthorne alone who remains true to his vision—all the performances. others have followed Archibald: “if the All-Right chooses to discard aestheticism, it proves that aesthetics ought to be discarded”. They are followers, Bunthorne is the One of the 94 lectures took place in Boston. “On January 31, Wilde was to speak at individual. One can claim that Patience is also an “individual”, that she is “pure” the Music Hall in Boston. Sixty Harvard students decided to parody Wilde’s clothes and never bought into the craze, and indeed this is what makes her so attractive and manners. When the auditorium was nearly full, the students, each dressed to Bunthorne. But she is pure and individual out of “circumstance” and not out of like Bunthorne, paraded in pairs down the center aisle to their seats in the front “conviction” to use a Gilbert construction. She is a working girl who “earns her rows, swishing sunflowers and lilies as they went. Wilde, who had been tipped off, living” and has not the leisure to even consider joining movements. Bunthorne appeared in conventional evening dress. After welcoming the students and the rest is drawn to an “idea” of purity, an “idea” of non-conformity that is expressed of the audience, he drolly commented, “Caricature is the tribute that mediocrity in Patience. He is objectifying her, and does not love Patience the woman—this pays to genius.” This won loud applause from the entire audience. He then sighed is what Patience sees and cannot accept: “I am quite certain that, under any a quiet prayer, “Save me from my disciples,” which again evoked enthusiastic circumstances I couldn’t possible love you.” applause.” (Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Stanley P. Baldwin) With Patience Gilbert and Sullivan struck out on a new musical path, leaving behind Patience is a sophisticated often savage skewering of societal norms. It parodies the string of ‘numbers’ parodying Verdi and Donizetti, and building something fashion, fancy, vanity, poetry, love, dilettantism, and mostly Aestheticism, the that was more thematically unified across the entirety. They did, however, not leave cultural movement that swept Britain in the 1870s and 1880s and that had a sister comedy behind. A reading of the libretto in the quiet of one’s home is guaranteed to movement in France known alternately as Symbolism or Decadence. Prominent make one laugh out loud. It is a humor complete from the outset, the lines are ready artists associated with the movement(s) include: William Morris, Algernon Charles for the playing. I have tried to remember the critic’s warning when speaking of the Swinburne, James McNeil Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Charles Baudelaire, players in a New York revival: “It is better to let Mr. Gilbert make them funny than Stéphane Mallarmé, and Edgar Allen Poe. The paintings of Edward Burne-Jones to try and make Mr. Gilbert funny” (The Times April 5, 1907). and Puvis de Chavannes’ murals in the Boston Public Library were inspirational for this production. I hope you enjoy our show as much I have enjoyed living in Bunthorne’s world. —Frank Kelley 2 ODYSSEYOPERA.ORG GILBERT AND SULLIVAN’S PATIENCE 3 GILBERT AND SULLIVAN’S PATIENCE OR, BURTHORNE’S BRIDE Music by Arthur Sullivan Act I – Exterior of Castle Bunthorne Odyssey Opera Orchestra and Chorus Libretto by W. S. Gilbert Intermission Aaron Engebreth Reginald Bunthorne Gil Rose, Conductor Paul Max Tipton Archibald Grosvenor Frank Kelley, Stage director Act II – A Glade Sara Heaton Patience Janna Baty Lady Jane Sung in English James Maddalena Colonel Calverley June 2 & 3, 2017 at 7:30pm Steven Goldstein Lieut. The Duke of Dunstable Huntington Avenue Theatre Run Time: Two hours with Jaime Korkos Lady Angela 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston one 15-minute intermission. Sara Womble Lady Ella Heather Gallagher Lady Saphir Sumner Thompson Major Murgatroyd Jesse Martin Solicitor Amanda Mujica Costume Designer Dan Daly Scenic Designer Christopher Ostrom Lighting Designer Rachel Padula-Shufelt Hair and Make-up Designer WILDE OPERA NIGHTS SEASON SPONSORED BY RANDOLPH J. FULLER 4 ODYSSEYOPERA.ORG GILBERT AND SULLIVAN’S PATIENCE 5 PROGRAM NOTES AUTHORS BY LAURA STANFIELD PRICHARD In this heady climate, Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) began a career as a composer of both “serious” music (he had trained in the Chapel Royal, the Royal Academy English ballad opera, Italian opera, and French-style operetta thrived in England of Music, and in Leipzig on a Mendelssohn scholarship) and of “light” music (his before the revolutions of the 1770s-90s, but in 1843, Parliament clamped down father was a theatre musician who became an army bandmaster). Sullivan was the on popular entertainment. The new Theatres Act specified that saloons, gardens, conductor of the Leeds Festival for almost twenty years, a recital accompanist for the and cafés providing music could only be licensed if run as “theatres:” the Lord Royal family (knighted in 1883), and “incomparably the greatest English musician of Chamberlain could vet and prevent any new plays threatening “the preservation of the age” according to his colleague William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911). good manners, decorum or of the public peace.” Promoters began to raise funds to establish new venues, and by the end of the century, London boasted several new Sullivan became famous overnight after a successful 1862 performance of his houses dedicated to English comic opera. incidental music for The Tempest in the Crystal Palace. Over the next decade, he published his only song cycle (The Window, to texts by Tennyson), a cello concerto Early romantic Parisian composers Hervé (1825-1892) and Adolphe Adam and symphony, several dramatic cantatas, and popular hymn tunes such as St. (composer of Giselle, 1803-1856) created the first operettas with spoken dialogue Gertrude (adopted as Onward, Christian Soldiers by the Salvation Army). Large-scale instead of sung recitative. The French government, which sponsored all grand works of this period include huge commissions for the Crystal Palace (Festival Te opera, limited independent operettas to one act with no more than three Deum, 1872), the Three Choirs Festival (an 1869 three-act oratorio, The Prodigal Son), characters.