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Arthur Sullivan's Walter Scott-based opera Ivanhoe, despite attaining considerable success at its 1891 premiere, has since quickly fallen from musicological grace. Although initially achieving a remarkable run of 155 consecutive performances, the ultimate failure of the business venture with which it was closely connected (Richard D'Oyly Carte's Royal English Opera House), allied with Sullivan's declining reputation as a composer of serious music, the widespread twentieth-century reaction against Victorian culture and the relative intransigence of resuscitating an already comatose opera, condemned it by association in the eyes of posterity, and it all too easily followed the fate of most other works of nineteenth-century British music.
Substantive criticism of this work in the twentieth century has concentrated on the static, tableau-like dramaturgy of the opera, a lack of dramatic coherence, and its undeniably conservative musical language. As the critic in The Times wrote during Beecham's 1910 Royal Opera revival, dramatically ‘the whole work seems curiously loose-limbed and wanting in force and concentration … hampered by [the] desire to get in the whole of the story, or at any rate as much of it as could be made at all picturesque,’ while musically it was ‘merely old fashioned … a sin for which there is no forgiveness.’Footnote 1The Standard voiced similar sentiments: ‘There is practically no sense of continuity between the various scenes, and little sense of focus and climax. … Of real dramatic intuition there is little or nothing in the score.’ The libretto offers ‘little more than a series of disconnected tableaux.’Footnote 2 Thomas Dunhill, meanwhile, a sympathetic defender of the composer, described the opera in 1929 as ‘a mere panorama of events without constructive unity.’Footnote 3 Winton Dean, reviewing a 1973 amateur revival, criticized harshly the episodic libretto and the lack ‘of dramatic pace in a continuous score’ measured against ‘the tension of Verdi or the symphonic architecture of Wagner.’ ‘This opera was a good sixty years out of date; so presumably was English taste’ concludes Dean.Footnote 4 Even Arthur Jacobs, Sullivan's foremost biographer, locates a weakness in the opera's structure, from low-level melodic syntax that ‘rarely takes wing on its own’ (does Wagner?), through the frequent medium-level set-piece construction to the ‘nine scenes, none musically linked to the rest’, judged against either the contemporary backdrop of Wagnerian ‘symphonic flow’ or Mascagni's dramatic compression.Footnote 5
Taking its bearings from such criticisms this article explores Sullivan's problematic magnum opus from the perspective of its relationship with time, understood from multiple levels – the opera's musical-dramaturgical, historical, and music-historical temporalities. In other words, it seeks to re-evaluate Ivanhoe's dramaturgy, narrative and musical language by reconsidering the models of temporality such criticisms are based upon. Starting from Michael Beckerman's insightful analysis of what he terms the ‘iconic mode’ in Sullivan's music, Ivanhoe can be viewed as an attempt at creating a different type of dramaturgical paradigm that emphasizes enduring identity located in the past – highly apt for a work seeking both to crystallize past history and found a new tradition for future English opera. Investigating this work and the composer's stated aesthetic concerns more closely reveal a conscious desire to opt out of the modern temporal sense found in contemporaneous continental European narratives of musical progress and build a composite, pageant-like vision of English history, therefore inevitably partaking in a process of constructing national identity.
Musical-dramaturgical temporality
Nicholas Temperley, in a considered and well-argued reply to Winton Dean's criticism of Sullivan's opera, highlighted certain unspoken assumptions concerning an opera's underlying musical-dramatic temporal strategy that critics in the twentieth century have been accustomed to demand. Underlying the criticism of Ivanhoe, Temperley held, ‘is a more general assumption that every successful opera must show the kind of dramatic tension and character development that is found in Mozart or Verdi.’ In fact, Temperley continues, ‘certain schools of opera have flourished for long periods with only the most perfunctory dramatic framework.’ ‘One does not find much of it [dramatic tension] in Orfeo (Monteverdi) or Gluck, in Handel, or in Wagner. Yet critics persist in condemning lesser works on the bogus ground that they are not dramatic in this sense’. Instead, Victorian opera should be criticized ‘on its own terms.’Footnote 6
Just what Victorian opera's ‘own terms’ are obviously requires some further explanation. It seems clear that for Sullivan and many of his British contemporaries the taut unfolding of dramatic narrative was not always a priority, the composer being happy to emphasize the picturesque, scenic qualities of a story through a succession of accompanying musical numbers.Footnote 7 As we shall see, this tendency is in fact characteristic of English musical theatre since the seventeenth century. Through-sung operas are something of a rarity in English operatic history before the late nineteenth century (Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1689), Arne's Artaxerxes (1760) and Barnett's The Mountain Sylph (1834) are among a handful of significant exceptions), and despite the upsurge of operatic production in the last quarter of the century, these latter works still retain discrete set-piece construction, inserted dances, ballads and songs, in place of continuous designs in the manner of the later Wagner or Verdi.Footnote 8 From this perspective, John Caldwell offers a historically based defence of Sullivan's design of ‘continuous but detached scenes’ in light of contemporary practice, since ‘neither this variety nor the lack of continuity between scenes was abnormal at the time.’Footnote 9 Early reviews of Ivanhoe's premiere bear this out, speaking of the picturesque nature of Sullivan's conception, but not dismissing it thereby.Footnote 10 This point suggests immediately that Temperley's suggestion of using a Victorian aesthetic to judge Sullivan's work may provide a more enlightening perspective on the opera – historically at least, if not also aesthetically.
The idea that dramatic tension and character development are necessary conditions for an operatic work – as indeed that organic development and goal-directed motion are a critical yardstick for music – is anyway rather questionable. This presupposition is premised upon an underlying conception of time, and human existence in time, as essentially linear, teleological, and progressive, and the subsequent inference that art should reflect this nature accurately. These premises may seem natural and self-evident to us since they are a belief about the world around us and how we live in and are conditioned by time that is found particularly strongly in the last four centuries of Western thought, but, as Jonathan Kramer has pointed out, such a conception is in fact neither universal nor (necessarily) absolute.Footnote 11 It is rather a belief underpinned by the rise of modernity, scientific thinking and the Enlightenment in Western Europe. Western classical music, especially the Austro-German symphonic tradition, has traditionally emphasized this progressive, teleological conception of time, but other forms of temporality can be found in music, argues Kramer, such as that from non-Western cultures and in experimental music from the later twentieth century. More recently scholars have explored alternative musical and operatic temporalities in a wide range of music from the Renaissance, through the Romantic era to the present day.Footnote 12
Michael Beckerman, speaking of Sullivan's light opera Haddon Hall from the following year, has identified a characteristic use of time and musical-dramatic temporality in Sullivan's operatic music that he designates ‘iconic’, which differs from conventionally understood dramatic writing:
We often use the term ‘drama’ as if it were synonymous with conflict. Thus what we may identify as the dialectic mode of dramatic presentation is so commonplace that we might mistakenly assume it to be the central ingredient of all types of theatrical performance … In this dialectic mode, the future is uncertain: the audience thus becomes conscious of movement towards a goal, of passage through time.
Yet not all types of presentation utilize the dialectic. … Parades, pageants, and all manner of pastorals offer the spectator scenes free from conflict, an image of perfected time. These may be considered examples of the iconic mode … Working in iconic time, a dramatist ‘tends to create an image of an idea rather than an image of time passing’. The iconic mode in its purest form is not merely characterized by stasis but also embraces a ‘steady state of being, an undifferentiated timelessness that demonstrates an abiding truth.’Footnote 13
Ivanhoe does not hide the visual, spatial, iconic properties of its design. Symmetrically formed from three acts each consisting of three scenes, the resulting nine musical tableaux present scenes drawn from Scott's novel that seem chosen as much for their scenic, picturesque qualities as their dramatic ones (Figure 1).Footnote 14 As commentators and critics readily observed, the opera is marked by a plethora of characters, the relationships between them not always being well defined in the libretto (important motivating events and connecting incidents are sometimes entirely cut in Sturgis's adaptation), the erstwhile protagonist Ivanhoe is an often passive hero, one of a crowd of varied types with little development in character from beginning to end, and there is no one point of dramatic climax (or classical peripeteia) but rather a succession of episodes that present more-or-less visually attractive pictorial scenes from an imagined history.Footnote 15
Layout of Sullivan's Ivanhoe, with chapter source from Scott's novel
In this sense, the term ‘novelistic’ often applied to Sullivan's opera is an accurate description, not only as the work presents a wide variety of characters and incidents but also by virtue of the fact that it presupposes prior acquaintance with Scott's novel (hardly unusual for opera-goers in late nineteenth-century Britain but increasingly infrequent in the twentieth century).Footnote 16 This quality is characteristic of a nineteenth-century (and particularly British) trend for creating musical pieces using episodes drawn from a known, larger literary work – Schumann's Scenes from Goethe's Faust (1853), Parry's Scenes from Prometheus Unbound (1880), Sullivan's own The Golden Legend (1886), Elgar's Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf (1896) and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha Trilogy (1900) are all examples of this tendency.Footnote 17 To this extent, too, twentieth-century criticism of the opera's disjointed narrative misses the well-established context for this type of dramaturgical design in the nineteenth century.
The relationship between the opera and its literary source can in fact be taken further; certain elements of Sturgis's/Sullivan's work, such as the approach to dramaturgy and narrative structuring, find a complement in Scott's novel – as do the attitude to language and history examined later. Scott's willingness to introduce poetry and ballads into his prose, for instance, is mirrored by the examples of diegetic song in Sturgis/Sullivan, most notably the songs provided in Act 2 Scene 1 – King Richard's ‘I ask nor wealth’ and Friar Tuck's well-known ‘The wind blows cold’. These provide a break within the dynamic unfolding of plot, a digression that provides space for humour, the depiction of character and the broader picturesque atmosphere. An overriding symmetry of design is also shared by opera and novel. Alice Chandler observes that Scott's Ivanhoe is ‘remarkably symmetrical in plot, with the symmetry underscoring the theme’; the novel progresses in broad outline ‘from Rotherwood to the tournament, to the forest glade, to Torquilstone, and back to the forest glade, a tournament, and Rotherwood’. This symmetry is nevertheless progressive; the narrative meets its nadir at Torquilstone, with its ‘confrontation between good and evil’ and ‘apocalyptic destruction by fire’, after which crisis-point ‘the plot retraces itself backwards towards harmony.’ The resulting design is consequently ‘not only symmetrical but triumphant’, combining static, spatial qualities with some overriding degree of dynamism.Footnote 18
Further spatialization of the narrative is suggested in the multi-stranded alternation of scenes, the picturesque switching from one world to another, depicting at different points in the narration events that are sometimes occurring simultaneously. One of the best examples of this tension between dynamism and iconic spatialization in Scott is found in the solitary trumpet call that three times interrupts chapters set in the bowels of Torquilstone (chapters 22, 23, 24), as Isaac, Rowena, and Rebecca are undergoing their respective ordeals at the hands of their Norman captors. A single, unique moment is experienced three separate times, from three different perspectives. Another primary characteristic of both story and opera is the mosaic-like alternation of outdoor and indoor scenes, public and more intimate, the dramatic, lyrical and humorous, the foreboding presence of Norman Torquilstone and the carefree life of the Saxon forest.Footnote 19 Again, this is a technique that characterizes Scott's narrative technique, deriving arguably from the structure of medieval Romance.Footnote 20
At a more specifically musical level, the construction of the opera blends the dramatic-dynamic with static, picturesque elements. Though Ivanhoe undeniably demonstrates the effects of the nineteenth century's persistent demand for through-composed opera, the continuous spans of music Sullivan writes within scenes, averaging about twenty minutes, frequently break down into underlying set pieces embedded into the larger musical fabric. This tendency is seen most clearly in the two diegetic songs mentioned in Act 2 as well as Cedric's first scene ‘Raise the cup’, though underlying modified strophic structure is also evident in such pieces as Rowena's ‘O Moon, art thou clad’ and Rebecca's ‘Lord of our chosen race’. Though some use is made of the more fluid, loosely structured phrase syntax typifying later Wagner (Scene 1 is a good case in point), the use of such devices as Leitmotiv is normally restricted to the recurrence of more traditional ‘reminiscence’ themes which, when developed, are lightly modified in ways that the audience can usually clearly perceive. In short, the medium-scale structure of the opera is relatively conservative for 1891 (as attested to by almost all commentators) and formally clearly defined, even sectional. This compromise between formal approaches was noted at the time of the premiere; Fuller Maitland (generally critical of Sullivan) was not convinced by the result, although other critics, and the large attending public, were. As the Pall Mall Gazette reported, ‘In our opinion the composer of Ivanhoe has struck a most happy medium between the set forms of the past and the rhapsodical diffuseness of extreme Wagnerianism; and, if we mistake not, his medium will be a genuinely popular one in the ears of all’.Footnote 21
The criticism of hiatus within scenes does have some grounds: Act 1 Scene 3 (the tournament), for instance, despite containing a rousing double chorus, is musically rather piecemeal, though (viewed from the perspective of opera being fundamentally a theatrical, mimetic genre) relies correspondingly on the spectacle visible on stage; the final scene is open to similar criticism. Nevertheless there are several examples of through-composition and development within scenes that link the separate parts smoothly. Scene 1 is fluidly constructed in its negotiation between successive sections, as is Act 2 Scenes 1 and 3. Act 1 Scene 2, in particular, is notable for its sensitive and compositionally sophisticated process of musical growth, mirroring perfectly the analogous development of the as yet unspoken love between the protagonists. A thematic idea consisting of a simple falling scale is introduced at Ivanhoe's entry, an embryo of what will blossom later at the climax of the scene. It is subsequently heard at Rowena's concerned ‘God keep him safe’, developed into a more characteristic hemiolic version at Ivanhoe's ‘Ah! then if he beyond the ocean foam’, and then at the climax (‘hope is for all the world’) sung by the two in thirds over a romantically undulating cello line that reprises the melody heard at Rowena's ‘If thou dost see him’ (Ex. 1).
Sullivan: Ivanhoe, Act 1 Scene 2 [D+4] (Sir Arthur Sullivan, Ivanhoe, full score edited from the autograph manuscript by Robin Gordon-Powell, 3 volumes (The Amber Ring, 2008))
Sullivan also utilizes a technique of appending dramatic material to the end of a scene after its apparent natural close in order to link the narrative to the ensuing scene, resulting in an open-ended design.Footnote 22 This type of linkage is also made musically in Act 1, where the E major of Scene 2 is approached through opening in its minor subdominant, A, the common notes C and E forming a harmonic link with the C major close of Scene 1. The result of these formal strategies is a string of scenes, musical-visual pictures, that are both enclosed and yet open out onto each other.
At the largest level, too, the dramaturgy of the opera follows three parallel waves of escalating tension to a climactic conflict and its resolution. Act 1 moves from the opening challenge pledged between the Templar and Ivanhoe, set against the implicit enmity between Saxon and Norman and Ivanhoe's supposed exile, to Ivanhoe's victory over the Norman knight at Ashby and consequent unmasking at the close. The second wave, the largest, spans Act 2 Scene 1 to Act 3 Scene 1, and moves from the purity of Saxon rural life through the darkness of Norman Torquilstone to the destruction of the castle, the rescuing of the Saxons and unmasking of the Black Knight as King Richard. The third (Act 3 Scenes 2 to 3) completes the narrative business left unfinished in the second, passing again from the tranquillity of the woodland glade to the rescue of Rebecca and rout of the Templar Order.
Nonetheless, this general design still tolerates digressions and interpolations. The woodland encounter between King Richard and Friar Tuck (Act 2 Scene 1), for instance, derided by later critics as ‘dramatically irrelevant’,Footnote 23 presents some of Sullivan's most attractive (and popular) music, and can easily be argued to be as necessary as any other scene if the opera is understood to be a scenic, picturesque traversal through an imagined historical England rather than merely the syllogistic unfolding of an ethical proposition translated into theatrical personae. The earlier nineteenth-century genre of tableaux vivants, so popular in the Victorian era, suggests itself here – or the magic lantern displays that to some extent superseded them later in the century.Footnote 24 The image depicted is visual and spatial rather than temporal and dynamic, yet still filled with life. Attending the opera is to experience a heroic adventure story, a visual feast, an entertaining re-enactment of history. Hermann Klein, an acquaintance of the composer, encapsulated this aural-visual-narrative panoply well in describing Ivanhoe as a work ‘which rivets the attention of the spectator from the moment the curtain is raised; which is strong and sympathetic in action and picturesque in story; which is rich in melody and replete with musical interest and contrast’.Footnote 25
The opera's dramaturgy, then, is a mixture of the iconic and dynamic, but with the balance closer to the former than dominant critical paradigms of the later-nineteenth and twentieth centuries would desire. The opera, like the novel upon which it is based, does have its drama, but this is not taut, strictly linear or unified, and it is intermixed with scenic, romantic, humorous and pageant-like elements.Footnote 26 The result conforms perfectly to Sullivan's stated operatic ideal: a work of ‘human emotions and human passions’ with a balance of ‘dramatic, humorous and romantic aspects’.Footnote 27 Once we consider this dramaturgical-temporal structure in its own right as a significant constructive factor in the opera and not merely as a failed attempt at a more conventionally dynamic type of dramatic writing, we might obtain a more insightful and fruitful understanding of the work than that routinely arrived at in earlier critiques. Beckerman's analysis of an ‘iconic mode’ in Sullivan suggests that the static, visual and picturesque elements of the opera can be read as belonging to an alternative dramaturgical paradigm that emphasizes stability and identity found in an ideal past. This quality is obviously highly appropriate for a national work, presenting an idealized scene from English history, intended as the founding work of a new line of English opera.
National Qualities, Musical Style and Language
Sullivan wrote Ivanhoe for the new Royal English Opera House that Richard D'Oyly Carte had custom built in Cambridge Circus with the express purpose of founding a permanent repertory opera company on London supporting works by national composers.Footnote 28 As the realization of his long cherished ambition of writing a full-scale dramatic work, Sullivan conceived Ivanhoe as the fulfilment of his dream of the ideal opera, a work at once patriotic, national, and historical.
As Temperley argues, Sullivan, in Ivanhoe, ‘was trying to produce a characteristically English type of opera which had existed … since 1826 … The form continued to develop throughout the nineteenth century and Ivanhoe was a legitimate example of it.’ The tendency to conceive a musical stage work in terms of scenic, visual tableaux and discrete musical numbers has in fact accompanied English opera throughout the centuries. In part this might stem from the nation's decidedly literary culture and (to a lesser extent) visual imagination; the achievements of English writers and painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are undeniably considerably higher than that of composers. The historical lineage of Sullivan's work can be traced back through its English operatic antecedents into the twentieth century – from the pageant-like structure of Jacobean Masques, Purcell's semi-operas and incidental music, the discrete numbers of eighteenth-century ballad opera and the nineteenth-century Romantic school of Bishop, Macfarren, Balfe, Wallace and Benedict, to the novelistic tableau of Vaughan Williams's The Pilgrim's Progress, the stylized numbers-within-scenes of Britten's Peter Grimes and historical scene-portraits of Gloriana.Footnote 29 Indeed it forms an important link between the stage-play-with-music song-and-dialogue format of its precursors to the larger-scale scene opera of the twentieth century.
There is no doubt that Sullivan's opera was furthermore perceived by his contemporaries as being characteristically English, be it through plot, formal design or music. The Illustrated London News reviewing an early performance held that
there is set forth on its stage a story which is the inalienable birthright of every Englishman; and the story is told to music which is, above and before everything, English. ‘In spite of all temptations to belong to other nations’ – Wagner exhorting to be unmelodious and to transfer what tunes he may have from the performers’ mouths to the orchestra, Gounod whispering him to leave all and follow Faust, Verdi and Ponchielli inviting his to be that ‘devil incarnate, an Englishman Italianate’ – Sir Arthur remains an Englishman.Footnote 30
Yet it is notable here that the composer, in his recorded statements regarding his operatic intentions, was quite strikingly unconcerned with trying to create a national style – this despite his indisputable wish to write a national work. In a well-known interview given to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1885, Sullivan presented his aesthetic aims for the Grand Opera project that would find fruition five years later in Ivanhoe:
The opera of the future is a compromise. I have thought and worked and toiled and dreamed of it. Not the French school, with gaudy and tinsel tunes, its lambent light and shades, its theatrical effects and clap-trap, not the Wagnerian school, with its sombreness and heavy ear-splitting airs, with its mysticism and unreal sentiment; not the Italian school, with its fantastic airs and fioriture and far-fetched effects. It is a compromise between these three – a sort of eclectic school, a selection of the merits of each one. I myself will make an attempt to produce a grand opera of this new school. Yes, it will be a historical work, and it is the dream of my life. I do not believe in operas based on gods and myths. That is the fault of the German school.Footnote 31
Underpinning the great national venture that was Ivanhoe was apparently the belief that a national mix of styles, an ‘eclectic compromise’ between diverse European influences, will end up sufficiently English. (The English language, after all, is nothing if not eclectic in its sources.) A further possible inference is that attempting to define national identity in terms of exclusive stylistic categories may not always be a fruitful undertaking in music. At any rate, Sullivan was not unduly concerned with it.Footnote 32
In this problematizing of musical style as a bearer of national identity Sullivan is taking up an important theme of Scott's novel, mentioned repeatedly in the opening chapters and thereon throughout the book: language, more precisely the linguistic divide separating the Saxons from the Normans, seen both as a cause of the enmity between the two and as a metaphor for it.
French was the language of honour, of chivalry, and even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds, who knew no other. Still, however, the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil, and those oppressed inferior beings by whom that soil was cultivated, occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect, compounded betwixt the French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they could render themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and from this necessity arose by degrees the structure of our present English language, in which the speech of the victors and the vanquished have been so happily blended together; and which has since been so richly improved by importations from the classical languages, and from those spoken by the southern nations of Europe.Footnote 33
Ultimately it is with the intermingling and fusion of the two languages, cultures and peoples that the English as a nation will find their identity. While language divides most of the characters of the novel, heroic figures such as Ivanhoe (a Saxon by birth) and Richard (a Norman) appear to move easily between the two, offering a glimpse of the future path to national identity that will come through their fusion.
The parallels with Sullivan's own attitude to blending European styles for his English opera are indeed striking. Sullivan, it seems, even takes this suggestion further in his stylistic characterization of the ethnicities of the principal participants in his story. Most evident is the respective characterization given to the Saxons (through the opera's opening motive, associated with the Saxon Cedric's Hall of Rotherwood) and to the Norman Knight/Chivalry theme that appears soon after at Cedric's words ‘his knights, his Norman knights’. The former, marked pesante, moves vigorously upwards through a C major arpeggio, initially played in simple octaves, the short, three-bar melodic phrase restricted to the notes of the pentatonic collection and its subsequent simple harmonization (bars 7–18) diatonic, almost modal. In short, it is a perfect musical analogue of the ‘manly’, ‘rustic’, somewhat unrefined Saxons, yet the absent opening beat (a quaver rest) creates a slightly precipitous sense to the proceedings (Ex. 2a). This material, on its continuation, is gradually infiltrated by destabilizing chromaticism, a descending bass line dragging the music down to relative-minor areas until a sforzando blow sends the music scurrying down in semiquavers to a dominant pedal of A minor, over which Cedric enters with his opening lament for the state of England – set unsurprisingly to a descending melodic line.Footnote 34 Within the first minute of the opera Sullivan has encapsulated musically the fall of the Saxon society depicted, from hearty C major life, through a gradual decline and, via the hammer blows of the D6∃3 chord (a pre-dominant in both C or A minor, which therefore, like the original battle, could resolve either way), to oppression in its shadow A minor.
(Continued)
The Norman theme, meanwhile, suggested in embryo in Cedric's opening grievance, makes its full appearance a few minutes later at the entrance of the knights De Bracy and Bois-Guilbert (the Templar) (Ex. 2b). It immediately makes its difference known. Whereas the Saxons are given a short, curt three-bar phrase that is prone to simple repetition and fragmentation, the Norman theme, in contrast, is formed from a sophisticated melody spun out into thirty-six bars – a compound period in analytical parlance, formed from two matching eighteen-bar phrases with a three-bar codetta appended to their end. Rising similarly through a major arpeggio, the Normans start more sedately, only reaching the octave level after five moderato beats (the Saxons take barely two allegro crotchets), but eventually climb to even greater heights as the music ascends to the F another octave above; if they are slower starters, Norman canniness wins out over Saxon choleric. The theme is given a certain sophistication by the opening triplet figure, the distinction created against the subsequent dotted rhythms, and the syncopations across the middle of the bar, while grace-notes ornament the melody and chromaticism the harmony. The phrase is set to a descending bass line which gives a sense of directionality to the music, though might also suggest a more metaphorical fall or the seeds of decline; after its assured beginning the long melodic phrase soon passes through a passage of harmonic uncertainty (bars 9–12) that results in a more aimless repetition of fragmentary one-bar units, before dominant harmony is attained and the consequent phrase can return to the confidence of the opening.
(Continued)
(Continued)
Sullivan: Ivanhoe, Act 1 Scene 1, opening, Saxon/Rotherwood Theme
Sullivan: Ivanhoe, Act 1 Scene 1 [G+20], Norman/Knight Theme
The contrast between the two themes, and whom they symbolize, is in one sense clear: rude Saxon health versus decadent Norman refinement. Yet, in truth, the two musical ideas are hardly that removed from each other in basic outline: the opening motives of both arpeggiate a simple ascending major triad. Though Sullivan does not offer an eventual fusion of the two in his opera (which would after all be premature within the bounds of Scott's story),Footnote 35 one could easily imagine one.Footnote 36 The Saxons and Normans have more in common than they think.
As for the two figures that stand to some extent above the warring ethnic distinctions, Ivanhoe himself is not given a clear reminiscence theme or individual Leitmotiv, though a short figure heard as he announces (in the third person, incognito) that Ivanhoe will meet the Templar's challenge recurs when he enters into combat, in keeping with this promise (Act 1 Scene 3; Act 3 Scene 3, sometimes called the ‘Pledge’ motive). The theme given in Ex. 2b that is usually associated with the Normans is not, however, restricted in use to Norman subjects but is heard elsewhere in the opera taking on a broader connotation of knightly chivalry – the ideal the Normans introduced but did not always live up to. It is heard at Rowena's entrance in Act 1 Scene 1, and furthermore in an altered version at the conclusion of the joust in Act 1 Scene 3 after Ivanhoe is declared to have defeated Bois-Guilbert. The initial minor-key inflections here could be held to refer to the Templar's defeat, but its graceful continuation, as Ivanhoe is lead forward to receive the victorious crown from Rowena, suggests that the knightly chivalry Ivanhoe has learned from the Normans finds its true representative in the Saxon knight.
This nuanced interpretation of one of the positive counterparts of the Norman conquest, a beautiful ideal that rarely found active embodiment, is wholly in keeping with Scott's views on medieval chivalry,Footnote 37 and encapsulates Ivanhoe's defining quality as a figure uniting the best of Saxon and Norman worlds.Footnote 38 King Richard, on the other hand, as (arguably implausibly) in Scott's original, is happy switching into the language of his Saxon subjects, indeed mimicking the musical speech of anyone, including himself.Footnote 39 If anything, this errant regal hero seems something approaching a self-parody in Sullivan's setting; adept at exchanging linguistic banter with the Saxon Tuck (Act 2 Scene 1), he repeatedly lapses into self-quotation (Act 3 Scene 2), his reminiscence theme marking his presence rather too overtly in a manner that suggests a gentle ironic intent on Sullivan's part towards this larger-than-life, somewhat two-dimensional character – mirroring Scott's warm yet critical attitude to the king.Footnote 40
In Ivanhoe, then, Sullivan is not only consciously combining what he saw as the best elements from continental opera to create his national English work – in this offering a remarkable parallel to one of Scott's overriding themes – but also taking up Scott's thematicization of language as part of his musical characterization. What is also clear is that, historically, Sullivan is in no sense desirous of seeing his music participating in a radical stream of stylistic development but is happy to work with largely pre-existent musical forms and techniques, assimilating multiple influences into the idiom he wishes. He therefore stands outside the notion of a single (implicitly Germanic) line of artistic progress, both in the historical quality of his music and in its polystylism. His music is more conservative in idiom, largely intentionally – from here stems its accessibility and popularity, necessary qualities for the national opera he was endeavouring to write – but in another sense is simultaneously ‘thicker’ and richer in its temporality: it contains more ‘history’ within it.
Constructing National Identity through History
For such a determining work of national identity the choice of subject was highly significant. Sir Walter Scott was an obvious source for the story; as the effective creator of the historical novel as a genre, Scott loomed large over any treatment of such subject matter, and although the age of European-wide Scott-euphoria was long gone by the late-Victorian era he was an established classic and cornerstone of the British literary tradition.Footnote 41 Sullivan had previously toyed with Scott subjects in his masque ‘Kenilworth’ (to words by Henry F. Chorley from Scott's novel), his ‘Marmion’ Overture (after the poem of 1808) and in a handful of songs. Ivanhoe, from 1819, was Scott's nod to creating an explicitly English historical novel in the manner of his highly successful series of Scottish novels following Waverley, and as contemporary sales abundantly demonstrated (the first print run of 8,000 copies sold out in two weeks) the move was an astute ploy by the author.
What Scott had achieved in constructing a (sometimes imagined) Scottish identity in his earlier works he would equally accomplish for the English in Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe would become not only hugely successful in Scott's own time but a major influence on the Victorian imagination in its portrayal of the medieval past. Writers such as Carlyle, Newman and Ruskin would attest to the importance of this work on the formation of Victorian Britain's consciousness of this earlier period, in part itself awakening this historical interest. The infamous Eglinton Tournament (1839) took much of its historical inspiration from Scott's novel, and historians as diverse as Macaulay and Thierry were influenced by Scott's creative retelling of history.Footnote 42Ivanhoe did not actually start the medieval revival (this was already underway in Scott's time), but it did provide the defining paradigm for interpreting the Norman period: as historian Clare Simmons puts it, ‘Sir Walter Scott's 1819 novel Ivanhoe is the one work to which all later depictions of Saxons and Normans, either directly or indirectly, owe a debt.’Footnote 43 For Sullivan's audience the subject matter would have further chimed with the near-obsession in Victorian Britain with the medieval past, be it the Arthurian subjects of the Pre-Raphaelites or the Tennyson of the Idylls of the King (1856–1885).
Ivanhoe, in common with most of Scott's mature work, is historical but fictional – an idealized version of what might have happened, capturing the essence of this momentous period (or how at any rate the nineteenth century wished to see it), when Britain, as the Victorians knew it, was emerging from the dark ages. Set in the late twelfth century at the time of the Third Crusade, the narrative paints a picture of an heroic, chivalric England of Richard the Lionheart – of Robin Hood, knights, Templars, monks, outlaws, jousts and damsels in distress – yet still unsettled from the aftermath of the Norman invasion. It presents, as it were, the essence, not the accidental events of the past, Aristotle's privileging of poetry over history, yet a poetic fiction which is historically located, a idealized paradigm to stand for it all.
The liberties Scott took with history (despite the erudite antiquarianism he also displayed) have frequently been noted by critics. The author even offered a disarming account of these anachronisms in the novel's introduction: ‘It may be that I have introduced little which can positively be termed modern; but, on the other hand, it is extremely probable that I may have confused the manners of two or three centuries, and introduced, during the reign of Richard the First, circumstances appropriated to a period either considerably earlier, or a good deal later than that era.’Footnote 44 These anachronisms, however, typically serve an important purpose. The objective was to make the past come alive, to live again, not merely in order to escape from the realities of nineteenth-century industrial Britain but so as to come to an understanding of the present in terms of the past. Scott thus placed the emphasis on the commonalities between the historical England and the present, searching for ‘that extensive neutral ground [between ancient and modern], the proportion, that is, of manners and sentiments which are common to us and to our ancestors, which have been handed down unaltered from them to us, or which, arising out of the principles of our common nature, must have existed alike in either state of society.’Footnote 45
In this light, we can understand the historical compression of the middle-ages in Scott's story, the imagined temporal coexistence of chronologically distinct times. Belief in dark-age Germanic and Norse gods and eleventh-century epigones from the Norman conquest fuse with the fourteenth-century tournament, the historically uncertain Robin of Locksley with the reign of Richard I (an enduring legacy of the author). As Alice Chandler shows, Scott had been influenced by his friend, the historian Sharon Turner, whose organicist, progressive view of history understood individual stages as running through a tripartite model of crude beginnings, mature flowering, and finally decadence and decline. The Saxon society and code of knightly chivalry depicted in Ivanhoe both conform to this pattern, but whereas in Scott's Anne of Geierstein the three stages are encountered successively, in Ivanhoe they are found simultaneously, conforming to what the historian Reinhart Koselleck has called the ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’.Footnote 46 The resulting compression of diachronic history into a synchronic snapshot of multiple layers adds to the iconic properties of Ivanhoe. The iconic mode thus fuses the middle-ages, from the earliest Saxon times to the late Norman period, into one defining moment of vision, and holds this up as a mirror to the present.
Here the analysis of the iconic mode in Ivanhoe reveals a perfect dramaturgical means for conveying such an idealized history as the carrier of the essence of a nation. As Bernard Beckerman writes, ‘there is something in the nature of this [iconic] process that seeks to concretize itself, to resist change, to make itself into a permanent emblem.’Footnote 47 Indeed, such means of presentation can easily be used to reaffirm existing cultural and political values in a manner that suits conservative constructions of national identity. ‘In a world where iconic time holds sway, change can only produce corruption, for where there is perfection, the ideal, whatever its nature, can only endure; it can never improve.’Footnote 48
Yet when we compare this iconic method of dramaturgical presentation with the content of the plot, we see a notable contradiction emerging. For the world which is being presented before our eyes is not one of a steady, timeless state conforming to a fixed social, ethnic or religious identity, but records a constant process of struggle, compromise and accommodation between Saxon, Norman and Jewish constituents of early medieval society. This vision of Merrie England under the despotic stand-in Prince John is no more settled than the political unrest of 1819, of Peterloo and the excesses of Prince George's regency (this despite Scott's own monarchist leanings). In fact, the message of Scott's and Sullivan's work seems opposed to much conventional nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism – the portrayal of the nation and its identity as a fixed, perfect, timeless entity. Here we see the conflict that is history in the making – historically located (if partially fictitious and idealized) – as if this struggle, this uneasy mix of races and religion, is itself the timeless truth of history and English identity, just as Sullivan (who by ancestry was more Irish and Italian than English) favours his ‘eclectic’ school of various French, German and Italian influences to make up his ideal English national opera.Footnote 49
In this sense, Ivanhoe's conception is the opposite of, say, Wagnerian music drama – an ahistorical, ‘timeless’ mythology presented more or less dramatic-dialectically – and by extension, a type of art beloved of the more disreputable face of nationalism and twentieth-century fascism – the essence of a nation as stable, closed, unable to endure the threat of change.Footnote 50 Rather, it demonstrates ‘that being English is something you can “put on”: it is a perpetual process of becoming’.Footnote 51 The relationship between ethnicity and custom is particularly significant here; Scott reads English identity not along racial lines but in terms of shared culture. The obsession with maintaining the purity of the royal Saxon bloodline which Cedric is victim to is painted in no uncertain terms as flawed: his Saxon exemplar Athelstane is the embodiment of decline. It is Cedric's disinherited son, by combining the best elements of Norman and Saxon, who offers the path to the future. Revising an earlier trend which saw pre-1066 society as a golden age that was lost by the imposed feudalism of the invaders, Scott offers an influential re-reading of the so-called Norman Yoke, suggesting that the conquest was ultimately a positive event in the history of England. This reinterpretation of the past necessary for believing in the progress desired by the nineteenth-century historical outlook therefore transfers utopia from a lost past into the future. The message of 1819 is even more pointed in Sullivan's 1890s Britain, at the height of Empire and confidence.
This interpretation is borne out by Robert Young's influential recent reading of the change in English identity across the nineteenth century towards an inclusive multi-ethnic sense of shared culture and ideals that could incorporate any external element.Footnote 52 Sullivan's opera, appearing at the end of this era, is thus not exceptional in its message but reflects a wider discourse on the nature of Englishness that had been ongoing throughout the century. By returning to Scott – and Ivanhoe in particular – Sullivan is reformulating one of the most potent sources for the construction of this idea of Englishness. Young notes that ‘it was above all in Ivanhoe that Scott is commonly reckoned to have invented English national cultural identity’. Yet ‘Scott's portrait … allowed for two simultaneous interpretations.’Footnote 53 At first a Saxonist reading of English identity predominated, seeing the superiority of the native Saxons over the Norman invaders (and implicitly, of contemporary England over its Celtic neighbours), as found in the writings of Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Arnold in the 1840s. But gradually, through the researches of racial science and ethnography and such influential intellectual figures as Matthew Arnold (in works like ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’ and Culture and Anarchy), a more humane, inclusive conception of English ethnicity was promulgated, thus emphasizing the integrative elements present in Scott's narrative. Over the next few decades, the years of imperial expansion, ‘Arnold's idea of an inclusive English ethnicity was opened out so as to include the English diaspora beyond’.Footnote 54 Scott's original contribution to this understanding of Englishness was therefore, as Ian Duncan comments, that ‘the multiple valencies of a heterogeneous English equip it to absorb any cultural element’, with the consequence that ‘the colonial origins of modern England, the mixing and tempering of its stock by foreign conquest, have produced its modern world-imperial fitness’.Footnote 55
Both Scott's novel and Sullivan's opera exhibit a peculiar openness of ending. The victorious conclusion to the novel features the symbolic marriage of Ivanhoe and Rowena, vouchsafing for English society the happy fusion of Norman and Saxon elements in coming generations:
These distinguished nuptials were celebrated by the attendance of the high-born Normans, as well as Saxons, joined with the universal jubilee of the lower orders, that marked the marriage of two individuals as a type of the future peace and harmony betwixt two races, which, since that period, have been so completely mingled that the distinction has become utterly invisible.Footnote 56
Yet Rebecca – as most readers have felt, the true heroine of the story – and her father, Isaac, choose voluntary exile to Moorish Granada in Scott's version, trusting an unequal yet secure existence under the Muslims Richard has been fighting rather than the assurances of the king of this still untamed and sporadically barbaric land. Scott's medieval England is still a work in progress. As Northrop Frye, emphasizing the pessimistic element of Scott's conservatism, remarks, ‘the struggles he describes are within the cycle of history, and never suggest any ultimate transcending of history’.Footnote 57
In Sullivan, the closing chorus opens out into a beautiful moment of lyricism, recapitulating a theme briefly heard in an earlier scene (Act 3 Scene 2), yet for all this apparent serenity the ensemble juxtaposes three different, contrasting sentiments. While the Saxons Ivanhoe, Rowena, the reconciled Cedric and their surrogate-Saxon monarch Richard sing a conventional paean to all-conquering love, the soon-to-be exiled Templars grouse moodily over their papal authority from distant Rome (the proto-Protestantism of the message clear for all), while Rebecca, as if lost in a higher world, sings of the true temple of her religion.Footnote 58 The end of the story is closed and yet open. Both works depict assimilation and exclusion, simultaneously sustaining optimistic and more sceptical readings, presenting ‘in unidealized form the possibilities of reconciliation and continued division’.Footnote 59
Ivanhoe thus captures a dynamic moment of becoming when English history – England as the Victorians thought they knew it, securely held and possessed – was being made. It captures a dynamic event through the prism of the iconic mode, sub specie aeternitatis. And its message seems to be that this history is an ongoing process of accommodation between the human actors that are its participants, and that the nation which has arisen from this is essentially a mixture of diverse, heterogeneous elements, which makes the search for a singular national identity a chimera.
Postscript: Sullivan's Music in History
For a final consideration of the relationship between Ivanhoe and time we could return to the question of Sullivan's music within history. Ivanhoe, and Sullivan's music in general, is, as stated, rightly considered conservative judged against broad tendencies in European music. Certainly it attempts no revolution or radical reformulation of musical language, and neither, can we suppose, would Sullivan have wanted to – at least for its own sake. Yet just as the richness of artistic history should not be reduced to one narrow strand of development, so is Sullivan's music not without its own originality and uniqueness. In an interview reported by The Musical World in 1885, Sullivan revealingly claims that the ‘Golden age’ of German music ended with Schumann and Italian opera with Donizetti.Footnote 60 This could, of course, be dismissed as merely the hallmark of artistic epigonism by critics who know better what is considered acceptable within modernist ideology, but that would be to substitute unthinking rejection for aesthetic understanding. For Sullivan, the development of music since the mid-nineteenth century might well not be what he would consider an improvement. His music prizes something that was lost in music since then – a formal lucidity, directness of communication and accessibility of comprehension, a cleaner, more transparent yet no less colourful orchestral patina.
There is a clear link with Scott again here, in the simultaneity of the historically non-simultaneous seen in Ivanhoe, the willingness to intersperse historically diverse materials, the casual attitude to ‘anachronisms’ in the interest of what the artist saw as the message of common humanity. (This analogy between the two is well worth consideration, though to a certain extent it is limited, as Sullivan is not setting out to write ‘historical’ music in the same sense as Scott is creating the historical novel; the two art forms are not precisely comparable.)
It is here, too, that the comparison with the Pre-Raphaelite movement already suggested by some Sullivan commentators may prove more fruitful. The creed of the ‘adherence to the simplicity of art’ announced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1850 finds an echo in Sullivan's aesthetics of clarity and emotional directness, his avoidance of ‘unnecessary complications or diffuseness’, his ‘maxim of respecting the fitness of things’ and deliberate simplicity of means.Footnote 61 Sullivan would probably also have agreed with Ruskin's defence of the Pre-Raphaelites: that ‘progress has in some things taken place is perfectly true; but it is true also that this progress is by no means the main thing to be noticed respecting ancient and modern art; that there are other circumstances, connected with the change from one to the other, immeasurably more important, and which, until very lately, have been altogether lost sight of.’Footnote 62 William Parry has left the following pregnant observation on this connection:
Clearly Sullivan was a friend of people like Millais and Burne-Jones, who were the leading Pre-Raphaelite artists. (Millais painted the portrait of Sullivan that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.) But there seem to me two other important links to the Pre-Raphaelite world. One might be Sullivan's approach to orchestration which seems very colourful, free of modern pigments, to be free of augmentation. And to that extent he seems to be almost like Pre-Raphaelites who were seeking to go back to a purer, more colourful, simpler time before Raphael, before the time when they thought that painting was ruined by modern influence. … But there is also the fact that he shares with the Pre-Raphaelites an obsession with the medieval, the dark ages, the middle ages. So in works such as The Golden Legend, Ivanhoe, Haddon Hall, King Arthur there is this continued preoccupation with that time when early English history was being created. The Victorians were incredibly keen on the dark ages and the medieval world from which Britain had emerged.Footnote 63
Beyond the common interest in idealized historical topics from the medieval past and a pellucid, simpler use of colour and timbre in their work, by returning to aspects of earlier art prematurely left behind by the march of progress such artists achieve something ‘new’, original, distinct and deeply characteristic, even without attempting progress as such. Through the impossible attempt to return, something original is produced, creating a byway from the linear, mono-directional course of art usually narrated.
With Sullivan this is revealed by a peculiar subtlety of harmonic and orchestral colour which draws on soft pastel shades and deep yet translucent hues, a new flexibility of melodic line that while deriving from conventional periodic phrasing eludes capture within this familiar framework, and a more general atmosphere, a gentle tincture that seeps over the dreamy historical setting which is unique to these pieces. This can be observed especially in Sullivan's work from the later 1880s and early 1890s such as The Golden Legend, Ivanhoe and King Arthur, even in parts of Haddon Hall, The Beauty Stone and The Emerald Isle.Footnote 64 In Rowena's hymn to the moon and her subsequent duet with Ivanhoe (Act 1 Scene 2), in the outdoor forest scenes of Copmanhurst, Ivanhoe's dawn ‘Happy with winged feet’ (Act 3 Scene 1), the accumulated pathos of Rebecca's plea to the Templar (Act 2 Scene 3) and the final chorus, the music swelling, ebbing and flowing yet higher, successive waves in one seemingly elastic, inexhaustible melodic line like the banner of England that there is unfurled, there is an indefinable stamp of a lyricism unique to Sullivan at this time, a conception that stands outside the tramlines of European musical progress, one that speaks of a more secret, undisclosed realm that is inimitably itself.
Ivanhoe is an uneven opera; alongside its moments of inspiration it has its fair share of longueurs (which opera doesn't?), and had Sullivan only been granted the health and summoned up the dedication to complete further works along these lines it is to be expected his achievement would have been the more considerable. Yet there is enough in Ivanhoe and the works he did complete to show us more than fleeting glimpses of this unique musical world, and for this those who listen to it unencumbered by a century of critical abuse must be thankful.
