Songs
The number of songs varied from production to production. The version submitted to the Lord Chamberlain had six songs, and an early review in The Times wrote that it was "overweighted with a quantity of extremely undramatic music", though the London Echo thought the music was "pretty". Nonetheless, the version printed in Gilbert's Original Plays (1911) cut these six songs to three, and some productions omitted the songs entirely.
The list of songs in the licence copy is:
- "Did you ever know a lady so particularly shady" – Jacques and villagers
- "Some people love Spring" – Boomblehardt
- "At home at last all danger past" – Sergeant Klooque
- "A soldier in the King's Hussars" – Sergeant Klooque, Pipette, and Peter
- "With furious blow" – Peter, Pipette, Sergeant Klooque, and Martha
- "Finale: Go away, ma'am, go away, ma'am" – ensemble
While the lyrics survive, none of the music was ever published, and it has been lost. The version in Original Plays omits the second verse of Nos. 1 and 6 and cuts Nos. 2, 3, and 5.
Read more about this topic: Creatures Of Impulse
Famous quotes containing the word songs:
“And songs climb out of the flames of the near campfires,
Pale, pastel things exquisite in their frailness
With a note or two to indicate it isn’t lost,
On them at least. The songs decorate our notion of the world
And mark its limits, like a frieze of soap-bubbles.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Dylan is to me the perfect symbol of the anti-artist in our society. He is against everything—the last resort of someone who doesn’t really want to change the world.... Dylan’s songs accept the world as it is.”
—Ewan MacColl (1915–1989)
“On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me,
“Pipe a song about a Lamb”;
So I piped with merry chear.
“Piper pipe that song again”—
So I piped, he wept to hear.
“Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe
Sing thy songs of happy chear”;
So I sung the same again
While he wept with joy to hear.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)