“Fallen Fairies”: Sir W. S. Gilbert on the New Savoy Opera; Amusing Reminiscences

Abstract

Conversing with the representative of the Daily Telegraph, while the chorus and orchestra were being taken by Mr German² through some of the delightful and very characteristic numbers which he has written for Fallen Fairies, Sir W. S. Gilbert recalled the production of the original Haymarket version,³ and described some interesting reminiscences. When The Wicked World was produced there was a prologue, which had to be spoken by Buckstone in front of the curtain. Unfortunately the famous comedian suffered from a defective memory, besides being very deaf, and for the life of him he could not remember the words of the prologue. The prompter’s voice failed to reach him, and so the actor was hardly able to complete a single line of the verses without going up close to the wings and repeating the words after the prompter. ‘It was a hopeless fiasco’, said the author, recalling the incident, ‘but fortunately Buckstone remembered his lines right enough once the play was started.’

Fallen Fairies made its first appearance as The Wicked World, ‘an entirely original Fairy Comedy’, at the Haymarket Theatre on 4 January 1873. It ran for 200 nights, which, as Gilbert proudly noted, was ‘a very good run in those days’. He had written it, along with The Palace of Truth and Pygmalion and Galatea, to demonstrate that it was quite possible to write a modern play which preserved the ancient dramatic unities of time and place. Gilbert wrote The Wicked World in blank verse, and also, for that matter, Fallen Fairies. Gilbert compressed his last two acts of The Wicked World into one and collaborated with Edward German, the composer, to convert his play to an opera. Gilbert described the new work as ‘a light comedy, with a thread of sentiment running through it.’ (It is useful to remember that Gilbert wrote more than four times as many dramatic scripts, burlesques, operas and extravaganzas without Sullivan as he did with him, and that Gilbert, at the time he was knighted, proudly claimed that he was the first to be so honoured ‘for dramatic authorship alone’.)