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Ivanhoe

Music in the Victorian theatre before Ivanhoe

There was such a vast amount of music presented in the Victorian theatre that it is necessary to divide it into a number of separate categories

Opera without spoken dialogue

Most of the operas in this category which were heard during the Victorian era were given in Italian.

In 1851 the following composers were represented:

Rossini: La Cenerentola, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, La Gazza ladra, Otello, Semiramide

Donizetti: L'Elisir d'Amore, Lucrezia Borgia, La Figlia del Reggimento, Don Pasquale, Linda di Chamounix, Anna Bolena, La Favorita

Bellini: Norma, I Puritani

Auber: Masaniello, Roberto il Diavolo

Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro, Il Flauto magico, Don Giovanni

Beethoven: Fidelio

Verdi: I due Foscari, Ernani

Meyerbeer: Gli Ugonotti

Through-composed opera was automatically equated with Italian opera in the early Victorian mind. This prevailed so forcibly that Balfe set the dialogue in Fidelio as Italian recitative in 1851, his own Les Quatre Fils Hymon became I Quattro Fratelli, his Bohemian Girl was given recitatives when it became La Zingara (1858). Die Freischütz (retitled Il Franco Arciere) was given recitative by Costa, Oberon received the same from Benedict, and Maritana by Mattei.

Through-composed operas in English had always been rare. Purcell's Dido and Aeneas is his sole essay in the form, as is Blow's masque Venus and Adonis. In the eighteenth century they were usually based on Italian models, an example being Arne's Artaxerxes which uses the composer's own translation of Metastasio's text.

The first important English romantic opera The Mountain Sylph, (by Barnett, 1834) was also practically the first through-composed opera since Artaxerxes. Four years later Balfe was commissioned write Falstaff to am Italian libretto and in 1844 he produced the 'Grand Opera Seria' The Daughter of St Mark, the first of his English operas in which the whole of the action was expressed in music.

The next opera of any worth which did not have spoken dialogue was Sullivan's 'dramatic cantata' Trial by Jury (1875). This ushered in a period in which several of the younger composers began to produce operas. Cowen's Pauline (1876), Stanford's The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan (1881), Goring Thomas's Esmeralda (1883), Mackenzie's Colomba (1883), Stanford's Savonarola (1884), Goring Thomas's Nadeshda (1885), Mackenzie's The Troubadour (1886), Corder's Nordisa (1887), Philpot's Dante and Beatrice (1889) and Cowen's Thorgrim (1890) are all examples of this developments, which encouraged D'Oyly Carte to establish a Royal English Opera House in 1891.

Operas with spoken dialogue

As suggested above, almost all the English operas written before 1880 contained spoken dialogue.

The tradition of having spoken dialogue in an opera was a very old one in England stretching back to Restoration times. The plays of the Elizabethan dramatists contained many instances of the introduction of music, such as songs, dances, sennets, etc. Afterpieces called 'jigs' were frequently performed after these plays and they were the antecedents of ballad opera, being based on popular songs and having libellous and scandalous texts.

The Jacobean masques at Court were lavishly produced plays with a large amount of music in them.

In Purcell's day, semi-operas became popular. These were also plays but with substantial musical contributions. Unfortunately, the main characters of the play were not allowed to sing so that there were no opportunities for musical characterisation. Purcell himself wrote the music for two adaptations of plays by Shakespeare: The Tempest (1695), and The Fairy Queen (1692).

Between 1750 and 1800 such composers as Arne, Arnold, Dibdin and Storace kept the tradition alive in their light operas.

Between 1809 and 1831 Sir Henry Bishop composed at least twenty light operas all on which had spoken dialogue.

Balfe, Benedict and Vincent Wallace were the leading operatic composers of the whole of the middle of the century and the great majority of their works had spoken dialogue. These include The Bohemian Girl (Balfe), The Lily of Killarney (Benedict), and Maritana (Vincent Wallace).

Incidental music to plays

In the Victorian era any town of a reasonable size had at least one theatre, and practically every theatre had its own orchestra and musical director. As the theatres were use both for opera and plays the musical staff were employed full-time and therefore music was a very important part of any play and a substantial amount of music was composed.

Entr'actes, songs and dances were common, as were melodramasthat is, speech accompanied, or punctuated, by music.

Edward German is probably the best remembered [British] composer of incidental music today. When they were first published, his dances for Shakespeare's Henry VIII and Hope's Nell Gwynne were immediately popular throughout the country, not only in theatres (they were used for plays other than those fro which they were written [I wonder where I got that nugget from!]) but also played by the municipal seaside orchestras which proliferated at that time, and of course as piano duets.

Other pieces

The audience of a Victorian theatre adored lavish spectacle, and entertainments of this type were common. Harlequinades such as Harlequin and King Pepin (1843; an afterpiece to Die Freischutz), Harlequin Hogarth (1851); Harlequin and the Yellow Dwarf (1851); Oliver Cromwell, or the Harlequin Charley over the Water and the Maid of Patty's Mill (1851) and Harlequin Billy Taylor (1851) contained some music and the orchestra was always used in the 'Grand Transformation Scene' (to hide the sound of the stage machinery!).

This was written in 1977 as part of my Bachelor of Music degree at Royal Holloway College, University of London.