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:
“But they that hold God to be [an incorporeal substance] ... do absolutely make God to be nothing at all. But how? Were they atheists? No. For though by ignorance of the consequence they said that which was equivalent to atheism, yet in their hearts they thought God a substance ... So that this atheism by consequence is a very easy thing to be fallen into, even by the most godly men of the church.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
“As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in Indian file along some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)