Princess Ida
|
|
Template:Wikisource Template:Wikisourcepar Princess Ida, or Castle Adamant, is the eighth operetta written by Gilbert and Sullivan. It opened at the Savoy Theatre on January 5, 1884, and enjoyed a run of 246 performances.
Princess Ida is based on Tennyson's poem The Princess. It is the only operetta that W.S. Gilbert wrote entirely in blank verse (as Trial by Jury was the only G&S operetta entirely set to music), and it is the only Gilbert and Sullivan operetta in three acts.
The operetta satirizes feminism and women's colleges, both of which were controversial topics in conservative Victorian England.
Princess Ida is an interesting operetta with lovely music, particularly a sequence of songs in Act II known as "Sullivan's string of pearls". However, between the comments made by characters in the operetta and its simplistic resolution, it is clearly a backlash against feminism's earliest incarnation. But Gilbert also satirizes the foolishness of men, and audiences generally do not take the anti-feminism seriously.
The Plot
Princess Ida is a young woman who dismisses men entirely and forms a women's college where no man is ever to set foot. The operetta opens on the day that she is supposed to meet the man to whom she was betrothed in infancy. She ignores her duty, however, and remains at her college.
Her prince, Hilarion, has never met her but is in love with her anyway. He and his friends Cyril and Florian invade Ida's college, laughing at the very concept: "A woman's college – maddest folly going!"
In the end, Ida is persuaded to wed her prince when Hilarion's father, King Hildebrand, presents her with the following argument in response to her appeal to the gratitude of Posterity:
If you enlist all women in your cause,
And make them all abjure tyrannic Man,
The obvious question then arises, "How
Is this Posterity to be provided?"
She replies,
I never thought of that!
External link
- All the lyrics and dialogue, complete with sound (http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/princess_ida/html/ida_midi.html)