Princess Ida (review)

"Libretto-bashing," writes Arthur Groos, "has a distinguished tradition in the blood sport of opera." ¹ While Groos's concern is the categorical contempt in which the librettist's craft has historically been held, his statement pertains no less to a kind of circumstantial contempt which has long been a mainstay of music critics. The circumstance that calls it forth is the ostensibly unaccountable failure of an opera by some esteemed composer, either at its premiere or in its subsequent exclusion from the standard repertory; the cause, of course, cannot be the music, and is therefore traced instead to the inferiority of the verbal content to which the score was bound. Thus the second-rate status of operas from Weber's Oberon to Rossini's Guillaume Tell to Massenet's Thaïs deserves, according to the composers' apologists, such sympathy as one might feel for a thrifty, hard-working spouse dragged down to ruin and degradation by an unfortunate marriage to a wastrel.

The profound obscurity of most librettists has made them easy prey in this "blood sport," but W. S. Gilbert, the first English dramatist to be knighted for his writings, would seem to be proof against such calumny. After all, in the history of the lyric stage, there has arguably been no other librettist (save, perhaps, Hofmannsthal) who wrote to a higher literary standard, nor any (save, perhaps, Wagner) who better understood his composer. But paradoxically, while many of the harmless hacks among his brethren are unjustly hauled out as whipping boys for their partners' musical faults, there is one notable instance in which Gilbert truly deserves such treatment, and that is Princess Ida (1884), the eighth of the fourteen operas he wrote with Arthur Sullivan.

Gilbert's great glory lies in the whimsical originality of his characters and plots and the clever illogicality with which these plots are resolved, but Princess Ida is neither original nor clever. The essential story is, in fact, doubly purloined. The initial source was Tennyson's long didactic poem entitled The Princess (1847); in 1870, Gilbert turned out an eponymous burlesque, which he called "a Respectful Perversion of Mr. Tennyson's Poem," ² and in 1884 he recycled his previous play into Princess Ida, retaining large chunks of the blank-verse dialogue and replacing song lyrics that had been sung to existing tunes with new ones for Sullivan to set. The action concerns the efforts of Ida, King Gama's daughter, to establish a university for women where students are charged to renounce all men; she is ultimately, however, moved to accept King Hildebrand's son Hilarion, to whom she was married in infancy. And even the joke employed to resolve this situation was adapted from Gilbert's earlier piece No Cards (1869), as Hildebrand points out to Ida the impossibility of passing her celibate ideal down to Posterity: "The obvious question then arises, 'How/ Is this Posterity to be provided?'" ³ The cluelessness of Ida's reply ("I never thought of that!") signifies yet another flaw in the libretto: its condescending depiction of women, which is probably prime among the reasons that the opera nowadays is rarely produced—but even in 1884, Gilbert's mockery of higher education for women rang hollow, with women's colleges already established at Cambridge (1869) and Oxford (1878), and women actually earning degrees at the Universities of London and Leeds. The result was a run of 246 performances, one of the shortest in the Savoy Theatre series.

Ida, alas, was handed to Sullivan at the height of his musical powers, which were squandered on such a piece. His efforts, to be...