Gilbert and Sullivan was a Victorian-era theatrical partnership of the dramatist W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and the composer Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), who jointly created fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896, of which H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado are among the best known.
Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan was an English composer. He is best known for 14 operatic collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado. His works include 24 operas, 11 major orchestral works, ten choral works and oratorios, two ballets, incidental music to several plays, and numerous church pieces, songs, and piano and chamber pieces. His hymns and songs include "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and "The Lost Chord".
Iolanthe; or, The Peer and the Peri is a comic opera with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert, first performed in 1882. It is one of the Savoy operas and is the seventh of fourteen operatic collaborations by Gilbert and Sullivan. In the opera, the fairy Iolanthe has been banished from fairyland because she married a mortal; this is forbidden by fairy law. Her son, Strephon, is an Arcadian shepherd who wants to marry Phyllis, a Ward of Chancery. All the members of the House of Peers also want to marry Phyllis. When Phyllis sees Strephon hugging a young woman, she assumes the worst and sets off a climactic confrontation between the peers and the fairies. The opera satirises many aspects of British government, law and society. The confrontation between the fairies and the peers is a version of one of Gilbert's favourite themes: a tranquil civilisation of women is disrupted by a male-dominated world through the discovery of mortal love.
John Barnett was an English composer and writer on music.
Jean Charles Emmanuel Nodier was a French author and librarian who introduced a younger generation of Romanticists to the conte fantastique, gothic literature, and vampire tales. His dream related writings influenced the later works of Gérard de Nerval.
The history of opera in the English language commences in the 17th century.
Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old, is an operatic extravaganza that was the first collaboration between dramatist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan. No musical score of Thespis was ever published, and most of the music has been lost. Gilbert and Sullivan went on to become the most famous and successful artistic partnership in Victorian England, creating a string of enduring comic opera hits, including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado.
Louis Joseph Ferdinand Herold, better known as Ferdinand Hérold, was a French composer. He was celebrated in his lifetime for his operas, of which he composed more than twenty, but he also wrote ballet music, works for piano and choral pieces. He is best known today for the ballet La Fille mal gardée and the overture to the opera Zampa.
La Sylphide is a romantic ballet in two acts. There were two versions of the ballet; the original choreographed by Filippo Taglioni in 1832, and a second version choreographed by August Bournonville in 1836. Bournonville's is the only version known to have survived and is one of the world's oldest surviving ballets.
The Lyceum Theatre is a West End theatre located in the City of Westminster, on Wellington Street, just off the Strand in central London. It has a seating capacity of 2,100. The origins of the theatre date to 1765. Managed by Samuel Arnold, from 1794 to 1809 the building hosted a variety of entertainments including a circus produced by Philip Astley, a chapel, and the first London exhibition of waxworks by Madame Tussauds. From 1816 to 1830, it served as The English Opera House. After a fire, the house was rebuilt and reopened on 14 July 1834 to a design by Samuel Beazley. The building is unique in that it has a balcony overhanging the dress circle. It was built by the partnership of Peto & Grissell. The theatre then played opera, adaptations of Charles Dickens novels and James Planché's "fairy extravaganzas", among other works.
The Fairy-Queen is a semi-opera by Henry Purcell; a "Restoration spectacular". The libretto is an anonymous adaptation of William Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. First performed in 1692, The Fairy-Queen was composed three years before Purcell's death at the age of 35. Following his death, the score was lost and only rediscovered early in the twentieth century.
Fallen Fairies; or, The Wicked World, is a two-act comic opera, with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert and music by Edward German. The story is an operatic adaptation of Gilbert's 1873 blank-verse fairy comedy, The Wicked World. In Fairyland, the fairies are curious about wicked mortals, especially their strange capacity for love. They summon three mortal men from the world below to observe them and to teach the men how to live virtuously. The fairies fall in love with the mortals, become jealous of each other and behave badly. The men return to Earth, and the fairies realize that love is overrated.
Ivan Alexandrovich Vsevolozhsky was the Director of the Imperial Theatres in Russia from 1881 to 1898 and director of the Hermitage from 1899 to his death in 1909.
William John Charles Pitcher, known as Wilhelm or C. Wilhelm, was an English artist, costume and scenery designer, best known for his designs for ballets, pantomimes, comic operas and Edwardian musical comedies.
Farinelli is an opera in two acts, described as 'serio-comic', by John Barnett, to a libretto by his brother Charles Zachary Barnett. Produced in 1839, it is the third of the composer's large-scale operas, and was the last to reach the stage. The hero is the castrato singer Farinelli, although the storyline of the opera is fictional.
Frederick John D'Auban was an English dancer, choreographer and actor of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Famous during his lifetime as the ballet-master at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, he is best remembered as the choreographer of many of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.
Samuel James Arnold (1774–1852) was an English dramatist and theatrical manager. Under his management the Lyceum Theatre, London became the English Opera House, and staged the first English productions of many operas, including in 1824 Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz.
Kong Renés Datter is a Danish verse drama written in 1845 by Henrik Hertz. It is a fictional account of the early life of Yolande of Lorraine, daughter of René of Anjou, in which she is depicted as a beautiful blind sixteen-year-old princess who lives in a protected garden paradise. The play was highly popular in the 19th century. It was translated into many languages, copied, parodied and adapted. The Russian adaptation by Vladimir Zotov was used as the basis for the 1892 opera Iolanta, written by Tchaikovsky, with libretto by his brother Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Henry Phillips (1801–1876) was an English singer, who took on operatic roles in the 1820s and 1830s.
Trilby; or, The Fairy of Argyll is an 1822 literary fairy tale novella by French author Charles Nodier (1780–1844). In it, a Scottish household spirit falls in love with the married woman of the house, who at first has him banished, then misses him, and eventually returns his love, both of them dying at the end. It was a popular work of the Romantic movement, published in multiple editions and translations. It also gave birth to adaptations as multiple ballets, including La Sylphide, and Trilby, and the opera The Mountain Sylph, some of which only retained the basic idea of love between a fairy and a Scottish peasant, but otherwise greatly diverged from the original plot.
