Fallen Fairies

Fallen Fairies; or, The Wicked World, is a two-act comic opera, with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert and music by Edward German. Premiering at London's Savoy Theatre on December 15, 1909, it failed miserably, closing after just 50 performances. Neither Gilbert nor German would write another opera.

Fallen Fairies is an operatic adaptation of Gilbert's 1873 blank-verse fairy comedy, The Wicked World. Gilbert wrote a number of successful plays in this genre. He was clearly fascinated by this plot, which had been the subject of his 1871 short story of the same name. Gilbert also wrote (under a pseudonym) an 1873 play that parodies The Wicked World called The Happy Land, which made a sensation at the Court Theatre after the Lord Chamberlain banned parts of it.

Like a number of Gilbert's blank-verse plays, Fallen Fairies treats the ensuing consequences when an all-female world is disrupted by men and the romantic complications they bring. His plays The Princess (1870) and Broken Hearts (1875), and his earlier operas Iolanthe (1882) and Princess Ida (1884), are all treatments of this basic idea. Stedman calls this a "Gilbertian invasion plot". Princess Ida and Fallen Fairies, both based on earlier blank-verse plays by Gilbert, unlike most of Gilbert's operas, both retain blank verse in the dialogue.

Read more about Fallen Fairies:  Background, Roles and Original Cast, Musical Numbers

Famous quotes containing the words fallen and/or fairies:

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    Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.)

    Slowly ... the truth is dawning upon women, and still more slowly upon men, that woman is no stepchild of nature, no Cinderella of fate to be dowered only by fairies and the Prince; but that for her and in her, as truly as for and in man, life has wrought its great experiences, its master attainments, its supreme human revelations of the stuff of which worlds are made.
    Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)