Perhaps as an alternative to waiting in line at the diner on Mother’s Day, you can cook breakfast for Mom at home and listen to “Haddon Hall.” Sir Arthur Sullivan’s rarely-heard light opera, given its premiere in 1892, will be the featured work on Sandy Steiglitz’s “Sunday Morning Opera.”
“Haddon Hall” is one of the works Sullivan composed without Gilbert, in the wake of the team’s temporary dissolution following “The Gondoliers.” Savoy Opera impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, no doubt crestfallen at the G & S separation, introduced Sullivan to Sydney Grundy. The result was a mild satire that left audiences accustomed to Gilbert’s barbed observations vaguely dissatisfied.
The opera dramatizes the elopement of Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall in 1563, against her father’s wishes, with John Manners, son of Thomas Manners, 1st Earl of Rutland. The conflict may have been in part religious (the Vernons were Catholic, the Manners Protestant); it was most certainly financial (as the second son of an earl, Manners’ prospects were uncertain). If all this sounds a tad dry to American sensibilities, Grundy moves the action forward a century to about 1660, recasting it against the backdrop of unrest between Royalists and Roundheads. Isn’t that much more interesting?
There’s also a fuming Scottish stereotype in the person of “The McCrankie,” a particularly strict Puritan from the Isle of Rum, who sings to the accompaniment of bagpipes and drinks whisky from a flask, ha ha.
Anyway, the music should be nice. Purportedly, it bears the stamp of Sullivan’s only grand opera, “Ivanhoe,” which had been completed only the year before.
“Haddon Hall” enjoyed a vogue among amateur groups in the 1920s, but has since drifted into obscurity. The 2000 recording features Mary Timmons, Maxwell Smart (no shoe phone jokes, please), and Alan Borthwick. The performance is conducted by David Lyle.
“Sunday Morning Opera” can be heard on WPRB Princeton at 103.3 FM, beginning at 5:30 a.m. The main attraction begins at 7:00. After the opera, in the time remaining, Sandy will celebrate the birthday of Richard Tauber. You can listen online at http://www.wprb.com.
More about “Sunday Morning Opera” here: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~san/schedule.html
PHOTO: When men were men, and women were women – if only we could tell them apart
