Happy Arcadia

Happy Arcadia is a musical entertainment with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert and music originally by Frederic Clay that premiered on 28 October 1872 at the Royal Gallery of Illustration. It was one of four collaborations between Gilbert and Clay between 1869 and 1876. The music is lost. The piece is a satire on the genre of pastoral plays in which the characters, who each wish that they could be someone else, have their wish granted, with unhappy results.

Gilbert and Sullivan later produced a popular comic opera, Iolanthe in which two of the characters, Strephon and Phyllis, are "Arcadian" shepherds. Phyllis, like Chloe, is torn between two suitors. The character of Lycidas also anticipates the character of Archibald Grosvenor in Patience, who is cursed with perfect beauty.

Read more about Happy Arcadia:  Background, Synopsis, Roles and Casts of 1872 and 1895 Productions, Musical Numbers

Famous quotes containing the words happy and/or arcadia:

    Fair thoughts and happy hours attend on you!
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.
    Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)