Creators' Intentions and the Realities of Performance: Some Exemplary Editorial Problems from the Savoy Operas

Abstract

When playwrights, composers and choreographers bring scripts, scores, and choreographies to first rehearsals, these are provisional documents that still need to be tested, transformed into audible sounds and visible movements. Works that are successful enough to be revived go through similar processes of testing and adjustment for each new production. In no genre are such adjustments so many or so far reaching as in opera. The Savoy Operas — the collaborations of Gilbert and Sullivan — constitute an excellent repertoire in which to study the dynamics of this process, for their genesis and performing history can be traced in a wealth of documentation. Although performances were controlled for three quarters of a century by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, a troupe committed to performing these works exactly as their creators had intended, numerous adjustments were made over the years. Because few good performers will regard any text as altogether binding, editors should supplement their clear texts with enough information, provided in critical commentary and appendices, to enable performers to exercise intelligently the freedom they will almost certainly claim.