Ivanhoe (opera) - Production and Aftermath

Production and Aftermath

Ivanhoe and The Royal English Opera House opened on 31 January 1891, with the Prince and Princess of Wales and other members of the royal family in attendance. The production was lavish: An orchestra of 64 players, 72 choristers and 120 supernumeraries were employed. Percy Anderson designed the costumes, Hawes Craven and others designed the sets, staging was by Hugh Moss, and François Cellier and Ernest Ford alternated as conductors. Ford also arranged the piano score for Ivanhoe. In the opening night programme, Carte set forth his goals:

I am endeavouring to establish English Grand Opera at the New Theatre which I have built.... Whether will succeed or not depends on whether there is a sufficient number of persons interested in music and the drama who will come forward and fill the theatre.... I have made arrangements with other distinguished composers and authors to write operas to follow Ivanhoe, which operas will be produced if the enterprise is a pecuniary success. The intention is to 'run' each opera, that is to say, to play it six times a week, at any rate at first. This is the only way in which the expenditure necessary to secure a proper representation in the matter of scenery and costumes can be recouped.... It rests with whether a National Opera House shall be established on a permanent basis or not.

Thus, departing from the usual practice for grand opera to be presented in repertory, Carte presented Ivanhoe every night, with alternative singers being provided for the chief roles - not as separate 'first' and 'second' casts, but in different mixtures. One cast member who went on to a fine career was the young tenor, Joseph O'Mara, in the title role. R. Scott Fishe, a member of the chorus, later became a principal performer with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company at the Savoy Theatre. No expense was spared to make the production a success, including "every imaginable effect of scenic splendour". The opera ran for an unprecedented 155 consecutive performances and had strong revenues at first. It received very favourable press, with a few reports expressing reservations about the libretto. Of more than a dozen opening night reviews, only Shaw's and Fuller Maitland's reviews were negative.

Ivanhoe closed in July, when the opera house closed for the summer at the end of the opera season. When the house re-opened in November, after a delay, Carte produced André Messager's La Basoche (with David Bispham in his first London stage performance) alternating in repertory with six more performances of Ivanhoe (which ran at a substantial loss this time), and then La Basoche alone, closing in January 1892. Though praised, La Basoche could not fill the large house, and losses were mounting. Carte had commissioned new operas from Cowen, Herman Bemberg, Hamish MacCunn and Goring Thomas. Although Bemberg's opera Elaine was finished, and Cowen's Signa would be completed in March, Carte evidently had decided that producing these would be impracticable or too expensive and that he could not make a success of the new house. The Pall Mall Gazette wrote, "The question, then, uppermost is whether Londoners really want English opera at all.... Mr D'Oyly Carte is to be pitied, and it is hard to see how he can continue to throw his operatic pearls before those who do not value them. After all, the Englishman's opera-house is the music-hall."

Notwithstanding Ivanhoe's initial success, the opera house was a failure, and later writers unfairly blamed Ivanhoe for this failure. It was, as critic Herman Klein observed, "the strangest comingling of success and failure ever chronicled in the history of British lyric enterprise!" Sir Henry Wood, who had been répétiteur for the production of Ivanhoe, recalled in his autobiography that " Carte had had a repertory of six operas instead of only one, I believe he would have established English opera in London for all time. Towards the end of the run of Ivanhoe I was already preparing the Flying Dutchman with Eugène Oudin in the name part. He would have been superb. However, plans were altered and the Dutchman was shelved." After a season of performances by Sarah Bernhardt, Carte was forced to sell the theatre. A consortium led by Sir Augustus Harris purchased the house, renaming it the Palace Music Hall and later the Palace Theatre of Varieties. The building is known today as the Palace Theatre.

There was a successful touring revival of Ivanhoe by the Carl Rosa Opera Company from December 1894 to June 1895 in a cut version (the opera originally ran almost four hours) and then again in the autumn of 1895, and a production in Berlin in November 1895 that generated no further interest. A concert performance was given at the Crystal Palace in 1903. Then, apart from two performances in Sir Thomas Beecham's 1910 season at the Royal Opera House, Ivanhoe disappeared from the professional repertory. The opera was broadcast twice on BBC Radio in 1929, with the London Wireless Orchestra conducted by Percy Pitt, who had conducted the 1910 performances. Stanford Robinson conducted another broadcast between the wars. The few modern performances of the music have included a concert by the Boston Academy of Music on 23 November 1991.