Ghost of Sunday Classics: Yes, it's more Donald Adams!

Princess Ida's three "hulking brothers" are bested by Prince Hilarion and his friends Cyril and Florian in Act III of the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players' Princess Ida.

Politics we bar,
they are not our bent!
On the whole we are
not intelligent!

-- Ida's brother Arac, in Act I of Princess Ida

by Ken

So far in this series we've heard our Donald as the army-besotted landlord Sergeant Bouncer in Burnand and Sullivan's Cox and Box and as the Usher in Trial by Jury, and most recently as the specter of the late Sir Roderic Murgatroyd in Ruddigore. And I thought we should start by finishing up with Sir Roderic, since we gave rather short shrift to the great scene in which the ancestral Murgatroyds step out of their picture frames in the great hall of the Bad Baronets of Ruddigore to torment the recently entitled Sir Ruthven over his failure to live up to the fabled Witch's Curse -- to "do one crime or more, once every day forever." After all, it was supposed to be our goal in last week's post, "When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls."

So we're going to return to the Picture Galley, then push farther into Ruddigore, and then we're going to hear Donald in another role, one he didn't have occasion to sing often, but sang wonderfully on two recordings of Princess Ida.

Ghost of Sunday Classics: When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls

With update, in which I actually include the texts
and music for the meeting of the two Bad Barts

Carole Round in the 1999 SavoyNet Performing Group Ruddigore

DAME HANNAH [quoting the burning witch]:
"Each lord of Ruddigore,
despite his best endeavour,
shall do one crime, or more,
once every day forever.
This doom he can't defy,
however he may try.
For should he stay
his hand, that day
in torture he shall die!"

[We heard the story in full in this week's preview, "The Witch's Curse."]

Gillian Knight (ms), Dame Hannah; Orchestra or the Royal Opera House, Covent Gardn, Isidore Godfrey, cond. Decca, recorded July 1962

Monica Sinclair (c), Dame Hannah; Pro Arte Orchestra, Sir Malcolm Sargent, cond. EMI, recorded Dec. 11-14, 1962

SIR DESPARD SOLILOQUIZES ABOUT HIS PICTURE GALLERY

Ruddigore, Act I: All the village girls express their horror of SIR DESPARD MURGATROYD, Bad Baronet of Ruddigore. As he approaches them they fly from him, terror-stricken, leaving him alone on the stage.

SIR DESPARD MURGATROYD: Poor children, how they loathe me -- me whose hands are certainly steeped in infamy, but whose heart is as the heart of a little child! But what is a poor baronet to do, when a whole picture gallery of ancestors step down from their frames and threaten him with an excruciating death if he hesitate to commit his daily crime? But ha! ha! I am even with them! [Mysteriously] I get my crime over the first thing in the morning, and then, ha! ha! for the rest of the day I do good -- I do good -- I do good! [Melodramatically] Two days since, I stole a child and built an orphan asylum. Yesterday I robbed a bank and endowed a bishopric. Today I carry off Rose Maybud and atone with a cathedral! This is what it is to be the sport and toy of a Picture Gallery! But I will be bitterly revenged upon them! I will give them all to the Nation, and nobody shall ever look upon their faces again!

by Ken

Before we continue with Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore, we're going to observe our frequent custom of starting at the beginning, with the Overture. For our purposes, as I hope you'll hear, it's especially important here. (Note that this is the "later" overture, in which Sullivan had no hand. But something had to be done when for the 1920-21 revival of the show -- after the deaths of both Gilbert and Sullivan -- the tune that had served as the big "developoment" tune of the original Overture, Robin's "When a man has been a wicked baronet" from the Act II finale, was cut. I happen to think that the replacement Overture, generally credited to Geoffrey Toye, a longtime assistant of Sullivan's, is quite dandy.)

GILBERT and SULLIVAN: Ruddigore: Overture (1920)


Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Isidore Godfrey, cond. Decca, recorded July 1962

Pro Arte Orchestra, Sir Malcolm Sargent, cond. EMI, recorded Nov. 3, 1960


ON TO BUSINESS -- ABOUT THAT PICTURE GALLERY
[Sorry, I was so pressed for time that I completely screwed this up this morning. The texts and the audio files were all ready to go, and I didn't get around to inserting them!]

This is officially, or at least this post began life as, a continuation of last week's idea of a tribute to the great G-and-S bass Donald Adams. Well, things happen. Much of the text was written on paper napkins in the shadow of the Harkness Tower at Yale, with a carillon ringing that included "Send in the clowns." (I was hoping for "Send in the clowns," but that wasn't bad.) We actually will get to Adams. But first . . . .

Ghost of Sunday Classics preview: The Witch's Curse

Dame Hannah (Maya Stroshane) tells the impressionable young village bridesmaids the story of the Witch's Curse in Brown University Gilbert and Sullivan's 2010 Ruddigore.

by Ken

We first pondered "The Witch's Curse," though at the time I wasn't able to enable you to hear it, in a June 2007 post called "'Laws? I don't obey no stinkin' laws!' Are Chimpy the Prez and his partner in crime 'Big Dick' Cheney blood brothers of the Bad Baronets of Ruddigore?," in response to a Washington Post report, "'Signing Statements' Study Finds Administration Has Ignored Laws." Right-wing scum pols ignoring the law -- what a surprise! This has a special resonance now when degraded and demented right-wing life forms like Darrell "The Unembarrassable" Issa have made a daily habit of persecuting the Obama administration for sins that were in fact spécialités de maison of the Bush regime, when they went routinely unremarked upon, even defended, by degraded and demented right-wing life forms like Darrell "The Unembarrassable" Issa.

Though I wasn't able to enable you to hear it back in 2007, we did eventually hear one of our versions of Dame Hannah's song in June 2010. We actually have entirely other-than-political reasons -- leftover business from last week, to be exact -- for returning this week to the ghost of Sir Rupert Murgatroyd, the first and baddest of the whole long line of Bad Baronets of Ruddigore. But I think it's never out of place to recall the curse that lay so heavily upon the bad barts, as explained by the doughty Dame Hannah early in Act I of Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore.


GILBERT and SULLIVAN: Ruddigore, or The Witch's Curse: Act I, Song, Dame Hannah and chorus, "Sir Rupert Murgatroyd, his leisure and his riches"

DAME HANNAH: Sir Rupert Murgatroyd,
his leisure and his riches,
he ruthlessly employed
in persecuting witches.
With fear he'd make them quake—
he'd duck them in his lake—
he'd break their bones
with sticks and stones,
and burn them at the stake!
CHORUS OF BRIDESMAIDS: This sport he much enjoyed,
did Rupert Murgatroyd—
no sense of shame
or pity came
to Rupert Murgatroyd!



DAME HANNAH: Once, on the village green,
a palsied hag he roasted,
and what took place, I ween,
shook his composure boasted.
For as the torture grim
aeized on each withered limb,
the writhing dame
'mid fire and flame
yelled forth this curse on him:
     "Each lord of Ruddigore,
     despite his best endeavour,
     shall do one crime, or more,
     once, every day, forever!
     This doom he can't defy,
     however he may try,
     for should he stay
     his hand, that day
     in torture he shall die!"

The prophecy came true:
each heir who held the title
had, every day, to do
some crime of import vital;
until, with guilt o'erplied,
"I'll sin no more!" he cried,
and on the day
he said that say,
in agony he died!
CHORUS OF BRIDESMAIDS: And thus, with sinning cloyed,
has died each Murgatroyd,
and so shall fall,
both one and all,
each coming Murgatroyd!

Monica Sinclair (c), Dame Hannah; Glyndebourne Festival Chorus, Pro Arte Orchestra, Sir Malcolm Sargent, cond. EMI, recorded Dec. 11-14, 1962

Gillian Knight (ms), Dame Hannah; D'Oyly Carte Opera Chorus, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Isidore Godfrey, cond. Decca, recorded July 1962

Ella Halman (c), Dame Hannah; D'Oyly Carte Opera Chorus, New Promenade Orchestra, Isidore Godfrey, cond. Decca, recorded July 21, 1950

Bertha Lewis (c); D'Oyty Carte Opera Chorus, orchestra, Harry Norris (or maybe George Byng?), cond. EMI, recorded June 30, 1924

I don't suppose we can any longer call the more-than-50-year-old EMI and Decca recordings "modern," though they sound better to me than an awful lot of recordings that are unquestionably "modern" chronologically. Stil, we have to distinguish them somehow from the two "historical" recordings I've included. Ella Halman, who recorded most of the G-and-S contralto roles in the late '40s and early '50s, has ardent Savoyard admirers, which has always mystified me. The greatness of Bertha Lewis, however, seems to me to glow through the 1924 acoustical sound.


IN THIS WEEK'S GHOST OF SUNDAY CLASSICS POST

We'll meet the ghostly Bad Baronets of Ruddigore, including their spokesghost, Sir Roderic Murgatroyd.

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