La Vivandière; or, True to the Corps! is a burlesque by W. S. Gilbert, described by the author as "An Operatic Extravaganza Founded on Donizetti's opera, La figlia del regimento."[1] In the French or other continental armies a vivandière was a woman who supplied food and drink to troops in the field.[2]
The piece was first produced at St. James's Hall, Liverpool, on 15 June 1867.[3] It was then presented in London, with a mostly new cast, at the Queen's Theatre, Long Acre, opening on 22 January 1868. It was part of a series of operatic burlesques and other broad comic pieces that Gilbert wrote in the late 1860s near the beginning of his playwriting career. It was modestly successful and introduced some themes and satiric techniques that Gilbert would later employ in his famous Savoy operas.
Gilbert's first operatic burlesque, Dulcamara, or the Little Duck and the Great Quack, had been successful enough to encourage him to write another. It had run for 120 nights, from Christmas 1866 to Easter 1867, a good run for the London theatre of that time.[4] As with Dulcamara, Gilbert based La Vivandière on a comic opera by Donizetti, using the composer's tunes, and those of other composers, and fitting new words to them.
The work was premiered in Liverpool, by Maria Simpson's Opera Company, billed as "The new, original, and brilliant Operatic Extravaganza ... from the pen of W. S. Gilbert, Esq." The Gilbert scholar Jane Stedman writes that the subtitle was a topical allusion to a popular melodrama, True to the Core; A Story of the Armada.[4] In the Victorian era theatre managers normally bought or licensed plays from authors, and the authors had nothing to do with the staging of the works. Like his mentor Tom Robertson, however, Gilbert was not content to be merely the author, but sought to influence the staging of his works as much as a playwright was allowed to do. The press announcements for the Liverpool production stated that the piece was being staged under the author's "immediate superintendence".[5] Once established, Gilbert would stage direct nearly all of his own shows. It is not clear how much the Liverpool and London productions differed. Stedman notes that Gilbert made a number of changes to the libretto for the London production. The staging of the two productions was in wholly different hands: W. H. Montgomery and George Vinning, respectively musical director and scene painter in Liverpool, were replaced by Mr. Wallerstein and T. Grieve in London, and an almost completely new cast was selected.[6]
Gilbert generally followed the plot originally written for Donizetti by his librettists, Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Jean-François Bayard, but allowed himself some variations. In the opera, the Marchioness's husband does not appear, but Gilbert presented him as a glum figure played by Charles Wyndham in Liverpool and Lionel Brough in London. The hero, Tonio, is not an Alpine guide in the original, and, as Gilbert made plain in the libretto, Lord Margate, the noisome English tourist, was a character "unknown to Donizetti, one of the many liberties taken by the Author with the original story."[7] One reviewer noted that "the story ... acquires a new aspect from the circumstance that all the soldiers are converted into gorgeously attired Zouaves, and all the peasants into picturesque mountaineers.[8]
Among the stock devices of Victorian burlesque, such as rhymed couplets, contrived puns and other word-play, mistaken identities, and women playing male roles en travesti, La Vivandière contains the first example of what was to become one of Gilbert's trademarks: the ageing woman whose looks, if any, are fading.[5] Gilbert later renounced breeches roles and revealing dresses on his actresses, and made publicly known his disapproval of them.[9] In his choice of music, Gilbert ranged less widely than he had done with Dulcamara, which drew not only on music by operatic composers including Bellini, Flotow and Offenbach, but also on a great number of music hall and other popular songs, such as "Champagne Charlie" and "The Frog in Yellow." For La Vivandière, he drew almost entirely on the music of Donizetti's original or Offenbach's similarly military operetta, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein.[10]
Gilbert married in 1867 amid one of his most productive periods. In addition to his other writing activities during the late 1860s, Dulcamara and La Vivandière were part of a series of about a dozen early comic stage works, including opera burlesques, pantomimes and farces. These were full of awful puns and jokes as was traditional in similar pieces of the period.[11] For instance, in La Vivandière Gilbert included this joke on a Darwinian theme:
Nevertheless, Gilbert's burlesques were considered unusually tasteful compared to the others on the London stage.[12] The Times wrote: "The chief care of Mr. Gilbert has been to make his dialogue as perfect a specimen as possible of smooth verse, and to stud it profusely with elaborate puns of unquestionable originality. ... Mr. Gilbert shows a power of detecting phonetic affinities ... in which perhaps he excels all his contemporaries. ... [S]eldom have mere verbal pleasantries provoked such frequent laughter and applause as those in La Vivandière ... an extravaganza more elegant in its tone than the generality of burlesques"[8] The new piece ran for a total of 120 performances.[13] [14]
Gilbert's early pokes at grand opera show signs of the satire that would later be a defining part of his work. He would depart even further from the burlesque style from about 1869 with plays containing original plots and fewer puns.[12] [15] The most successful of Gilbert's opera parodies, Robert the Devil, opened in December 1868. These 1860s pieces led to Gilbert's more mature "fairy comedies", such as The Palace of Truth (1870) and Pygmalion and Galatea (1871), and to his German Reed Entertainments, which in turn led to the famous Gilbert and Sullivan operas.[15] [16]
The original Liverpool and London casts were as follows:
| Role | Description | Liverpool[17] | London | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count Roberto | Husband of the Marchioness of Birkenfelt, disguised as Manfred,[18] and living on Mont Blanc. | Charles Wyndham | Lionel Brough | |
| Tonio | An Alpine guide, sprung from a well-known Alpen-stock | Miss M. Brennan | Miss P. Markham | |
| The Earl of Margate | A British tourist unknown to Donizetti | Bella Goodall | Fanny Addison | |
| Lord Pentonville | His companion, man of small Parts. | Miss Deane | Miss Jordan | |
| Sir Peckham Rye | His companion, man of small Parts. | Miss Armstrong | Miss Montgomery | |
| The Marquis of Cranbourne Alley | His companion, man of small Parts. | Miss Vining | Miss Sylvia | |
| Pumpernickel | Steward to the Marchioness, in love with everybody. | E. Newbound | Mr. Sanger | |
| Sergeant Sulpizio | Paymaster sergeant, risen from the ranks to the ranks | J. D. Stoyle | J. L. Toole | |
| Cospetto | Soldier | Miss Chester | Miss F. Heath | |
| Ortensio | Soldier | Miss J. Gunniss | Miss Maxse | |
| Notary | His motto is deeds, not words | A. Brown | Mr. Fotheringham | |
| Maria | Supposedly the child of the Regiment; in reality, Roberto's daughter | Maria Simpson | Henrietta Hodson | |
| Marchioness of Birkenfelt | Her Mother | Harriet Everard | Harriet Everard | |
| Cocotte | Her Maid | Miss E. Seymour | Miss Turner | |
| Guests, Happy Peasants, Soldiers, and others, by a host of unrecognised Siddonses and Kembles | ||||
The following is the list of musical numbers printed in the Liverpool libretto, followed by the name of the original number pastiched. The lyrics were evidently revised for the London libretto. As none of the music was original, no vocal score was published.
The Liverpool press was no more than moderately impressed by the piece, judging it "no better and no worse" than other burlesques staged locally.[19] The London critics were much more favourable. The consensus was that Gilbert had avoided the vulgarity of most burlesques, choosing good music and writing ingenious and literate words. The Pall Mall Gazette complimented Gilbert on his good taste which was "deserving of compliment and imitation."[20] The Standard agreed, praising Gilbert's verbal dexterity: "Up to the present, Mr. H. J. Byron has been unsurpassed in the humorous extravagance of his verbal jokes, but in True to the Corps Mr. Gilbert fairly out-Byrons Byron." The reviewer wondered if some of Gilbert's plays on words were too clever for the audience.[21] The Morning Post began a long review thus:
The so-called "operatic extravaganza" produced last night under the title "La Vivandière; or, True to the Corps," does not, as one might at first suppose, belong to the same class of works as Mr. Sullivan's burlesque operas "Cox and Box" and the "Contrabandista." In "La Vivandière", the descriptive title, "operatic extravaganza," is justified only by the fact that the work is based on the libretto of an opera. It was a daring thing to attempt to make fun of "La Fille du Régiment," for the simple reason that the piece is of a serio-comic nature in its original form ... we should have thought it about as hopeful an enterprise as to parody a comic song. However, we must judge by results. Mr. W. S. Gilbert has already shown, in "Dulcamara," that he could produce an effective travesty of a comic opera, and he has given us a fresh and still more brilliant proof of that power in his happily named "True to the Corps."