Sullivan's reputation suffered because of all his work on comic operas (though he also did other material), which people felt couldn't be as artistically great or "important" as serious stuff. It's a totally crazy prejudice--would anybody really want to question the artistic merit of Le nozze di Figaro?--but at the same time, it IS kind of understandable: not to question their verbal facility, but Gilbert's libretti are just so light and frivolous that it's just a little hard to think of their operas in a serious way. What can I say?
Sullivan himself was chafing a bit having to keep writing music to these extremely silly words. Gilbert tried to compromise with The Yeoman of the Guard, which includes some more serious elements. Sullivan liked it, but the resulting work is very strange: the protagonist ends up heartbroken and alone, which is certainly an unexpected twist, but aside from that, the tone is exactly the usual thing, which creates a most peculiar dissonance.
In the 1890s, the Savoy was really thrashing around looking for some kind of new success. G&S had broken up, their two reunion operas weren't big successes, and no one else seemed able to replicate their popularity. For this one, Sullivan was paired with a librettist named Basil Hood, very explicitly trying to imitate that classic G&S style. And hey, this time it actually worked, at least public-success-wise. The two of them were set to do a follow-up, The Emerald Isle, but Sullivan died before completing the score.
I don't know; I wanted to see this as an interesting novelty: Gilbert and Sullivan minus Gilbert isn't something you hear most days. So I found this, from 1995. It's mostly pretty easy to understand the words, but there are places (including the opening chorus) when you'll be glad to have the libretto.
The plot really is flimsy as anything. One hesitates to even try to describe it, lest it blow away. There's this rich guy in Persia (do you imagine for a moment that Hood understood the differences between Persian and Arabic cultures?), Hassan (don't think that's a Persian name). He has twenty-five wives, no more no less. Anyway, some stuff happens, I don't need to go through it all, and he ends up claiming to be the sultan and being tricked by the actual sultan. Also, the sultana and two of her slaves sneak out and end up at Hassan's place, and one of the slaves falls in love with this storyteller, Yussuf. Anyway, there's some mistaken identity stuff, some threatened executions, and everything resolves itself. There you go.
I did like it, for all its silliness. Hood may not be up to Gilbert's standards...or actually, he may be; I don't think I'm really up enough on his oeuvre to judge. But either way, he's a reasonable replacement, capable of a decent turn of phrase. As usually with operetta, my complaint is that I want some real emotional resonance, dammit. But that's okay. What's slightly less okay is that if you follow along with a libretto, you will notice that this production cuts A LOT of music: entire numbers axed, others brutally cut down--what's wrong with you people? Do you even like this stuff? Do better!
Anyway. What I really want to see is Sullivan's Ivanhoe, which was a success when first put on but quickly disappeared after. I would lament the impossibility of this ever come to pass, but at this point I've seen enough rarities to know not to rule out anything.
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