Sir Arthur SULLIVAN (1842-1900)
Victoria and merrie England – ballet in one Act (1897) [77:49]
RTÉ Sinfonietta/Andrew Penny
rec. 1993, National Concert Hall, Dublin
NAXOS 8.555216 [77:49]
Should you ever visit a specialist internet discussion forum dedicated to classical music, it probably won’t take you long to find someone offering an opinion on ballet while simultaneously admitting to never having seen a staged production. Some self-proclaimed ballet lovers, it seems, regard the word ballet as referring primarily or even exclusively to the musical score.
Why are so many otherwise reasonably cultured people so resistant to the idea of watching a staged performance of ballet? It’s often, I imagine, because they believe that the classical dance repertoire is somewhat too rarefied or even effete for their taste. To an extent that is an understandable reaction. After all, classical ballet – tremendously expensive to mount and often full of historical, literary or mythological allusions that only an educated audience might pick up – was, at its Imperial Russian height, undeniably an elite art form.
What is sometimes overlooked, however, is that before that particular late 19th century ballet style was adopted across the world, individual countries’ styles of staged dance had been surprisingly diverse. Sometimes the result was still recognisable as classical ballet, even if it was delivered in a rather less showily extravagant manner than at Russia’s Bolshoi or Mariinsky theatres. In Copenhagen, for instance, the Royal Danish Ballet had preserved – as it still does to this day – the distinctive and more modest choreography of August Bournonville, dating from the 1830s, 40s and 50s but based on even earlier French models.
But if late 19th century audiences in Denmark were watching productions recognisable as classical ballet, that certainly wasn’t always the case in other European nations. Two such were the UK and Italy. There haven’t, as far as I know, been any performances of Victoria and merrie England in many decades and there are certainly none preserved on film. Something of the original production’s flavour can still be sampled, however, in a rather similar type of show, Luigi Manzotti’s Excelsior (Milan, 1881), that is still staged occasionally in Italy and has been preserved on a couple of DVD releases. Excelsior offers an insight into how and why some European theatrical cultures, including the UK’s, largely bypassed the refined elegance associated with classical ballet in favour of less sophisticated dance forms with a more genuinely popular appeal. It is therefore worth a little investigation.
Essentially a lavish, garishly eye-pleasing extravaganza mounted as a series of pantomimic tableaux, Excelsior made up for its lack of artistic subtlety with 500 performers, on-stage horses and even an elephant. [A 1978 performance starring Carla Fracci and Paulo Bortoluzzi may be found on Hardy Classic Video HCD 4044, while a rather more modern one from 2002 features Isabel Seabra and a young Roberto Bolle and has been issued on TDK DV-BLEXCEL. Both, regrettably, are performed sans livestock]. In 11 separate scenes, it depicts the recurrent 19th century conflict between Civilisation and Obscurantism. Both concepts are portrayed by dancers who tussle repeatedly for dominance as science and technology usher in various features of the modern world - the construction of the first steam-powered vessel, the opening of New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, the discovery of electricity and its successful application to lighting and telegraphic communication, the inauguration of the Suez Canal and the completion of the Monte Cenisio tunnel under the Alps. A triumphant finale celebrating Light’s ultimate triumph over Darkness features dozens of dancers personifying the era’s leading nations. The scantiness of its young ladies’ costumes and its camp choreography would have rendered the performance perfectly suited to the Tiller Girls or the Rockettes. It truly has to be seen to be believed.
Apart from offering patrons the opportunity to watch attractive girls in revealing clothing, Excelsior owed its success to its canny exploitation of an immense swell of patriotic pride that was coursing through the newly-created Kingdom of Italy at that time. Chauvinistic audiences could easily come away with the impression that the Brooklyn Bridge had been built by Italian immigrants, that an Italian scientist had discovered electricity and that Italian engineers had masterminded that Alpine tunnel - and if Italians hadn’t actually built the Suez Canal themselves, they’d probably recall that at least Signor Verdi had provided the music that marked its opening. Excelsior provides the clearest of demonstrations of just how easy it was for staged dance to be co-opted in support of the era’s burgeoning nationalism. Its successful exploitation and exemplification of the populist and nationalistic Italian Zeitgeist is best indicated by fact that, in its first year, 1881, the La Scala dancers performed it for ecstatic Milanese audiences no less than a staggering 104 times.
If artistic concerns had been subordinated to those of nationalism in Italy, the same phenomenon might also be observed in the Victorian UK where, just four years before the premiere of Excelsior, patriotic fervour had even added an altogether new word to the language – jingoism, derived from the words of a music-hall song. Just as in Italy, British theatrical audiences proved largely indifferent to the likes of lovelorn princes and wanly dying swans. Thus, in 1884, a one-Act production, The swans, based on elements of the Swan lake story, failed to excite much enthusiasm at London’s Alhambra Theatre (though the fact that Tchaikovsky’s music had been jettisoned in favour of a score by the in-house musical director Georges Jacobi probably didn’t help its chances of success). If, indeed, there were going to be a depiction of a queen on stage, it appeared that patriotic Britons didn’t particularly want to see her feinting to the ground in despair (as in Swan lake, Act 2); they instead wanted her to be portrayed in her full pomp and majesty, ruling benevolently over, let’s say for the sake of argument, all the world’s sea lanes and a quarter of its land mass. And if concerns of lèse-majesté prevented Queen Victoria herself being portrayed on stage, maybe the abstract personification of Britannia might do instead?
Appropriately enough, it was the same Alhambra Theatre that had witnessed the public’s indifference to The swans that staged the 1897 premiere of the ballet Victoria and merrie England (advertised at the time as “A grand national ballet in eight tableaux” and timed to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee). As already observed, the latter shares significant characteristics with Excelsior. Both, in the first place, glory in nationalist/patriotic themes, while each is best characterised as a theatrical pageant or spectacle than as a true ballet. The expert author of Naxos’s very useful booklet essay, Selwyn Tillett, helpfully details the typical characteristics of such a production when mounted at the Alhambra: (a) a single Act in length, though sub-divided into a large number of individual scenes, (b) something best appreciated as a “mime drama”, (c) either an comic adventure or else something with less plot, but more patriotic sentiment and music and great opportunities for the girls of the corps de ballet to dress up in revealing costumes, (d) plenty of ‘speciality’ dances and, as a rule, several grand tableaux including fights, shipwrecks and other visually startling dramatic effects, (e) very little – because of time constraints – in the way of romantic pas de deux or long solos.
Most of those features might be applicable to either Excelsior or Victoria and merrie England. Nevertheless, even if both follow much the same structural lines and exhibit generally similar nationalistic/patriotic themes, there are a few interesting differences. Most obviously, if Excelsior’s nationalism had celebrated grand, upper-case abstractions like “Civilisation” and “Progress”, Victoria and merrie England was, in both its conception and its execution, more modest, reserved and, indeed, an exemplar of self-proclaimed English values (for this production, as so often before and since, the other nations of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland were blatantly subsumed into “England”). It probably had closer to 50 than 500 performers and, far from including horses and elephants, the only even tangential mentions of animals that I can discover in its scenario are occasional references to a dragon, a couple of hobby horses and the head of a dead boar.
Victoria and merrie England was, then, unreservedly populist in its presentation, as confirmed by
a contemporary review in The Times that noted that the whole production, including Sir Arthur Sullivan’s music, “is here appealing to a very much less cultivated audience”. It was comprised of eight individual scenes, ranging in length from about six minutes (Coronation of Queen Victoria) to 21 or so (May Day in Queen Elizabeth’s time). After an opening set in Ancient Britain, in which a sleeping Britannia is awakened by some druidical rites, the second and third scenes fast-forward us to May Day in Queen Elizabeth’s time in which mummers, revellers, warriors, knights and “rose maidens” variously process across the stage before and performing a quadrille, a mazurka, and a few morris dances, all climaxed by mass cavorting around a maypole. The following two scenes, depicting The legend of Herne the Hunter, features a woodland episode in which hunters and nymphs are joined by peasants and, once again, mummers. This time the score includes a waltz and a gallop. The sixth scene, Christmas revels in the time of Charles II, sees on-stage jollifications including a “procession of the boar’s head and roast beef”, a dance by a drunken jester, a game of blind man’s buff, a mistletoe dance and the arrival of Father Christmas. After a brief tableau of the Coronation of Queen Victoria set to an “Imperial march”, the final, eighth, scene, 1897 – Britain’s glory, is a typically Alhambra Theatre celebration of the nation’s military prowess. It sees Britannia returning to join sailors and soldiers from across the Empire in a final flag-waving rendition of the national anthem (“a good excuse for the girls of the corps de ballet to parade in the bare essentials of military dress while revealing a substantial acreage of leg”, as Mr Tillett observes).
I’m conscious that I’ve devoted rather a lot of space so far to describing the type of production that Sir Arthur Sullivan’s score was composed for, rather than the writing about the music itself. That, however, is because this is most definitely one occasion where, to reverse the late Stephen Sondheim’s famous dictum, form dictates content. Quite simply, the somewhat superficial nature of the whole project coupled with the very precise structure imposed by the Alhambra Theatre circumscribed Sullivan’s musical options quite considerably. Reviewing a different performance of excerpts from the score, my colleague John France considered the music “a little naïve… [albeit] well written and attractively scored and… most enjoyable”. Although, as John makes clear in his review, he was listening to one of the three suites that Sullivan extracted from the full score and was therefore assessing some of the more immediately effective and appealing numbers, much of the rest of the full score is also attractive – even if there’s rather a lot of monotony in almost 80 minutes of upbeat “merrie” music that deliberately eschews much in the way of dramatic tension (welcome, if all too brief, exceptions are provided by the Windsor forest – storm and Entrance of the hunters episodes that open the fourth scene). What’s apparent before too long is that, while individual numbers may be attractive enough, Sullivan’s full score is seriously hamstrung by its lack of variety. Victoria and merrie England, it turns out, is in need of a bit more darkness to provide some effective musical contrast – an injection of threatening Obscurantism, perhaps, or even a hefty shock of that Italian electricity.
Initially, matters get off to a relatively promising start. The Ancient Britain scene sees an effective Mendelssohn-like opening introduction depicting Britannia asleep (and just in case we’re unsure as to who the sleeping figure is, there’s a flourish of Rule, Britannia to clear the matter up), followed by a druids’ sacred march that, rather strangely and contrary to historical expectations, doesn’t depict them as blood-crazed, human-sacrificing fanatics but in a sinuous musical idiom more appropriate, perhaps, for a bevy of Asian bayadères. Unfortunately, matters go off the rails somewhat at that point, for a Rites of the mistletoe dance seems completely out of place in Ancient Britain, with a “ye olde merrie England” atmosphere that would have better fitted in either the Elizabethan or Restoration scenes to come.
The two scenes that encompass May day in Queen Elizabeth’s time are pretty relentlessly celebratory in tone, as is only to be expected, but with a few idiosyncrasies thrown in. The procession of the mummers and revellers, for instance, sounds in places as if they’ve arrived on a coach tour from Dublin, while the light and airy Warriors’ dance (historical quadrille) suggests that said fighters would probably be better deployed on the dance floor than on a battlefield. Meanwhile, anyone worried by a bit of musical anachronism will be somewhat concerned, if they aren’t already by this stage, by the inclusion of a vigorous Mazurka (knights and rose maidens) even though that dance hadn’t actually reached England before the 1840s.
The legend of Herne the Hunter takes up the production’s fourth and fifth scenes and gives us a series of attractive dances, even if it’s distinctly odd – i.e. yet again jarringly anachronistic - to find a rather lushly orchestrated Waltz of wood nymphs that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Victorian London’s high society ballrooms. Less disconcerting is a final Galop and dance of nymphs and hunters that would have made, I imagine, an effective staged conclusion to this section of the ballet.
Next comes a single scene depicting Christmas revels in the time of Charles II and, once again, a jolly scenario offers the opportunity for an unrelenting sequence of danced seasonal cheer that’s enough to have one crying “Bah, humbug!” at the drop of a mince pie. Both the Comic pas de quatre (fugue) and the following Drunken jester’s dance sound as if they would work well if effectively choreographed – though, from what we know of Alhambra Theatre productions, in practice that may well have been a vain hope.
The fact that the premiere of Victoria and merrie England took place in 1897 means that there would have been plenty of people around who still recalled Queen Victoria’s coronation in June 1838 – not least the aged monarch herself. As the seventh scene Coronation of Queen Victoria was composed of a single static tableau vivant (Tableau – Imperial march), it’s initially difficult to see why it featured in a ballet at all, other than to offer a chance for the chauvinistic audience to cheer its collective head off. In fact, the scene quite probably served the very practical purpose of providing six invaluable minutes of general stage inaction while frantic preparations were going ahead backstage for the upcoming and very elaborate finale. Sullivan’s Imperial march provided suitably grand musical wallpaper for the tableau, even though the use of a march when no-one on stage was actually moving – let alone dancing - seems a somewhat bizarre choice.
Victoria and merrie England’s final scene, 1897 – Britain’s glory, offers four numbers. The longest and most elaborate is the first, English, Irish, Scottish and colonial troops – military manoeuvres, and Sullivan incorporates a sequence of well-known tunes into it, including The British grenadiers, St Patrick’s day, Scots wha hae, his own He is an Englishman (from HMS Pinafore) and, in a naked appeal to Victorian sentimentality, Home! Sweet home! After a jaunty Sailors’ hornpipe and a Pas redouble, we arrive at Finale: Britannia – the Albert Memorial – God save the Queen!, a concentrated couple of minutes, at the end of which one can imagine the audience getting up from their seats (it was the national anthem, after all) and belting out the vocals with gusto.
Sophisticated? Definitely not. Historically accurate? Hardly. A true ballet? Well, only, perhaps, if you were watching it after a glass or three of claret mixed with Irish whiskey (Queen Victoria’s favourite tipple, so it seems). I suspect, nonetheless, that Victoria and merrie England was very effective at achieving its aim of filling the Alhambra and entertaining contemporary audiences, even if the artistic level of that entertainment was not especially elevated. Arguably closer to pantomime than to Petipa, it demonstrates that, if 19th century Britain was not quite the land without music that it was often said to be, it certainly was a land with a conception of ballet that seems quite alien to our modern sensibilities.
While, as the Times reviewer pointed out, Sullivan’s music may not be on a terribly sophisticated level, it benefits from the serious approach adopted by those involved in this recording. Conductor Andrew Penny leads the RTÉ Sinfonietta in a finely judged performance, giving it a real sense of theatre even in the absence of any staged action. The original tapes may be nearly 30 years old now, but they preserve a performance that still sounds very good indeed.
Rob Maynard
