Gayden wren biography of william

Appendices of opera synopses and revisions to Ruddigore are provided with a detailed list that includes the titles of all songs discussed within the chapters. A better gilt-tooled hardback cover would have been appreciated. Wren is a gifted writer and gives his honest views with confidence, providing clear style of presentation, clarity of description and much to get one thinking.

Search MusicWeb Here. Insightful, illuminating and essential to anyone interested in the subject. This seems backward to me, because I got into the operas by seeing them onstage, but perhaps it would work. In any case, an Arabian Nights approach an elderly postman spins tales at a pub is told in very readable, often entertaining, prose that has some appeal even to those who already know how the stories will come out.

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Gayden wren biography of william

Wed, Jan 29, - pm EST. More Events. Upcoming Events. Mother Goose Magic. Fri, Jan 31, - am EST. Creation Station. Sat, Feb 1, - pm EST. Building Tours, February All Events. Book Recommendations. He finds the "babies in love" concept in Patience to be too silly as if that was not the intention , finds the recitatives that open The Sorcerer to be workmanlike of course they're not masterpieces, but there's clearly a sense of humour there that can be performed, as it was in the Brent Walker video , and is given to dismissing some of the stretched rhymes as being acts of desperation on the part of the lyricist, rather than acts of overt cheekiness.

I've never been to an American production of the works, but I wonder if audiences there treat them as more self-consciously "classic"? Or perhaps it's that Wren sees these works as so devoid of any political or social sting that they must be more serious than most of us from the Commonwealth believe. They're works of great art, don't mistake me, but that is not inherently the same thing as being serious.

More intriguing still is Wren's habit - not infrequent in this volume - of dismissing all of those who came before. Several times he tells us sagely that every critic prior to him has either missed the truth about a song or has been wrong; occasionally, he acknowledges one critic walked up to the line but then clearly failed to see what was on the other side.

This is taken to its logical extreme in the back of the book where, to quote another reviewer here, "the world's snidest bibliography" is to be found. Annotating all of his sources, good and great books are given their due by the author, but more seem to be terrible, not worth reading, even outright offensive. Perhaps Wren's weakest point - oddly, for an entertainment writer - seems to be a limited interest in how a work is put together.

He seems to suffer from that old-fashioned indeed, 19th century notion which used to regard Shakespeare's works as "masterpieces with a lot of confusing bits that were probably added in by someone else". People thought that writers sat in ivory towers creating gossamer and then disseminating it to artists, rather than the reality that an Elizabethan playwright worked closely with his company in developing a new play, with the company also invoking a decent amount of license to shape a work to their needs.

The idea that Shakespeare himself might have thought pragmatically god forbid! To give an example of the two complaints above which come together, take Princess Ida. The consensus view of most commentators is that Tennyson's original poem is the more feminist work in line with that author's political leanings while Gilbert's reworking, unintentionally or otherwise, gives it a distinctly less feminist tinge.

Wren tells us straight that all of those commentators all of them! Tennyson was actually the hateful misogynist and Gilbert's reworking artistically created a work of profound support for gender equality. Don't get me wrong: Wren is entitled to his argument and I do believe he hovers close to the mark when he talks about the real battle between youth vs old rather than female vs male, with Gilbert lightly satirising the movement rather than being a staid old patriarch.

But that's not enough for the writer here, who not only dismisses all other critics with such certainty such certainty but invokes a serious of spurious arguments to prove this. He expounds at length upon Gilbert's decision to make Ida's father King Gama a negative character, where he is the good king in the poem to Hildebrand's bad king, and finds that this must have been done to emphasise how much of a break Ida is making from her "bleak, violent, confrontational" past.

The leading character was a Cockney businessman who happened to be a sorcerer, a purveyor of blessings not much called for and curses very popular. Gilbert and Sullivan were tireless taskmasters, seeing to it that The Sorcerer opened as a fully polished production, in marked contrast to the under-rehearsed Thespis. Nevertheless, Carte and his syndicate were sufficiently encouraged to commission another full-length opera from the team.

Gilbert and Sullivan scored their first international hit with H. Pinafore , satirizing the rise of unqualified people to positions of authority and poking good-natured fun at the Royal Navy and the English obsession with social status building on a theme introduced in The Sorcerer, love between members of different social classes. As with many of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, a surprise twist changes everything dramatically near the end of the story.

Gilbert oversaw the designs of sets and costumes, and he directed the performers on stage. Sullivan personally oversaw the musical preparation. The result was a new crispness and polish in the English musical theater. Pinafore ran in London for performances. The libretto of H. Pinafore relied on stock character types, many of which were familiar from European opera and some of which grew out of Gilbert's earlier association with the German Reeds : The heroic protagonist tenor and his love-interest soprano ; the older woman with a secret or a sharp tongue contralto ; the baffled lyric baritone—the girl's father; and a classic villain bass-baritone.

Gilbert and Sullivan added the element of the comic patter-singing character. With the success of H. Pinafore, the D'Oyly Carte repertory and production system was cemented, and each opera would make use of these stock character types. Before The Sorcerer, Gilbert had constructed his plays around the established stars of whatever theater he happened to be writing for, as had been the case with Thespis and Trial by Jury.

Building on the team he had assembled for The Sorcerer, Gilbert no longer hired stars; he created them. He and Sullivan selected the performers, writing their operas for ensemble casts rather than individual stars. The repertory system ensured that the comic patter character who performed the role of the sorcerer, John Wellington Wells, would become the ruler of the Queen's navy as Sir Joseph Porter in H.

Similarly, Mrs. Relatively unknown performers whom Gilbert and Sullivan engaged early in the collaboration would stay with the company for many years, becoming stars of the Victorian stage. These included George Grossmith, the principal comic; Rutland Barrington, the lyric baritone; Richard Temple, the bass-baritone; and Jessie Bond, the mezzo-soprano soubrette.

The Pirates of Penzance, conceived in a fit of pique at the American copyright pirates, also poked fun at grand opera conventions, sense of duty, family obligation, the "respectability" of civilization and the peerage, and the relevance of a liberal education. The story also revisits Pinafore' s theme of unqualified people in positions of authority, in the person of the "modern Major-General" who has up-to-date knowledge about everything except the military.

The Major-General and his many daughters escape from the tender-hearted Pirates of Penzance, who are all orphans, on the false plea that he is an orphan himself. The pirates learn of the deception and re-capture the Major-General, but when it is revealed that the pirates are all peers, the Major-General bids them: "Resume your ranks and legislative duties, and take my daughters, all of whom are beauties!

The piece premiered first in New York rather than London, in an unsuccessful attempt to secure the American copyright, and was another big success with both critics and audiences. During the run of the Gilbert and Sullivan's next opera, Patience, Carte built the Savoy Theatre, which became the partnership's permanent home and was the first theater in the world to be lit entirely by electric lighting.

The most successful of the Savoy Operas was The Mikado , which made fun of English bureaucracy, thinly disguised by a Japanese setting. Gilbert initially proposed a story for a new opera about a magic lozenge that would change the characters which he later presented in The Mountebanks, written with Alfred Cellier, in , but Sullivan found it artificial and lacking in "human interest and probability," as well as being too similar to their earlier opera, The Sorcerer.

The author and composer were at an impasse until May 8, , when Gilbert dropped the lozenge idea and agreed to provide a libretto without any supernatural elements. Ko-Ko loves his ward, Yum-Yum, but she loves a musician, who is really the son of the emperor of Japan the Mikado , and who is in disguise to escape the attentions of the elderly and amorous Katisha.

The Mikado has decreed that executions must resume without delay in Titipu. When news arrives that the Mikado will be visiting the town, Ko-Ko assumes that he is coming to ascertain whether Ko-Ko has carried out the executions. Too timid to execute anyone, Ko-Ko cooks up a conspiracy to misdirect the Mikado, which goes awry. Eventually, Ko-Ko must persuade Katisha to marry him, in order to save his own life and the lives of the other conspirators.

With the opening of trade between England and Japan, Japanese imports, art, and styles became fashionable in London, making the time ripe for an opera set in Japan.