In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Savoy Curtain-Raisers ed. by Christopher O’Brien
  • David Russell Hulme
Savoy Curtain-Raisers. Ed. by Christopher O’Brien. pp. 256. Musica Britannica, 99. (Stainer and Bell, London, 2015. £100. ISBN 9780852499436.)

Mock Turtles, Cups and Saucers, The Carp: these intriguing titles must have caught the eye of anyone exploring the annals of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in the nineteenth century. Short companion pieces to the main works of the evening, they were usually played beforehand—rather as ‘shorts’ came to be in the cinema. In one act, about half an hour long, using a handful of principals and without chorus: beyond such playbill information virtually nothing is generally known about these miniature musical pieces, mostly written by largely forgotten composers and librettists and cast, in the main, from the company’s understudies. This outstanding new volume of Musica Britannica brings two representative examples of the genre out of the shadows. Prepared by Christopher O’Brien, a foremost authority on such pieces, the volume presents edited full scores and libretti of two ‘curtain-raisers’ (as they were called), written to precede full-length works staged at the Savoy Theatre. Both works date from the 1890s. François Cellier’s Captain Billy (1891) ushered in Edward Solomon’s The Nautch Girl and Ernest Ford’s Mr Jericho (1893) did the honours for Sullivan’s Haddon Hall—one of his later comic operas written without Gilbert.

Countless short musical pieces were produced for the British theatre during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to play alongside the main work of an evening, either as curtain-raisers or after-pieces. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury (1875) is the only one to have maintained a regular place in the repertory—unless one counts Sullivan’s Cox and Box (1866), shortened to provide a curtain-raiser for his comic opera The Chieftain in 1894 and further reduced by the D’Oyly Carte company in 1921. Sullivan’s The Zoo (1875), written—like Trial by Jury—as an after-piece, lay forgotten for almost a century but has received occasional performances since its rediscovery in the 1960s.

Apart from these Sullivan works, performances of companion pieces written for D’Oyly Carte and other managements of the period have been rare indeed within living memory. The music for most has disappeared without trace. Christopher O’Brien notes that of the thirty-four companion pieces known to have been staged by D’Oyly Carte companies, only fourteen had any music published. Sullivan’s remained in print; the others have become collectors’ rarities. Orchestral material survives for even fewer works. The long reluctance of the D’Oyly Carte organization to provide access to orchestral and other material in its archive only served to consign these little pieces to even deeper obscurity.

Gaining crucial co-operation from the D’Oyly Carte Opera Trust, the editor examined the autograph full score of Captain Billy, the prompt book for the original production, and three sets of early orchestral parts. (These sources have since been acquired by the British Library along with a huge archive of D’Oyly Carte material.) The D’Oyly Carte library also yielded a number of string parts for Mr Jericho, left behind when Frederic Woodbridge Wilson acquired a complete set of parts, along with orchestral material for three other Savoy curtain-raisers and much else from the collection in the 1980s. (The reviewer briefly examined some of the manuscripts before Ric Wilson, who was staying with him at the time, posted them to the States.) Recently the material returned to London and is now at the British Library. The autograph full score and original prompt book of Mr Jericho remain untraced.

For his edition of Captain Billy, O’Brien drew upon a reassuring range of sources. As well as those mentioned, he consulted two printings of the piano/vocal score and a proof copy of the libretto submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office with the application for a performing licence. The autograph score and the prompt book provide the primary sources, with priority given to the most important orchestral parts—the set marked ‘A Savoy Set’—where the sketchiness of the...

pdf

Share