Bloggable bits and bobs: Bordèse and Bishop

Just some bits I felt like saving ...

The mini-concert had been given at La Bodinière in December 1896, but some of the songs had had a showing at the Châtelet in the Concerts Colonne (Holmès's 'Ce qu'on entendit dans le nuit de Noel', Paladilhe's 'Premier miracle de Jésus', Widor's 'Non credo' and Fauré's 'En prière'), sung by Blanche de Montalant in December 1890, and by Marcella Prégi ..

The songs and the staging were indeed well-liked at the outset, but by the 1920s they seem to have lost some of their charm

                                  

I'm annoyed that I hav'n't succeeded in identifying or dating these ladies and their garb. But it's France. And fantastical costumes were the rage there for the whole of the C19th ..

Top one looks like one of those fairy queens from Châtelet days. Bottom one is surely a chorine, presumably trying to be a (show)pony...

It is fashionable these days to prize ephemera from flop shows. Well, here's one I found today. From Drury Lane ...

I'm not referring to the hugely successful (and hugely butchered) Masaniello, which is still played to this day, nor to the popular comedy The Rent Day ...  but to the 'domestic opera' which preceded them on the Drury Lane bill. The Tyrolese Peasant. Clearly, I have never read the text or heard the music, but the London press did and told us about it

The text, which some libraries (and William Winter) have credited to J Howard Payne, was obviously not deemed worthy of being claimed: the playbill, you will notice, credits (if that is the word) nobody with the spoken part!

Howard Payne

This critic was doubtless right: The Tyrolese Peasant was simply a vehicle for launching Henry Bishop's voluminous bundle of songs and music. And apparently some by other hands..

It doesn't appear to have been a very effective launch pad. Anyway, after a handful of performances during the next three weeks, the Peasant vanished for good. But what is this?

Is this where the Howard Payne story came from? John Sinclair (who partnered Lydia Pearson in other pieces) certainly didn't play the hero at Drury Lane. Templeton did. Sinclair was in America, where this partition was published. I refuse to believe that the opera was produced on the other side of the Atlantic. What's up?  

Oh! the autograph manuscript score survives! In the Royal College of Music library! 157 folios of it. 26x31 cm. Salvaged from the wreckage by the good old Sacred Harmonic Society. 'unpublished except for one song' ... really? Which song was that? Apparently Bishop himself had Miss Pearson's 'The mother of a young lamb died' published. 

I wonder if that manuscript has been opened since 1832.