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''La Vivandière; or, True to the Corps!'' is a burlesque by W. S. Gilbert, described by the author as "An Operatic Extravaganza Founded on Donizetti's Opera, ''La figlia del regimento''."〔It was the fashion in the mid-19th century to give Italian titles to operas not written in Italian: the opera burlesqued by Gilbert was written in French as ''La fille du régiment'' (''The Daughter of the Regiment''). In the same month that Gilbert's burlesque opened, another adaptation closer to the original was playing in London, described as "founded, of course, on Donizetti's opera ''La figlia del regimento''."〕 In the French or other continental armies a vivandière was a woman who supplied food and drink to troops in the field.〔Oxford English Dictionary, "vivandière".〕 The piece was first produced at St. James's Hall, Liverpool, on 15 June 1867.〔"Dramatic and Musical Chronology", ''The Era'', 5 January 1868, p. 10〕 It was then presented in London, with a mostly new cast, at the Queen's Theatre, Long Acre, opening on 22 January 1868. It was part of a series of operatic burlesques and other broad comic pieces that Gilbert wrote in the late 1860s near the beginning of his playwriting career. It was modestly successful and introduced some themes and satiric techniques that Gilbert would later employ in his famous Savoy operas.〔 ==Background and analysis== Gilbert's first operatic burlesque, ''Dulcamara, or the Little Duck and the Great Quack'', had been successful enough to encourage him to write another. It had run for 120 nights, from Christmas 1866 to Easter 1867, a good run for the London theatre of that time.〔Stedman, p. 38〕 As with ''Dulcamara'', Gilbert based ''La Vivandière'' on a comic opera by Donizetti, using the composer's tunes, and those of other composers, and fitting new words to them. The work was premiered in Liverpool, by Maria Simpson's Opera Company, billed as "The new, original, and brilliant Operatic Extravaganza ... from the pen of W. S. Gilbert, Esq." The Gilbert scholar Jane Stedman writes that the subtitle was a topical allusion to a popular melodrama, ''True to the Core; A Story of the Armada.''〔 In the Victorian era theatre managers normally bought or licensed plays from authors, and the authors had nothing to do with the staging of the works. Like his mentor Tom Robertson, however, Gilbert was not content to be merely the author, but sought to influence the staging of his works as much as a playwright was allowed to do. The press announcements for the Liverpool production stated that the piece was being staged under the author's "immediate superintendence".〔Stedman, p. 39〕 Once established, Gilbert would stage direct nearly all of his own shows. It is not clear how much the Liverpool and London productions differed. Stedman notes that Gilbert made a number of changes to the libretto for the London production. The staging of the two productions was in wholly different hands: W. H. Montgomery and George Vinning, respectively musical director and scene painter in Liverpool, were replaced by Mr. Wallerstein and T. Grieve in London, and an almost completely new cast was selected.〔See images of London programme and Liverpool advertisement〕 Gilbert generally followed the plot originally written for Donizetti by his librettists, Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Jean-François Bayard, but allowed himself some variations. In the opera, the Marchioness's husband does not appear, but Gilbert presented him as a glum figure played by Charles Wyndham in Liverpool and Lionel Brough in London. The hero, Tonio, is not an Alpine guide in the original, and, as Gilbert made plain in the libretto, Lord Margate, the noisome English tourist, was a character "unknown to Donizetti, one of the many liberties taken by the Author with the original story."〔Gilbert (1867), p. 1〕 One reviewer noted that "the story ... acquires a new aspect from the circumstance that all the soldiers are converted into gorgeously attired Zouaves, and all the peasants into picturesque mountaineers.〔("New Queen's Theatre" ). ''The Times'', 24 January 1868; reprinted at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed 10 December 2010〕 Among the stock devices of Victorian burlesque, such as rhymed couplets, contrived puns and other word-play, mistaken identities, and women playing male roles ''en travesti'', ''La Vivandière'' contains the first example of what was to become one of Gilbert's trademarks: the ageing woman whose looks, if any, are fading.〔 Gilbert later renounced breeches roles and revealing dresses on his actresses, and made publicly known his disapproval of them.〔In January 1885, John Hollingshead wrote to the ''Pall Mall Gazette'', "Mr. Gilbert is somewhat severe on a style of burlesque which he did much to popularise in the old days before he invented what I may call burlesque in long clothes." Correspondence, ''The Pall Mall Gazette'', 26 January 1885, p. 4〕 In his choice of music, Gilbert ranged less widely than he had done with ''Dulcamara'', which drew not only on music by operatic composers including Bellini, Flotow and Offenbach, but also on a great number of music hall and other popular songs, such as "Champagne Charlie" and "The Frog in Yellow." For ''La Vivandière'', he drew almost entirely on the music of Donizetti's original or Offenbach's similarly military operetta, ''La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein''.〔"Queen's Theatre", ''The Morning Post'' 23 January 1868, p. 5. This review was of the London production. The list of numbers in the Liverpool score shows that Donizetti and Offenbach were less generously represented in the original production.〕 Gilbert married in 1867 amid one of his most productive periods. In addition to his other writing activities during the late 1860s, ''Dulcamara'' and ''La Vivandière'' were part of a series of about a dozen early comic stage works, including opera burlesques, pantomimes and farces. These were full of awful puns and jokes as was traditional in similar pieces of the period.〔Stedman, pp. 30–62〕 For instance, in ''La Vivandière'' Gilbert included this joke on a Darwinian theme: Nevertheless, Gilbert's burlesques were considered unusually tasteful compared to the others on the London stage.〔Crowther, Andrew. (''The Life of W. S. Gilbert'' ). The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive〕 ''The Times'' wrote: "The chief care of Mr. Gilbert has been to make his dialogue as perfect a specimen as possible of smooth verse, and to stud it profusely with elaborate puns of unquestionable originality. ... Mr. Gilbert shows a power of detecting phonetic affinities ... in which perhaps he excels all his contemporaries. ... ()eldom have mere verbal pleasantries provoked such frequent laughter and applause as those in ''La Vivandière'' ... an extravaganza more elegant in its tone than the generality of burlesques"〔 The new piece ran for a total of 120 performances.〔Dark and Grey, p. 42〕〔Ainger, p. 77〕 Gilbert's early pokes at grand opera show signs of the satire that would later be a defining part of his work. He would depart even further from the burlesque style from about 1869 with plays containing original plots and fewer puns.〔〔(''The Cambridge History of English and American Literature'' ), Volume XIII, Chapter VIII, Section 15, (1907–21) (referring to ''Pygmalion and Galatea'', ''The Cambridge History'' states: "The satire is shrewd, but not profound; the young author is apt to sneer, and he has by no means learned to make the best use of his curiously logical fancy. That he occasionally degrades high and beautiful themes is not surprising. To do so had been the regular proceeding in burlesque, and the age almost expected it; but Gilbert's is not the then usual hearty cockney vulgarity."〕 The most successful of Gilbert's opera parodies, ''Robert the Devil'', opened in December 1868. These 1860s pieces led to Gilbert's more mature "fairy comedies", such as ''The Palace of Truth'' (1870) and ''Pygmalion and Galatea'' (1871), and to his German Reed Entertainments, which in turn led to the famous Gilbert and Sullivan operas.〔〔Crowther, ''Contradiction Contradicted'', p. 20〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「La Vivandière (Gilbert)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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