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Uncle Samuel
''Uncle Samuel'' is a one-act comic opera with a libretto by Arthur Law and music by George Grossmith. It was first produced at the Opera Comique on 3 May 1881 to 8 October 1881, as companion piece to ''Patience''. The piece also toured from December 1887 to June 1888 as a companion piece to ''H.M.S. Pinafore''. A vocal score was published by Chappells in 1881 containing full libretto, dialogue and music, and a copy is in the British Library. The fashion in the late Victorian era was to present long evenings in the theatre, and so producer Richard D'Oyly Carte preceded his Savoy operas with curtain raisers such as ''Uncle Samuel''. W. J. MacQueen-Pope commented, concerning such curtain raisers: :This was a one-act play, seen only by the early comers. It would play to empty boxes, half-empty upper circle, to a gradually filling stalls and dress circle, but to an attentive, grateful and appreciative pit and gallery. Often these plays were little gems. They deserved much bette ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Comic Opera
Comic opera, sometimes known as light opera, is a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending and often including spoken dialogue. Forms of comic opera first developed in late 17th-century Italy. By the 1730s, a new operatic genre, ''opera buffa'', emerged as an alternative to '' opera seria''. It quickly made its way to France, where it became ''opéra comique'', and eventually, in the following century, French operetta, with Jacques Offenbach as its most accomplished practitioner. The influence of the Italian and French forms spread to other parts of Europe. Many countries developed their own genres of comic opera, incorporating the Italian and French models along with their own musical traditions. Examples include German ''singspiel'', Viennese operetta, Spanish '' zarzuela'', Russian comic opera, English ballad and Savoy opera, North American operetta and musical comedy. Italian ''opera buffa'' In late 17th-century Italy, light-hearted m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Law (playwright)
William Arthur Law (22 March 1844 – 2 April 1913), better known as Arthur Law, was an English playwright, actor and scenic designer. Life and career Law was born in Northrepps, Norfolk, England, to Rev. Patrick Comerford Law and his wife, Frances ''nee'' Arbuthnot. He was educated at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. From 1864 to 1872, he served in the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Early career Law began to act, making his professional stage debut in 1872 at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh. He then toured the British provinces and played at London's Surrey Theatre for two years, after which joined the German Reed Entertainments in London in 1874. While performing with the German Reeds, he wrote nineteen short comic theatre works performed by the company. In 1877, Law married actress Fanny Holland, with whom he appeared with the German Reeds at the Gallery of Illustration and St. George's Hall. The couple had a son named Hamilton Patrick John Holland Law (born 1879). S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Grossmith
George Grossmith (9 December 1847 – 1 March 1912) was an English comedian, writer, composer, actor, and singer. His performing career spanned more than four decades. As a writer and composer, he created 18 comic operas, nearly 100 musical sketches, some 600 songs and piano pieces, three books and both serious and comic pieces for newspapers and magazines. Grossmith created a series of nine characters in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan from 1877 to 1889, including Sir Joseph Porter, in ''H.M.S. Pinafore'' (1878), the Major-General in ''The Pirates of Penzance'' (1880) and Ko-Ko in ''The Mikado'' (1885–87). He also wrote, in collaboration with his brother Weedon, the 1892 comic novel ''The Diary of a Nobody''. Grossmith was also famous in his day for performing his own comic piano sketches and songs, both before and after his Gilbert and Sullivan days, becoming the most popular British solo performer of the 1890s. Some of his comic songs endure today, including " ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Opera Comique
The Opera Comique was a 19th-century theatre constructed in Westminster, London, between Wych Street, Holywell Street and the Strand. It opened in 1870 and was demolished in 1902, to make way for the construction of the Aldwych and Kingsway. The theatre was built cheaply as a speculative venture, and was known as one of the "rickety twins" along with the adjacent Globe Theatre. Numerous managements presented plays in English, French and German, and the house was also used for extravaganzas and English versions of French opéras bouffes. It is best remembered as the theatre where several early Gilbert and Sullivan operas had their first runs, between 1877 and 1881. History Background and early years In the 16th century Lyon's Inn, one of the Inns of Chancery attached to London's Inner Temple, stood on the site. By the 1860s the area had deteriorated greatly, and the old inn had been converted into what the historians Mander and Mitchenson describe as "dwellings of a dubious n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patience (opera)
''Patience; or, Bunthorne's Bride'', is a comic opera in two acts with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. The opera is a satire on the aesthetic movement of the 1870s and '80s in England and, more broadly, on fads, superficiality, vanity, hypocrisy and pretentiousness; it also satirises romantic love, rural simplicity and military bluster. First performed at the Opera Comique, London, on 23 April 1881, ''Patience'' moved to the 1,292-seat Savoy Theatre on 10 October 1881, where it was the first theatrical production in the world to be lit entirely by electric light. Henceforth, the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas would be known as the Savoy Operas, and both fans and performers of Gilbert and Sullivan would come to be known as "Savoyards." ''Patience'' was the sixth operatic collaboration of fourteen between Gilbert and Sullivan. It ran for a total of 578 performances, which was seven more than the authors' earlier work, ''H.M.S. Pinafore'', and the seco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Victorian Era
In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the period of Queen Victoria's reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. The era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwardian period, and its later half overlaps with the first part of the '' Belle Époque'' era of Continental Europe. There was a strong religious drive for higher moral standards led by the nonconformist churches, such as the Methodists and the evangelical wing of the established Church of England. Ideologically, the Victorian era witnessed resistance to the rationalism that defined the Georgian period, and an increasing turn towards romanticism and even mysticism in religion, social values, and arts. This era saw a staggering amount of technological innovations that proved key to Britain's power and prosperity. Doctors started moving away from tradition and mysticism towards a science-based approach; medicine advanced thanks to the adoption ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard D'Oyly Carte
Richard D'Oyly Carte (; 3 May 1844 – 3 April 1901) was an English talent agent, theatrical impresario, composer, and hotelier during the latter half of the Victorian era. He built two of London's theatres and a hotel empire, while also establishing an opera company that ran continuously for over a hundred years and a management agency representing some of the most important artists of the day. Carte started his career working for his father, Richard Carte, in the music publishing and musical instrument manufacturing business. As a young man he conducted and composed music, but he soon turned to promoting the entertainment careers of others through his management agency. Carte believed that a school of wholesome, well-crafted, family-friendly, English comic opera could be as popular as the risqué French works dominating the London musical stage in the 1870s. To that end he brought together the dramatist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan and nurtured their collaboration ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Savoy Opera
Savoy opera was a style of comic opera that developed in Victorian England in the late 19th century, with W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan as the original and most successful practitioners. The name is derived from the Savoy Theatre, which impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte built to house the Gilbert and Sullivan pieces, and later those by other composer–librettist teams. The great bulk of the non-G&S Savoy Operas either failed to achieve a foothold in the standard repertory, or have faded over the years, leaving the term "Savoy Opera" as practically synonymous with Gilbert and Sullivan. The Savoy operas (in both senses) were seminal influences on the creation of the modern musical. Gilbert, Sullivan, Carte and other Victorian era British composers, librettists and producers, as well as the contemporary British press and literature, called works of this kind "comic operas" to distinguish their content and style from that of the often risqué continental European operettas that th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Curtain Raiser (drama)
A curtain raiser is a short performance, stage act, show, actor or performer that opens a show for the main attraction. The term is derived from the act of raising the stage curtain. The first person on stage has "raised the curtain". The fashion in the late Victorian era and Edwardian era was to present long evenings in the theatre, and so full-length pieces were often presented together with, usually shorter, companion pieces. Each full-length work was normally accompanied by one or two short companion pieces. If the piece began the performance, it was called a curtain raiser. One that followed the full-length piece was called an afterpiece. W. J. MacQueen-Pope commented, concerning the curtain raisers: :This was a one-act play, seen only by the early comers. It would play to empty boxes, half-empty upper circle, to a gradually filling stalls and dress circle, but to an attentive, grateful and appreciative pit and gallery. Often these plays were little gems. They deserve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank Thornton (Savoyard)
Frank Thornton (1845 – 18 December 1918) was an English actor, singer, comedian and producer. Despite a successful stage career in comedies in London, on tour and abroad, Thornton is probably best remembered as the understudy to George Grossmith in a series of Gilbert and Sullivan operas from 1877 to 1884. Thornton began his stage career giving drawing-room entertainments while simultaneously working in a commercial office in London, keeping his theatrical activities secret from his office employers for four years. He was engaged by Richard D'Oyly Carte as understudy to George Grossmith in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, also playing roles in some of the curtain raisers played with the operas. In 1881, he created a small principal role in ''Patience'' and resigned from his office post. In 1883, he played the Lord Chancellor in a tour of ''Iolanthe''. Thornton left the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1884 and began a long series of tours of Australia in stage comedies, notabl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rosina Brandram
Rosina Brandram (2 July 1845 – 28 February 1907) was an English opera singer and actress primarily known for creating many of the contralto roles in the Savoy operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. Brandram joined the D'Oyly Carte company in 1877 as a chorister and understudy. By 1879, she was originating roles with the company, and she became its principal contralto in 1884, creating roles in seven of the famous Gilbert and Sullivan operas, as well as many other Sullivan comic operas. She was the only principal to appear in every original Sullivan production at the Savoy Theatre, and she performed with the company until 1903, when it left the Savoy. After leaving D'Oyly Carte, she played a few more roles with other companies before retiring from the stage. Life and career Beginnings Brandram was born Rosina Moult in Southwark, London. She was the elder child and only daughter of William Moult and his partner (later wife), Sarah Gosling. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English-language Operas
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots, and then closest related to the Low Saxon and Frisian languages, English is genealogically West Germanic. However, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by dialects of France (about 29% of Modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones. The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8th and 9th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
