Ruddigore
Ruddigore; or, The Witch's Curse, originally called Ruddygore, is a comic opera in two acts, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert.
This restores the work as far as possible to the state in which its authors left it and includes a substantial introduction that explains many of the changes, with appendices containing some music deleted early in the run.
After the expiration of the British copyright on Gilbert and Sullivan works in 1961, and especially since the Sadler's Wells production and recording, various directors have experimented with restoring some or all of the cut material in place of the 1920s D'Oyly Carte version.
[6] Sir Roderic's Act II song "When the night wind howls" had its forerunner in one of Gilbert's verses published in Fun magazine in 1869: Fair phantom, come!
Come, soar to yonder silent clouds; The ether teems with peopled shrouds: We'll fly the lightsome spectre crowds, Thou cloudy, clammy thing!
[8] There is a priggishly good-mannered poor-but-virtuous heroine, a villain who carries off the maiden, a hero in disguise and his faithful old retainer who dreams of their former glory days, the snake-in-the-grass sailor who claims to be following his heart, the wild, mad girl, the swagger of fire-eating patriotism, ghosts coming to life to enforce a family curse,[9] and so forth.
But Gilbert, in his customary topsy-turvy fashion, turns the moral absolutes of melodrama upside down: The hero becomes evil, the villain becomes good, and the virtuous maiden changes fiancés at the drop of a hat.
[14] After a run shorter than any of the earlier Gilbert and Sullivan operas premiered at the Savoy except Princess Ida, Ruddigore closed in November 1887 to make way for a revival of H.M.S.
The desperate bridesmaids ask Rose's aunt, Dame Hannah, if she would consider marrying, but she has vowed to remain eternally single.
One of his victims, as she was burnt at the stake, cursed all future Baronets of Ruddigore to commit a crime every day, or perish in inconceivable agonies.
Rose, who takes her ideas of Right and Wrong from a book of etiquette, replies that all of the young men she meets are either too rude or too shy.
Dame Hannah asks particularly about Robin Oakapple, a virtuous farmer, but Rose replies that he is too diffident to approach her, and the rules of etiquette forbid her from speaking until she is spoken to.
Robin reveals that he is indeed Sir Ruthven, having fled his home twenty years previously to avoid inheriting the Baronetcy of Ruddigore and its attendant curse.
They leave just in time to avoid the arrival of the Bucks and Blades, who have come to court the village girls, followed by Sir Despard, who proceeds to frighten everyone away.
Richard approaches him and discloses that Despard's elder brother Ruthven is alive, calls himself Robin Oakapple, and is going to marry Rose later that day.
Rose, horrified at Robin's true identity, resolves to marry Despard – who refuses her: now free of the curse, the ex-baronet takes up with his old love and fiancée Mad Margaret, who is ecstatic.
Robin's uncle, the late Sir Roderic Murgatroyd, orders him to "carry off a lady" that day or perish in horrible agony.
"[21][22] The interval was long (a half hour) as the elaborate picture gallery needed to be set up, but D'Oyly Carte had anticipated this and had printed indulgence slips which were distributed.
On 23 January 1887, under the heading "Their First Flat Failure; The First Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Not a Success", The New York Times reported, "When the curtain finally fell there was hissing – the first ever heard in the Savoy Theatre.
"[29] The Times praised both the libretto and the music of the first act ("Everything sparkles with the flashes of Mr. Gilbert's wit and the graces of Sir Arthur Sullivan's melodiousness... one is almost at a loss what to select for quotation from an embarrassment of humorous riches.")
The staging was also criticised: The Times stated, "The ghost scene ... of which preliminary notices and hints of the initiated had led one to expect much, was a very tame affair.
[22] Scholar Reginald Allen suggested that the reviews in the Sunday papers may have been better than the others because their critics, facing deadlines (the premiere was on Saturday night, and finished late because of the long interval), may not have stayed to the end.
"[3] On 1 February 1887, The Theatre wrote, "There can be no doubt that by its admirable production of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan's latest work the Savoy management has scored another of those shining and remunerative successes that its enterprise, intelligence, and good taste have repeatedly achieved – and merited.
By 1920, in a reappraisal of the piece, Samuel Langford wrote in The Manchester Guardian that "the gruesome strain is the real Gilbertian element" but "the opera has abundant charm among its more forbidding qualities".
As the Weekly Dispatch put it: 'If stage work of the kind caricatured in Ruddygore or The Witch's Curse is not extinct, it is relegated to regions unfrequented by the patrons of Mr D'Oyly Carte's theatre'.
"[52] The Sullivan scholar Gervase Hughes characterised Sir Roderic's song "When the night wind howls" as "unquestionably the finest piece of descriptive music that Sullivan ever wrote, worthy of a place beside Schubert's Erlkönig, Wagner's overture to The Flying Dutchman, and well above Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre, all of which are tone-paintings in a similar colour.
The recording and the production were based in part on Hulme's research, which also led to the 2000 Oxford University Press edition of the Ruddigore score, in which the music for some passages was published for the first time.
[citation needed] In 1987, the New Sadler's Wells Opera produced Ruddigore using a new edition of the text that restored many of the passages that prior productions had cut.
References in literature have included several novels in which the setting of the story involved a production of Ruddigore, such as Murder and Sullivan by Sara Hoskinson Frommer (1997)[92] and Ruddy Gore by Kerry Greenwood (2004; the 7th Phryne Fisher book).
[96] The "Matter Patter" trio is used (with some changed lyrics) in Papp's Broadway production of The Pirates of Penzance, and the tune of the song is used as "The Speed Test" in the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie.
