Iolanthe
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.
Iolanthe opened in London on 25 November 1882, at the Savoy Theatre to a warm reception, and ran for 398 performances, the fourth consecutive hit by Gilbert and Sullivan.
By December, he had written some lyrics for Sullivan to look at, but he struggled with the plot for several months, whereas he had dashed off earlier operas in a matter of weeks.
[6] Two casts rehearsed simultaneously, as the opera was to open on the same night in London and New York City, a historic first for any play.
In this opera, the House of Lords is lampooned as a bastion of the ineffective, privileged and dim-witted, whose only qualification to govern is noble birth.
[11] In fact, however, the title was advertised as Iolanthe as early as 13 November 1882 – eleven days before the opening – so the cast had at least that much time to learn the name.
On the first night Alice Barnett, as the Queen of the Fairies, sang the verses directly to Captain Shaw, who was sitting in the centre of the stalls.
[17] The opera's premiere was received by an enthusiastic audience and earned critical praise,[18] although there was general agreement that the second act needed some trimming.
[19] Iolanthe became the fourth consecutive major success for Gilbert, Sullivan and their producer, Richard D'Oyly Carte, following H.M.S.
[20] Increasingly viewing his work with Gilbert as frivolous, beneath his skills and repetitious, Sullivan had intended to resign from the partnership with Gilbert and Carte after Iolanthe, but on the day of its premiere, he received a letter from his broker, Edward Hall, notifying him that Hall had lost all his money, including £7,000 of Sullivan's investments, the bulk of his fortune.
The Queen of the fairies commuted Iolanthe's sentence of death to banishment for life on the condition that she left her husband and never communicated with him again.
He tells Iolanthe of his love for the Lord Chancellor's ward of court, the beautiful Phyllis, who does not know of Strephon's mixed origin.
Soon Phyllis arrives, and she and Strephon share a moment of tenderness as they plan their future and possible elopement ("Good-morrow, good lover"; "None shall part us from each other").
A cadre of the peers of the realm arrive in noisy splendour ("Loudly let the trumpet bray") with the Lord Chancellor ("The law is the true embodiment").
Spying on the two, the peers – led by the brainless and stuffy Earls Tolloller and Mountararat – together with Phyllis, see Iolanthe and Strephon in a warm embrace.
Pointing to Private Willis of the First Grenadier Guards, who is still on duty, the Queen claims that she is able to subdue her response to the effects of his manly beauty ("Oh, foolish fay").
Desperate, Iolanthe unveils, ignoring the warnings of the unseen Fairies, revealing that she is his long-lost wife, and Strephon is his son.
The Lord Chancellor suggests a solution: change the law by inserting a single word: "every fairy shall die who doesn't marry a mortal."
... Iolanthe is the work in which Sullivan's operetta style takes a definite step forward, and metamorphosis of musical themes is its characteristic new feature.
[31] The music for the fairies reflects Wagner's style, and the score uses leitmotifs, including a distinctive four-note theme associated with the character of Iolanthe.
[32] The score is wider in range of emotion and style, with innovative use of pizzicato strings, clever and varied underscoring of patter, the tender, sentimental eleventh-hour number for the title character, apt matching of the music to the absurd comedy of the lyrics, and a sustained first act finale with a series of dramatic situations that ends with the confrontation between the fairies and peers.
Arcadia was a legendary site of rural perfection, first described by the Ancient Greeks, that was a popular setting for writers of the 19th century.
[2][35] One of Gilbert's biographers, Andrew Crowther wrote: "The things that make [the opera] memorable as a work of art [include] the peers entering in the full pomp of their formal robes, magnificent and ridiculous.
Crowther notes: "All kinds of tone ... mingle in this opera: whimsy, fantasy, romance, wit and political satire."
[42] Michael Heyland restaged Iolanthe for D'Oyly Carte in 1977, the year of Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee, with silver-themed designs.
The revived D'Oyly Carte's 1991 recording contains Strephon's cut number "Fold Your Flapping Wings" as a bonus track.
[64] When Margaret Thatcher was elected as Prime Minister, the press joked about the line from the opera, "This comes of women interfering in politics!
[71] William H. Rehnquist, former Chief Justice of the United States, was an avid Gilbert and Sullivan fan[72] and was inspired by the costume of the Lord Chancellor, in a production of Iolanthe, to add four golden stripes to the sleeves of his judicial robes.
In 1980, while an Associate Justice, Rehnquist, in his dissenting opinion in the case of Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia, compares these words of the Lord Chancellor to the "flavor from the various opinions supporting the judgment in this case": The Law is the true embodiment/Of everything that's excellent,/It has no kind of fault or flaw,/And I, My Lords, embody the Law.
The eponymous hero of David Nobbs' The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin has "Iolanthe" as a middle name, allegedly due to his being born during a performance of the opera.
