No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2013
Arthur Sullivan's Walter Scott-based opera Ivanhoe, despite attaining great success at its 1891 premiere, has since quickly fallen from musicological grace. Substantive criticism of this work in the twentieth century has concentrated on the static, tableau-like dramaturgy of the opera, a lack of dramatic coherence, and its undeniably conservative musical language. Taking its bearings from such criticisms this paper explores Sullivan's problematic magnum opus from the perspective of its relationship with time, understood from multiple levels – his opera's musical-dramaturgical, historical, and music-historical temporalities. Starting from Michael Beckerman's insightful analysis of what he terms the ‘iconic mode’ in Sullivan's music, Ivanhoe can be viewed as an attempt at creating a different type of dramaturgical paradigm that emphasizes stasis and stability located in the past – highly apt for a work seeking both to crystallize past history and to found a new tradition for future English opera. Moreover, investigating this work and the composer's stated aesthetic concerns more closely reveal a conscious desire to opt out of continental European narratives of musical progress and build a composite, pageant-like vision of English history, therefore inevitably partaking in a process of constructing national identity. These features are teased out in the context of Scott's impact on the Victorian mind and their affinities with other historicist tendencies in the arts such as the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
I would like to thank Michael Allis especially for his kind suggestions for improving the first version of this paper presented at the Seventh Biennial Conference for Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Bristol University, 25 July 2009. Phyllis Weliver and Brooks Kuykendall also offered helpful comments on earlier versions and Robin Gordon-Powell was extremely generous in providing the musical examples from his edition of Ivanhoe.
1 The Times, 9 March 1910.
2 The Standard, 9 March 1910.
3 Dunhill, T. F., Sullivan's Comic Operas: A Critical Appreciation (London: Edward Arnold, 1929): 194Google Scholar
4 Ernest Walker: ‘a purely elementary work all through … as a rule mere commonplace … with not a trace of workmanship worth mentioning, and the deadly dullness of nearly all the opera passes belief.’ Walker, A History of Music in England, 1907; third edition, revised and enlarged J.A. Westrup (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952): 325Google Scholar
5 Jacobs, Arthur, ‘Arthur Sullivan’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, ed. Stanley Sadie, 29 volumes (London: Macmillan, 2001): 24: 697Google Scholar
6 Nicholas Temperley, reply to Winton Dean's review, The Musical Times, 114 (1973): 896.
7 John Caldwell for instance claims that ‘the idioms natural to English composers were not inherently musico-dramatic’ (The Oxford History of English Music, 2 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 2: 251Google Scholar
8 Nigel Burton's overview in The Athelone History of Music in Britain: The Romantic Age 1800–1914, ed. Nicholas Temperley (London: Athlone, 1981): 342–350Google Scholar
9 Caldwell, The Oxford History of English Music, 2: 252Google Scholar
10 J.A. Fuller Maitland's review in The Times (2 February 1891) locates these general features in Scott's novel, but sees them, contrariwise, as pre-eminently suited to operatic setting: ‘Scott's immortal romance has always had special attractions for opera composers, and the reason is very easily found; the picturesque costumes, the atmosphere of chivalry and of free forest life and certain eminent dramatic situations more than make up for the obvious want of unity and central interest in the story itself.’ These ‘eminent dramatic situations’ are captured in the Act 2 Scene 3 duet between Rebecca and the Templar, praised by many critics (cf. The Musical Times, 32 (1891): 150), although with this notable exception reviewers would normally admit that the lyrical writing took precedence over the dramatic (see The Athenaeum, 14 February 1891, 226). Interestingly, Fuller Maitland perceives a tension between conflicting aesthetics of operatic construction (the older set-piece versus the continuous modern style) in evaluating the work, suggesting that if the latter viewpoint became hegemonic (as it did), Ivanhoe would not be positively judged. In this context, it is also worth noting that the age of widespread operatic setting of Scott – including versions of Ivanhoe by Marschner and Nicolai – occurred much earlier in the nineteenth century, before the dramaturgical innovations of Wagner and Verdi rendered a more static operatic temporality outmoded for contemporary critics.
11 Kramer, Jonathan D., ‘New Temporalities in Music’, Critical Inquiry, 7 (1981): 539–556CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 Berger, Karol, Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Beckerman, Michael, ‘Arthur Sullivan, Haddon Hall, and the Iconic Mode’, Comparative Drama, 22 (1988): 2–3Google Scholar
14 The division into three acts follows broadly the outlines of Scott's division into three volumes. Here I have adopted numbering the chapters of the novel consecutively for simplicity of reference (Volume 1: chapters 1–14; Volume 2: chapters 15–30; Volume 3: chapters 31–44). Page numbers to Scott's novel follow the Penguin Classics reproduction of the text of the 1998 critical Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000).
15 Strong, Jonathan, ‘Ivanhoe and Continental Opera’, in Sullivan's Ivanhoe, ed. David Eden (Saffron Walden: Sir Arthur Sullivan Society, 2007)Google Scholar
16 Mitchell, Jerome, The Walter Scott Operas (Tuscaloosa, AL: Alabama University Press, 1977): 189–200Google Scholar
Stan Meares, ‘A Century of Ivanhoe’, Ivanhoe (Centenary Booklet) (Coventry: Sir Arthur Sullivan Society, 1990): 11Google Scholar
17 Also note in this context the number of prominent instances of incidental music for plays and use of melodrama in the nineteenth century – a genre which later became unfashionable. Examples include the Mendelssohn–Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream, Schumann–Byron Manfred, Bizet–Daudet L'arlésienne, and Grieg–Ibsen Peer Gynt. English music has a long heritage of accompanying established literary stage works, from Purcell's The Fairy-Queen and The Tempest through Sullivan's incidental music to five Shakespeare plays, Mackenzie's Coriolanus and the Oxbridge Greek dramas of Macfarren, Stanford, Parry and Vaughan Williams; a reason for this concentration may lie in the strength of (and corresponding emphasis on) the literary artistic tradition in Britain.
18 Chandler, Alice, ‘Chivalry and Romance: Scott's Medieval Novels’, Studies in Romanticism, 14 (1975): 198–199CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19 Robrahn, Ulrike, ‘Ivanhoe als lyrische Oper (Sullivan) und historischer Roman (Scott) unter Berücksichtigung von werkimmanenter Dramaturgie, öffentlicher Rezeption und Institutions-geschichte’ (Diplomarbeit, Magdeburg University, 2001)Google Scholar
20 Mitchell, Jerome, Scott, Chaucer, and Medieval Romance (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1987): 234–241Google Scholar
Fiona Robertson, ‘Romance and the Romantic Novel: Sir Walter Scott’, in Corinne Saunders, ed., A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004): 298–299Google Scholar
Duncan, Ian, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21 Jacobs, Arthur, Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician (Basingstoke: Scolar Press, 1992)Google Scholar
22 For instance in Act 1 Scene 1: De Bracy's plan to abduct Rowena; Act 1 Scene 2: Ivanhoe's warning to Isaac; Act 2 Scene 1: Locksley's urgent message of the abductions carried out by the Normans; Act 2 Scene 3: the trumpet call, announcing the storming of Torquilstone which occurs in the following scene (here a brief interjection before the end); Act 3 Scene 2: Isaac's news of Rebecca's trial for witchcraft.
23 Winton Dean, review of Ivanhoe, 722.
24 Ericksen, Donald H., ‘ “Black House” and Victorian Art and Illustration: Charles Dickens's Visual Narrative Style’, The Journal of Narrative Technique, 13/1 (1983): 31–46Google Scholar
Flaxman, Rhoda Leven, Victorian Word-Painting and Narrative: Toward the Blending of Genres (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987)Google Scholar
Smith, Grahame, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003): 64–65Google Scholar
25 Klein, Hermann, Thirty Years of Musical Life in London, 1870–1900 (London: Heinemann, 1903): 169Google Scholar
26 Beer, Gillian, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983)Google Scholar
27 Sullivan, Herbert and Flower, Newman, Sir Arthur Sullivan: His Life, Letters & Diaries (London: Cassell, 1927): 140Google Scholar
28 Lamb, Andrew, ‘Ivanhoe and the Royal English Opera’, The Musical Times, 114 (1973): 475–478Google Scholar
Arthur Jacobs, Arthur Sullivan, 324–326Google Scholar
Dailey, Jeff S., Sir Arthur Sullivan's Grand Opera ‘Ivanhoe’ and its Theatrical and Musical Precursors: Adaptations of Sir Walter Scott's Novel for the Stage, 1819–1891 (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2008)Google Scholar
29 Yates, Martin, ‘The Knight and the Queen. Ivanhoe and Gloriana: Two National Operas’, in Sullivan's Ivanhoe, 112Google Scholar
Strong, Jonathan, ‘Ivanhoe Explained’, Sir Arthur Sullivan Society Magazine, 61 (Winter 2005): 20Google Scholar
30 Illustrated London News, 7 February 1891; the last reference is of course an allusion to H.M.S. Pinafore.
31 Lawrence, Arthur, Arthur Sullivan – Life Story, Letters and Reminiscences (London: James Bowden, 1899): 210Google Scholar
32 Dahlhaus, Carl, Between Romanticism and Modernism, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980): 95–99Google Scholar
Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar
Day, cf. James, Englishness in Music: From Elizabethan Times to Elgar, Tippett, and Britten (London: Thames, 1999)Google Scholar
33 Scott, Ivanhoe, chapter 1, 17.
34 Scalic descents in music have a long history of association with painful, sorrowful sentiments. The baroque lamento bass (typically a chromatic fall from degree ⇒8 to ⇒5) and the melodic descent ⇒5-⇒1 are two classic archetypes.
35 At the close of the novel Scott claims that ‘it was not until the reign of Edward the Third that the mixed language, now termed English, was spoken at the court of London, and that the hostile distinction of Norman and Saxon seems entirely to have disappeared’ (Ivanhoe, chapter 44, 398).
36 The Norman theme is in fact preceded by an arpeggiated fanfare that to some extend mediates between the forthcoming theme and the Saxon material. Elsewhere, such as in Act 3 Scene 1 (the link revealed between the motive just heard in Ivanhoe's ‘Come, gentle sleep’ and Ulrica's earlier ‘Wave your long tresses’ from Act 2 Scene 3), Sullivan shows himself adept at combining or creating unexpected links between separate motives.
37 Chandler, ‘Chivalry and Romance’, 189; Scott, ‘Essay on Chivalry’, in Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, 28 volumes (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1836–1850)Google Scholar
38 Simmons, Clare A., Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990): 85Google Scholar
39 Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 75–76Google Scholar
40 One could also note Sullivan's possible homage to operatic history in that it is Grétry's Richard Coeur-de-Lion (1784) that features the first clear use of a reminiscence theme in an opera – the romance ‘Une fièvre brûlante’, which appears nine times across its three acts – a technique that would be developed most famously in Wagner's Leitmotiv.
41 Jerome Mitchell's The Walter Scott Operas and his follow-up More Scott Operas: Further Analyses of Operas Based on the Works of Sir Walter Scott (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996)Google Scholar
42 Brown, David, Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979)Google Scholar
Chandler, Alice, ‘Sir Walter Scott and the Medieval Revival’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 19 (1965): 315–332Google Scholar
43 Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 76Google Scholar
44 Scott, Ivanhoe, ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ from Laurence Templeton, 12Google Scholar
45 Scott, Ivanhoe, ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ from Laurence Templeton, 9Google Scholar
46 Chandler, ‘Chivalry and Romance’, 188–190Google Scholar
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985)Google Scholar
47 Bernard Beckerman, Theatrical Presentation, 46Google Scholar
48 Beckerman, Bernard, ‘Historic and Iconic Time in Late Tudor Drama’, in Shakespeare, Man of the Theater, ed. Kenneth Muir (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1983): 48Google Scholar
49 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991)Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar
Smith, Anthony D., National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991)Google Scholar
50 The above claim is not intended to suggest that Wagner's operatic output is necessarily or essentially fascistic, though elements of it can obviously easily be accommodated into this viewpoint. Of course Wagner's most clearly nationalistic (and allegedly anti-Semitic) mature work, Die Meistersinger, is an exception to this in that it is more-or-less historically located and unmythological.
51 Young, Robert J. C., The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008): 19Google Scholar
52 Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity.
53 Ibid., 37.
54 Ibid., 179.
55 Ian Duncan, Introduction to Oxford World Classics edition of Ivanhoe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar
56 Scott, Ivanhoe, chapter 44, 398.
57 Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture, 164Google Scholar
58 Indeed, religiously the Jewish Rebecca is the only serious figure in the whole story. The Saxon Christian Friar Tuck is a lovable rogue, an honest drinking fellow who can wield a sword and luckily doesn't take his religion too earnestly, and the Normans (read Catholics) lascivious foreign rapists. The Protestant reconfiguring of early English history also bears comparison with that at the close of Tennyson's ‘The Coming of Arthur’ (Idylls of the King), with Arthur's dismissal of the Lords of Rome.
59 Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 78Google Scholar
60 The Musical World, 24 January 1885.
61 Mackenzie, Alexander C., ‘The Life-Work of Arthur Sullivan’, Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 3/3 (May 1902): 539–540Google Scholar
62 Ruskin, John, ‘Lectures on Architecture and Painting’ (1853), Lecture IV: Pre-Raphaelitism, in Pre-Raphaelitism: Lectures On Architecture & Painting, &c. (London: J.M. Dent, 1906): 152Google Scholar
63 William Parry, Interview for the SWR radio series ‘Der englische Komponist Arthur Sullivan’, broadcast in June/July 2005).
64 Scene 6 of The Golden Legend is probably the best illustration of these traits and one of the high-points of Sullivan's oeuvre.