The Mountain Sylph

The Mountain Sylph is an opera in two acts by John Barnett to a libretto by Thomas James Thackeray, after Trilby, ou le lutin d'Argail by Charles Nodier.

[3] Before The Mountain Sylph, Barnett had mainly written comic operettas, incidental music and songs for plays, and burlesques and adaptations of popular foreign works, including the opera Robert le diable by his distant cousin Giacomo Meyerbeer.

As Barnett wrote in a note to the published score: The following (my first attempt at legitimate Opera), was, in its original form, intended as a Musical Drama for the Victoria Theatre, and written for an incomplete band; but, finding the difficulty of producing it at that theatre insurmountable, owing to the want of numbers, both on stage and in the orchestra, I was obliged to abandon my project; and this difficulty first suggested the idea of heightening it to an opera for the New Lyceum.

The proprietor of the Lyceum, Samuel James Arnold (to whom Barnett had been articled at the age of 11), had specifically relaunched the theatre as the 'English Opera House', and the Sylph provided him with a useful hit.

[6] In The Mountain Sylph, the rich scoring and use of recurring motifs to suggest elements of the supernatural showed that the composer had well learnt the lessons of Weber, whose Oberon and Der Freischütz had been popular in London from the 1820s.

Barnett's contemporaries were aware of the opera's qualities; George Alexander Macfarren wrote that "its production opened a new period for music in this country, from which is to be dated the establishment of an English dramatic school".

But when he is able to get his teeth into the few big ensembles and scenas that Thackeray gave him, Barnett does evolve dynamic musical textures that glow, even if their fire is very pale.

"[9] In 1837 The Mountain Sylph was presented as a "grand melodramatic spectacle" at the National Theatre in Washington, DC, with Annette Nelson in the role of Aeolia.