The little two-act
musical piece entitled Rosina (its
text fills but nine small-print double columned pages in my libretto, 46pp in
the original, with all the cuts opened) was first produced at the Theatre
Royal, Covent Garden on New Year’s eve 1782, as an afterpiece to a production of Henry II. It was a sticky-beak night at
the Garden, for the part of Rosamund in the Shakespeare was played by Mary
Robinson, the recently cast-off mistress of the very young Prince of Wales. Her
notices were not likely to be good (‘the rantings of a strolling company’), and
indeed the ‘gentlemen’ of the press rightfully neglected Henry II in favour of its afterpiece.
Rosina was a simple little piece, penned – book and lyrics – by a Mrs Frances
Brooke (née Moore), with a story allegedly adapted from the Book of Ruth (‘Palemon and Lavinia’) telling of
the orphaned daughter of an officer, raised by his servant, and toiling as a
gleaner on the lands of the local squire, who wins his heart and hand, in spite
of the machinations and money of his military brother. To this more than
conventional tale, Mrs Brooke added, in conventional operetta fashion, a pair
of soubrettes to lighten the sighing with some sprightly bickering and songs. The comic gleaning-maid, in fact, became the preferred role of many stars.
Mrs Martyr, the original Phoebe |
Mrs Brooke has
become fashionable in the present century. Academics have devoted regular articles to her and, in particularly, the novels that she penned. Someone
has even called her America’s (!) first female novelist, because she spent a
little part of her life in Canada whence her clergyman husband was seconded. She was pureblood English. Nobody,
as far as I know, has dubbed her the first female to write a hit musical, which
is surprising, because her ‘fashion’ these days is very largely her sex.
Women’s studies, and all that.
The few bits on Mrs Brooke that I have read (I couldn’t face them all), however, seem to miss out
dealing proportionately with the lady’s greatest success by far. Rosina outdid all her novels, and was performed all round Britain
for a century, a standard piece in every stock company’s repertoire and played
by just about every touring prima donna.
William
Shield ought to have a book written about him. Maybe he has. His list of successful
operettas, musical comedies and light operas includes some of the most famed
and durable of his time: Rosina, The Poor
Soldier, The Castle of Andalusia, Lock and Key, The Farmer, The Woodman, and
his songs some of the most memorable of the era: from the tenor ‘The Thorn’ to the great
basso dramatic scena ‘The Wolf’.
William Shield |
So,
what got me on to Rosina, Mrs Brooke
and Shield? My famous volume includes two pieces of sheet music, published by
Mr Shade, ‘from Rosina’. One of them
is ‘The Bud of a Rose’ (otherwise ‘Her mouth which a smile’) a little ballad
sung by our hero at the dawn of admiration.
The other is another Rose piece: ‘A
Rose Tree full in bloom’. Sic. And this is very odd. Because that duet actually
saw the light of stage in Shield’s next musical show, The Poor Soldier (Covent Garden 4 November 1873), featuring many of the same cast, and its
lyric is not the work of Mrs Brooke, but of John O’Keeffe. It was exceedingly
popular, so its seems unlikely (or does it?) that Mr Shade would make such a
basic error. Was Mrs Kennedy (in trousers again) and Mrs Bannister’s duo
interpolated into Rosina as a tenor
solo at some stage?
I
can’t find any evidence of such a twenty-first century mishmashing, so until any
future discovery I lean towards a fault on the part of Mr Shade!
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