Doing Our Best to Make Things Jolly

The New York Gilbert & Sullivan Society has a concert at each of its monthly meetings; in February 2007, I participated in my third Society concert, Haddon Hall. This is a late Sullivan work, with a libretto by Sydney Grundy. Here is the G&S archive page. This was my first experience with it; it is really a rather charming piece, with some very nice and interesting music, and some pretty nice sentimental bits. It’s not particularly funny — and it feels not much like G&S, although Sullivan is still recognizable.

The cast for this group was excellent. It was:

DOROTHY VERNON - Katie Holler
LADY VERNON- Megan Friar
DORCAS - Irma Obal Lucca
NANCE - Frances Yasprica

JOHN MANNERS - David Root
OSWALD - Paul Sigrist
RUPERT - Jonathan Ichikawa
SIR GEORGE VERNON - Richard Holmes
McCRANKIE - Philip Sternenberg

Megan, Richard, David, and Paul are professionals; I’d seen David’s Fairfax and Paul’s Physician with NYGASP the previous month (both excellent). And Richard has been on my short list of performing heros since I first saw his Captain Corcoron in Buxton in 2004. So it was an honor (and an intimidation!) to be singing with these fine people.

In the end, I felt that things came together reasonably well. The chorus bits were the weakest, because they are hardest to coordinate on minimal rehearsal. But I think that we got the piece across reasonably well. Richard says that Haddon Hall is more opera than operetta; I’m inclined to agree. One of my favorite moments of the evening was his duet with Megan, “Alone, alone!…Bride of my youth”. It was really beautiful and touching.

My character, Rupert, was something of an odd one, but I really enjoyed it. Some of his music suited me pretty well, I think — I will save his first patter song for the inevitable G&S audition that wants something that isn’t G&S.

Here are the excellent program notes, provided by our expert pianist and co-organizer (with M.D. Dan Kravitz):

HADDON HALL is a manor house located near Bakewell in Derbyshire, England in the Peak District, about 14 miles from Buxton. The house sits on a rock outcropping and is privy to gorgeous vistas. Portions of it date back to the 12th Century, but more date to the Tudor period. The house stood vacant for nearly 200 years, from the 1700s until the 1920s, and thus escaped the destructive remodeling many other older structures endured in the 18th and 19th centuries; it is one of the finest extant examples of medieval and Tudor construction. It was carefully restored in the 20th Century. Haddon Hall belongs to the Manners family; the current holder is Edward, Duke of Rutland. (At the time of the opera, the hereditary rank was Earl of Rutland.) [There was also a picture of the house on the cover.]

THE OPERA is based on a real incident, the elopement of Dorothy Vernon, actually the second daughter of Sir George and Lady Vernon, then the owners of Haddon Hall, with John Manners, in 1563. (Several architectural features of the house bear her name, most notably the door through which she left when she eloped.) In constructing the libretto, Grundy took considerable liberties with history, such as inventing a dead son for the Vernons and leaving Dorothy as their only child, but most notably moving the action forward in time by a century so that he could include the Puritans and Roundheads of that era for broad comedic effect and utilize the restoration of the monarchy to help resolve his plot. By this time in theatrical history (1892), light operas were vying for audience with the emergent musical comedy genre that would come to dominate the 20th Century stage, and there was quite a bit of cross-pollination. The inclusion of the completely extraneous comedic Scottish character, McCrankie, is an example of this. Various ethnic types would be a low-comedy feature of musical theatre as well as vaudeville and music hall until the middle of the 20th Century and the advent of modern “PC” thinking.

SULLIVAN CHRONOLOGY:

Produced in 1892, Haddon Hall was written after The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), The Gondoliers (1889), and the infamous Carpet Quarrel that divided G&S, but before they reunited—“or more or less, but rather less than more”—for Utopia Limited (1893) and The Grand Duke (1896). Sullivan’s one grand opera, Ivanhoe, had been produced the previous year (1891). Three of the other major “SWOGs” (Sullivans-without-Gilbert) were still in the future: The Beauty Stone (1898), The Rose of Persia (1899), and The Emerald Isle (1901). While some of the individual pieces in Haddon Hall bear a strong resemblance to Sullivan’s parlour songs, overall the music is typical of the later period of Sullivan’s writing, rich in chromaticism and more complex in construction than his works of the late 1870s and early to mid-1880s. Piano accompaniment cannot do this score true justice, as Sullivan was at the height of his powers as an evocative orchestrator and quite a bit of the power and beauty of the score are lost in the translation to piano, especially the storm effects. The recording by Prince Consort, available from The Sir Arthur Sullivan Society, is recommended for the full flavor.

–ASR

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