ABSTRACT
The recognition that the Savoy operas yoke the fanciful with the familiar and the romantic with the commercial is not new or original to me. Troost makes precisely this point when she writes:
Troost asserts that the mundane disrupts the expectations of audiences attending the theater to revel in escapism, and that Gilbert “fus[es] the illusory ideal with the commonplace to expose the materialism behind the romantic” (195). Troost’s claim that the operas expose commercialism and materialism implies that the commercial had been sublimated and that materialism was something audiences might have found undesirable in their entertainments. I believe, however, that Savoy audiences enjoyed the fruits of commercialism (as did Gilbert and his collaborators), and that the Savoy operas satisfied patrons by enabled them to continue doing pleasurable everyday activities in the theater, among them shopping and extolling codes of morality and behavior that patterned bourgeois life. Commercialism did not need to be exposed at the Savoy because it was never hidden: not only did it constitute a major feature of the evening’s experience for ticket purchasers, but it also established itself as a leitmotif in the operas that helped found the family likeness and ensured that opera after opera would please theatergoers.1 Indeed, the first three Savoy operas-those by which the collaborators established their collective reputation-centered on issues of commerce and class. Trial by Jury (1875), The Sorcerer (1877), and H.M.S. Pinafore (1878) all dealt with the same subject: they interrogated ways in which material realities impinge upon that most idealized of human relationships, romantic love. Although plots, characters, and situations differed, repeated elements in the operas started to shape the Savoy family countenance. By the time H.M.S. Pinafore crossed the Atlantic and achieved fame abroad, the dynasty was established. Later operas could rely upon the success of their predecessors to draw audiences to the theater and consequently were not so tied to each other thematically as those initial pieces-and it should be noted here that although every Savoy opera bears the family likeness to some extent, not all concern themselves primarily with class and commerce. Gilbert’s libretti explore a range of subjects, and it would be treating them reductively to suggest that they limit themselves to a single theme or concern. Nevertheless, subsequent operas joined the first three in developing assumptions about individuals and communities congenial to the beliefs and practices of Savoy audience members. Since the earlier and the later operas had different tasks to perform with regard to attracting and pleasing audiences, in this chapter I will concentrate on the
operas that founded the family by wooing and winning theatergoers; in the next, I will consider later operas that sustained audience loyalty by recalling features of the family countenance.
