His Excellency is a two-act comic opera, with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert and music by F. Osmond Carr, first performed in the fall of 1894, at the Lyric Theatre, where it ran for 162 performances. Although it enjoyed a moderately successful first run, it lost momentum (partly due to an influenza outbreak), closed, toured briefly, and then became obscure.

“The principal weakness in the music is the composer’s inability to comprehend the true spirit of the lines he had to set. Dr. Carr is a scholastic musician, and his concerted music is well put together; but where his audience looks for sparkle and piquancy it meets, for the most part with dullness and triviality.”  The New York Times, Nov. 1894 

 

Also from Jane Stedman’s WS Gilbert a Classic Victorian and His Theatre 1996: 

 

“The main complaint, unfortunately, seemed to be the score.” “Osmond Carr presented a greater problem to the critics….his earlier scores scarcely prepared him” for Gilbert’s libretto. Even though both men took three curtain calls on opening night, over the long term “the music was thought to be monotonous” and not up to the task. Carr…had not been up to the pressure of Gilbert’s lyrics, nor had he been able to hold his own in a powwow, if, indeed, he and the librettist had met to argue out the final structure.” Gilbert left the country early the next year, and returned to find His Excellency on the verge of closing. Stedman concludes: “With a better score and Gilbert’s continuing presence, to make post production alterations to the text, His Excellency no doubt would have had a longer life in spite of influenza.” 

     

 Like some other Gilbert operas from this period, His Excellency is (perhaps overly) complicated, but it’s subversive, deeply satirical and comically hilarious. Gilbert’s later works seem to benefit from, or suffer from (depending on your view), a sort of fragmentation or breakdown of the traditional dramatic schema that, despite the apparent wackiness of his stories, he made it his study to adhere to. In the 1875 story “A Consistent Pantomime”, the Clown narrator makes this claim about comical theatrical works: “If the Unities can be preserved consistently with dramatic interest, probability and the natural sequence of events, well and good, but if they can’t, let them go overboard.” (From The Triumph of Vice and other Stories by WS Gilbert collected by Andrew Crowther, 2018.) By the 1890’s, it’s as if this sardonic prophesy has come to pass, for better or worse, in works like The Mountebanks and Utopia Limited, and His Excellency, but the libretto of His Excellency also lacks some of the textual refinement and flow of those other works, although I agree with Andrew Crowther, in Contradiction Contradicted (2000), that “it is much more satisfactory in structural terms” than the others. He continues,“…just as The Mountebanks concerned characters who turned into the people they were pretending to be, so in His Excellency we have deceptions of a practical joke turning into reality. There is appropriate theatricality in this theme, which is, unfortunately, not coherently explored in either piece.” It’s not that I disagree, I just don’t think that the concept of coherency is that critical here.

 

I think Mr. Carr did his best with what he had to work with. When he realized that the music wasn’t catching on, he offered to take a pay cut. I think much of the fault actually lies with Gilbert in not following through with this particular libretto. Perhaps he became too distracted by the multiple casting and then legal issues overshadowing His Excellency, his painful gout and arthritis ( which were undoubtedly coupled with the frustration of  knowing that only changing his habits would improve the situation), the other rather volatile lawsuits he was engaged in, and his upcoming holidays.  

 

Mr. Gilbert, corresponding to Helen Carte, commented that “if it had had the advantage of …Sullivan’s music, it would have been a second Mikado.” Maybe if he’d had Sullivan’s music he would have been more attentive to the fate his own libretto. 

 

 

One song that didn't make the recording is the patter trio between Griffenfeld and his daughters, "When a gentleman supposes”, which didn’t do anything to make these conniving girls any more likable. Also, it’s got a very obscure and kind of complicated reference:

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Griffenfeld. When the case is quite completed, then the prisoner defeated with severity is treated as you’re probably aware — 

For it’s awfully provided that the jury will be guided by my summary one-sided — which distresses.

All. It is rough on Labouchere — 

It is rough on Labouchere — 

Oh, the dickens, how it sickens tender-hearted Labouchere!

 

 

Labouchère published a journal “Truth”, which gave publicly gave Gilbert a hard time. In His Excellency, Gilbert ridicules Henry Labouchère's claims to be impartial in the song, in reference to Labouchère’s claim that

“In sending me into the world, nature sent a person without prejudice or bias and consequently absolutely impartial.” (Andrew Crowther, Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan 2011). Labouchère was paired with Henrietta Hodson, who is famous for rather hysterically feuding with Gilbert, and may have inspired the characters of The Mikado’s Katisha, and His Excellency’s Dame Cortland, with her “perpetual antagonism” between “her Diabolical Temper and Iron Will” (His Excellency).  Labouchère had been a frequent theatrical critic of Gilbert, as Gilbert’s own legal counsel reported , “the writer is an adept in the art of offensive comment and criticisms and that he has done his best to annoy and insult Mr. Gilbert.” Gilbert commented in later years, “I never could understand his hostility (except that he is the avowed enemy of the whole human race) until I remembered that thirty-seven years ago I introduced him to the woman who is now his wife, I admit that, quite unwillingly, I did him an irreparable injury, and am disposed to regard his hostility in some measure justified.” 

(Gilbert, His life and Strife- H. Pearson 1957)

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Henry Du Pré Labouchère (9 November 1831 – 15 January 1912) Labouchère founded and funded a personal weekly journal, Truth, in 1877, “in which he pursued his anti-semitic, anti-suffrage and anti-homosexual social agenda” (Wikipedia). He is remembered for the Labouchère Amendment to British law, which  made all male homosexual activity a crime. He was directly responsible and proud of Oliver Wilde’s imprisonment and considered his two years hard labor too lenient.  

Labouchère was bitterly against  feminism; he campaigned in Truth against the suffrage movement, “ridiculing and belittling women who sought the right to vote. He was also a virulent anti-semite, opposed to Jewish participation in British life, using Truth to campaign against "Hebrew barons" and their supposedly excessive influence, "Jewish exclusivity" and "Jewish cowardice”. (Wikipedia)

 

“Oh, the dickens, how it sickens tender-hearted Labouchere!”