After the phenomenal success of the Mikado (1885), London had to wait almost eighteen months for a new Savoy opera. What had begun, in the mid 1870s, as a one-off collaboration, had evolved not only into a successful writing partnership, but an institution. When the audience finally assembled for the new piece, Gilbert and Sullivan experienced their first open failure. Ruddigore was considered ill-titled and poorly conceived, illness dogged the cast shortly after the premiere and, with poor performance at the box office and a show that amounted to a public relations disaster, Richard D’Oyly Carte reminded the writers of their contractual obligations and demanded a new opera to be ready for the autumn season.

However much they pretended to act in perfect unity in public, the Savoy triumvirate was bedevilled with dissatisfaction and barely concealed animosity. Sullivan felt keenly that, having begun as the brightest hope of English music in the 1860s, his reputation had been tarnished by his connection with comic opera. Twice before he had tried to end the partnership, but persuaded by the adulation and financial reward which attended a successful outing at the Savoy, it had been possible to talk him back on board. But, with Ruddigore a perceived failure, he had the ammunition he required to ask that the contract be dissolved so that he could concentrate again on the “serious music” upon which he believed his place in history would depend.

Carte had other ideas. He had expensive plans to build a hotel attached to the Savoy and, significantly for Sullivan, to build a new theatre to home English opera in which, naturally, Sullivan would hold pride of place. Thus was Sullivan prevailed upon to write another Savoy opera, but this time, he had most certain conditions. Whatever plot Gilbert came up with must offer him the chance to explore human relationships and to compose a subject which was amenable to serious treatment and which confined him no longer to Gilbert’s notions of Topsy Turveydom and his virtuosic rhyming.

Gilbert had severe misgivings and believed that the Savoy operas were a unique and specific genre. Any departure from the audience’s expectations spelt trouble and, if Sullivan insisted on a serious subject, he felt that he should stand aside and give up both his place and his royalties to someone who could better serve the composer’s needs. Because the formula “Gilbert and Sullivan” was a proven winner, Carte had brought in Gilbert from the legitimate theatre in which, uniquely, he held an unrivalled position as a dramatist equally adept at comic and serious work and, to some extent, because Carte always rather considered Gilbert as the necessary evil required to stimulate Sullivan’s lucrative genius, the manager insisted on Gilbert honouring his contract and so the librettist was sent away to come up with something serious.

Meanwhile the Savoy embarked on a series of revivals and Sullivan went on holiday. Surprisingly, perhaps, Gilbert rose to the challenge. The considerable variety of his non-Savoy output, coupled with an understanding of theatrical and musical forms which, effectively, embraced the whole range of 19th-cnetury British theatre, equipped him to address the problem at the Savoy, and while he remained unconvinced up to and beyond the time of the new opera’s premiere, he succeeded in writing a work which was not only serious but which was also one of the most unusual and innovative music theatre texts in the 19th-century British canon.

The exact process whereby he arrived at The Yeomen of the Guard is unclear. The libretto has resonances of several “English Operas” current in Gilbert’s boyhood, most notable Wallace’s Maritana (1845). It is also indebted to a whole series of romantic historical melodramas, most typically those offered under Charles Kean’s management at the Prince of Wales in the 1850s. He also drew on a string of ‘B’ novels – Harrison Ainsworth’s The Tower of London springs to mind, but he was also referring to the whole tradition of so-called “rescue” operas, fashionable from the 1790s until the 1830s, of which, perhaps, Beethovean’s Fidelio remains most familiar.

Censorship dictated a historical past as a setting, and common to all rescue operas was the theme of selfless sacrifice in a prison setting to free a political prisoner, unjustly accused, whose release would restore love and decency to a world in which those values seemed to have been forgotten. Thus, in every sense – theatrical, formal ideological and generic – The Yeomen of the Guard looks back to previous traditions. Sullivan, bred up to the same theatrical and musical traditions as his partner – they had so often parodied them in the past – instinctively grasped the opportunities which Gilbert’s text offered to create the challenging, anomalous and yet wholly typical Savoy opera that is The Yeomen of the Guard.

If Sullivan wanted “seriousness”, he got it, and The Yeomen of the Guard is imbued with a seriousness that has led generations to misread its true nature. It isn’t, and never can be, a tragedy, no more so than, for instance, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger – one of Sullivan’s favourite operas and one to which he alludes throughout. At once too clever and too cautious to quote Wagner’s 1868 ‘City Comedy’, he nevertheless embraces tonalities, musical interplay and a public/private rhythm which takes the score to places he was unable to access again – not even in his only grand opera, Ivanhoe.

The Yeomen of the Guard is, essentially, that largely forgotten thing, a romantic opera. Like the operas of Mercandante, Donizetti and a host of others, it is a semi-seria, embracing both the comic and the serious, relishing the sadness that is inherent in all comedy, and the absurdity that is always attendant on any serious occasion in life. As Gilbert went on to comment in Utopia Limited (1893), “properly considered, what a farce life can be”.

The Yeomen of the Guard is overshadowed by the idea of death – not death as it was conventionally perceived in Victorian culture, but rather in its most alarming form; abrupt, uninvited and inexplicable termination of human life. Time passes (Meryll’s song) and so we should be prepared for death, but what happens when death comes unjustly, unfairly and by decree of the state – alluded to in songs by Phoebe, Dame Carruthers and Fairfax in the first twenty minutes of the opera? In such cases, the human spirit rises to challenge death and to offer, at whatever cost, at least another day. The Yeomen of the Guard is a comedy, in the long run, because it does what all comedies do best; it reaffirms the importance of living and offers us the hope that somehow, life will always triumph over death.

Having created this extraordinary opera, we know that Gilbert was uncomfortable, at first, about its content. Right up to the first night, he was trying to push Sullivan into refashioning the work into something more “audience friendly”. Sullivan however resisted and when they came to revise the opera, which they did over almost ten years, Gilbert came over increasingly to Sullivan’s understanding. The text we know today is considerably enlarged and expanded from its first night version and always on the side of a further exploration of emotions and motivation, rather than “cutting to the chase” in the name of comic effect.

Gilbert and, to a lesser extent, Sullivan had the luxury of watching the opera develop through performance. A number of performers approached the work from different view-points and, early in the performance life of the opera, a tradition developed whereby the jester, Jack Point, achieved tragic dimensions by means of that easiest of clap-traps, the unexpected death. As early as 1889, George Thorne had introduced a full-blown death scene for the Finale, and that most loved of all Savoyards, Henry Lytton, went to great lengths to insist that Gilbert had approved the death scene at the end. The librettist had at least five opportunities before his own death to change his final stage direction “Point falls insensible at their feet”, but he never did so. Some Points may die – and doubtless to great effect, but I suspect that Gilbert’s feeling was that such a moment was “out of place in a …comic opera”.

The essence of romantic opera is that it is ambivalent; great events (in such an opera the marrying of like with like) are concluded and the rest is left open and to question. Ambivalence, that walking the tightrope between the real and the supposed, the tragic and the comic, prevails in The Yeomen of the Guard and to make such a definite assertion in favour of the dead, rather than the living, is contrary to the piece. I won’t give away our ending, but I feel that Gilbert might, at the very least, have given the nod.

Playing The Yeomen of the Guard today is tricky. In many ways it is alarmingly modern, even post modern in its use of varied forms and traditions, its conflicting romanticism and bitterness. In rehearsing this production, I have asked the cast not to address the performing traditions that have grown up around the opera, but rather to concentrate on the emotional and theatrical reality that lies at its heart. To a large extent, Gilbert would recognise our stage pictures; the set is based on both the original production and those revivals supervised by him. Costumes similarly are based on early productions. But Gilbert was a stage director of considerable brilliance and in the actual direction, I have attempted to make the piece as immediate as it was when it first shocked and delighted audiences 112 years ago.

Michael McCaffery
Director