Adrian Ross
Arthur Reed Ropes (23 December 1859 – 11 September 1933), better known under the pseudonym Adrian Ross, was a prolific English writer of lyrics, contributing songs to more than sixty British musical comedies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Ross next wrote the lyrics for a string of hit musicals, beginning with A Greek Slave (1898), San Toy (1899), The Messenger Boy (1900) and The Toreador (1901) and continuing without a break through World War I.
[3] During a brief illness in 1883 after catching cold at the University Boat Race, Ross used the lonely time in bed to write the libretto of an entertainment entitled A Double Event.
[2] The piece earned enough praise so that the impresario George Edwardes commissioned the two to write another burlesque, together with the comic actor John Lloyd Shine, called Joan of Arc.
Joan of Arc opened in 1891 at the Opera Comique starring Arthur Roberts and Marion Hood; he wrote under the pseudonym Adrian Ross, which he used for the rest of his career.
For his next piece, Morocco Bound (1893, with the song "Marguerite from Monte Carlo"), Ross concentrated on writing lyrics, leaving the "book" mostly to Arthur Branscombe.
As the new Edwardes-produced "musical comedies" took the place of burlesque, comic opera and operetta on the stage, Ross and Harry Greenbank established the usefulness of a separate lyricist.
His lyrics to additional numbers for An Artist's Model (1895) and The Geisha (1896) were successful enough so that Edwardes asked him for major contributions to the rest, beginning with A Greek Slave (1898), especially after the death of the theatre's early chief lyricist, Harry Greenbank.
[2][5] When Edwardes found success, beginning in 1907, in mounting English-language versions of the new generation of continental European operettas to the London stage, Ross wrote the English lyrics for the adaptations, often with libretti by Basil Hood.
He also worked on the revues Three Cheers (1917) with Herman Darewski, Airs and Graces with Lionel Monckton, and, years later, Sky High for the Palladium Theatre, but these were only diversions from his chief focus of writing lyrics for musicals and operetta adaptations.
[4] In 1922, he wrote both the book and the lyrics for the popular English version of Das Dreimäderlhaus, the international hit based on Franz Schubert's music and life, produced in Britain as Lilac Time.
[4] Ross collaborated extensively with the foremost British-based composers of musical theatre active during his productive period, including Carr, Ivan Caryll, Monckton, Leslie Stuart and Sidney Jones, and later Paul Rubens, Harold Fraser-Simson, Howard Talbot and Messager.
The book is notable for its depth of characterisation – especially of the compassionate young narrator, a Puritan scholar who has refused to join Oliver Cromwell's army because of his objections to religious violence and who sees the good in everyone – and for its subtle depiction of the creature in the hole, which is never completely seen even as it overwhelms the castle.
[7] Ross also wrote Short History of Europe, edited Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu's Letters (Selection and Life), and was a contributor to Punch magazine.
