His Excellency (opera)
The Gilbert and Sullivan partnership dissolved for several years after the production of The Gondoliers (1889), because of a financial dispute, but in 1893 they reunited to write Utopia, Limited.
In the case of His Excellency, after approaching George Henschel unsuccessfully, Gilbert selected Carr as the composer for the new piece.
Carr had enjoyed success in musical comedy, with In Town (1892), Morocco Bound (1893) and Go-Bang (1894), but critics inevitably found him inferior to Sullivan.
[1][2][3] In His Excellency, among other satiric targets, Gilbert ridicules Henry Labouchère's claims to impartiality in the song "When a gentleman supposes".
[5] Labouchère founded a personal weekly journal, Truth, in 1877, in which he pursued his anti-semitic, anti-suffrage and anti-homosexual social agenda.
For the cast of His Excellency, Gilbert was able to engage former Savoy opera stalwarts George Grossmith, Rutland Barrington, Alice Barnett, Charles Kenningham and Jessie Bond, as well as John Le Hay and the young musical comedy star, Ellaline Terriss.
[8] After the opera opened, Gilbert wrote to Helen Carte, "if it had had the benefit of your expensive friend Sullivan's music, it would have been a second Mikado" (quoted in Wolfson 1976, p. 65).
The London run of just over five months (162 performances, closing on 6 April 1895), cut short because of an influenza epidemic, was a disappointment.
But after the men leave, the girls admit that the appointments are a practical joke, one of many their father has perpetrated on the citizens of Elsinore.
He encounters Christina, who is struck by his resemblance to the statue, but he tells her that he is a mere strolling player, Nils Egilsson.
Seeing another opportunity for a practical joke, Griffenfeld asks "Egilsson" to impersonate the Prince Regent – dispensing fake honours to the townspeople, which will later be revealed as amusing hoaxes.
Fed up with Griffenfeld's incessant practical jokes, Erling and Tortenssen assemble the townspeople, and are joined by Dame Cortlandt, who has realised what is going on, and they plan to go to Copenhagen to complain to the Prince personally.
Griffenfeld is delighted that, once again, all of his practical jokes are working beautifully, but his daughters are starting to feel some remorse over their treatment of Erling and Tortenssen.
Everyone gathers for the weddings, but Griffenfeld abruptly announces that the Regent's visit was a sham, and all of the honours he dispensed were practical jokes.
The paper thought Carr's music an inferior copy of the Sullivan style, but nevertheless better than "that more vulgar mould in which he has found favour with the purveyors of variety entertainments."
Its comments on Nancy McIntosh accorded, to some degree, with Sullivan's: "[She] has of late made rapid progress and has become an actress of decided skill and charm, though her voice and singing are scarcely as good as they were when she came out.
"[1] The Manchester Guardian concurred, attributing the "undeniable triumph" of the piece solely to Gilbert's "inventive genius as a librettist and stage manager.
"[2] The Saturday Review rated Gilbert's libretto "a pretty fair specimen" of "genuine Gilbertian humour", but lamented the absence of Sullivan; of Carr's contribution, it said, "the music is neat, easy, the technical writing skilful, the orchestration correct; in fact there is nothing wrong with it.
"[3] The critic of The Theatre disagreed with the positive assessments, calling the libretto "the worst that Mr. Gilbert ever wrote – worse even than The Mountebanks, which was bad enough.
