Offenbach: Les Brigands.(Opera Review)

OFFENBACH: Les Brigands (in English)

Simmonds, Beatty, Knox, Blankenheim, Howle, Stuart, Wuehrmann; Ohio Light Opera, Thompson. Text. Albany Records TROY 660/661

Pop quiz: Name a comic opera, lyrics by W. S. Gilbert, about the misadventures of a band of merry pirates. An outrageous plot contrivance places a virtuous young man, the tenor hero, in their midst. In tepid pursuit of the ruffians, a troupe of bumbling policemen miss their quarry again and again.

If you answered The Pirates of Penzance, you'd be only half right. In 1871, the year of Thespis, his first collaboration with Arthur Sullivan, and eight years before he wrote Penzance, Gilbert produced an English translation of Offenbach's operetta Les Brigands, original libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludm4c Halevy. It's a fascinating piece of cultural cross-pollination. Many elements of the Savoy operas are already in place here: the commitment to lighthearted fun, the blithe presentation of potentially vicious plot elements. Who but Gilbert could so effortlessly set the lyrics "Sack and pillage/town and village/all the day" to a sprightly quadrille?

Gilbert's own dramaturgy, though, is on a higher level. The Brigands's ramshackle plot is like a sexless bedroom farce, full of disguises and mistaken identities, with none of the rigorous nonsense logic of Gilbert's own scenarios to ground them. The reasons may be cultural: without the bedrock of Victorian morality as a grounding element, the farce ...