Program Notes: Eyes And No Eyes
Between 1869 and 1875, W.S. Gilbert wrote a the libretti for a series of six "musical entertainments" produced by Thomas German Reed. Four of them had music by Reed, and the other two had music by Frederic Clay. These entertainments were exactly that -- light, family-friendly theatrical productions, in which Reed and his wife Priscilla often performed. These entertainments are of historical interest if you're interested in the history of that sort of thing, but they are not frequently produced nowadays. This is partly out of obscurity, partly out of them not tending to be interesting or robust enough to hold an evening on their own (dinner theater might suit them), and the fact that the original scores of most of them are lost to history might have something to do with it as well. I'm not going to stand here and argue that the German Reed entertainments are hidden masterpieces, because they're not. They are frequently funny, and where music exists it is often pleasant, but on the whole, even the weakest of Gilbert's collaborations with Sullivan far outclasses these early one-act libretti. The main appeal they have to me, therefore, is novelty. H.M.S. Pinafore may be stronger than Happy Arcadia in pretty much every way, but Happy Arcadia has the selling point that opportunities to see it are rare, if ever, and so you'd better grab it when you have the chance.
With this in mind, I am currently involved in directing a production of Eyes And No Eyes, which was the last one of these that Gilbert wrote. It is being produced by the University Of Michigan Gilbert And Sullivan Society, and we are presenting it along with two other one-acts connected to the Savoy to make for a full evening. Of all the German Reed entertainments, Eyes And No Eyes seems to be among the most frequently performed, with Ages Ago being the other one that tends to receive productions nowadays. (Albeit still less often than Utopia (Limited).) I expect other companies pick Eyes And No Eyes when they want to do an obscure Gilbert one-act for the same reasons I did. For one thing, it has a complete extant score. Not Reed's original, but a substitute score written in the 1890s by Florian Pascal. It is also relatively simple to follow, has few technical demands, and doesn't tend to stop for songs completely unrelated to the action.
Here is the plot:
The curtain rises on Clochette at her spinning wheel. (“As I At My Wheel Sit Spinning”) Her uncle, Cassandre, is going to be engaged to the elderly coquette Nicolette this day, and has sent Clochette’s sister Columbine to town to buy a magnificent cloak for the occasion.
In the meantime, Clochette and Columbine have been courted by two brothers, Arlequin and Pierrot. Nicolette warns Clochette that the brothers have flirted with her, but Clochette is unworried. She is all to aware that Arlequin and Pierrot are a pair of terrible rakes. (“Yes Yes, I Am That Miserable Beauty”)
Pierrot and Arlequin enter, and, along with Clochette, meditate on their peculiar state of birth. They are twins, which naturally makes them interchangeable in every way. (“Of Our Parents Each Child Is The Son”) It is agreed that Pierrot and Arlequin are going to marry Clochette and Columbine, but no one expresses any preference as to which brother shall marry which sister.
Columbine enters in a panic and forces Pierrot and Arlequin out of earshot. She explains to Clochette that she went and purchased the cloak, as Uncle Cassandre ordered, but she has now lost it. (“Well Here’s A Very Pretty State Of Things”) Clochette comes up with a plan: They will tell Cassandre and Nicolette that the cloak is a magic cloak, visible only to true lovers who never flirt. As the two are terrible flirts, they won’t question not being able to see the cloak, and they will both pretend to see it for fear of being exposed as untrue. The two sisters test this plan out on Pierrot and Arlequin to great success. Left alone, the brothers confess to each other that they could not actually see the cloak.
Alone, Cassandre and Nicolette flirt with each other. They remark on the peculiarity of their courtship. They met when Cassandre was eight-and-twenty, and so was Nicolette. Thirty years later, Cassandre is fifty-eight, but Nicolette is eight-and-twenty still. But she does not feel too young for him. (“When You Were Eight And Twenty”)
Columbine enters and explains the properties of the magic cloak, but panics before being able to produce it. She says that Clochette has it. Nicolette and Cassandre exit to review the marriage contract. Clochette enters with a basket, and informs Columbine that she has found the cloak. Columbine points out that, since she’s already told Cassandre that it’s a magic cloak, when he finds he can actually see it, he’ll know the story was fake. Clochette decides to keep the game going, and when Nicolette and Cassandre return, she explains that they were mistaken before, and the cloak is only visible to flirts, and invisible to true lovers. Sure enough, Nicolette and Cassandre are able to see the cloak, but do their best to pretend not to. (“Now Columbine The Magic Cloak Produce”)
Pierrot and Arlequin enter remorsefully. They explain that after the incident with the cloak earlier, they resolved to reform from their flirting ways. To determine whether they are worthy of marrying Clochette and Columbine, Cassandre decides to test them with the cloak. The brothers, still operating on the first set of rules, are thrilled when they can see the cloak, as to them it means they are now true lovers. Cassandre sees it differently. Clochette and Columbine perform one last bit of trickery to make everybody happy. (“Agony And Fell Despair”)
One of my favorite things about reading these early Gilbert libretti is seeing how he begins to explore ideas that would later be fleshed out in his full operas. Sometimes these are more thematic than anything. Happy Arcadia has elements that would be prominent in Iolanthe and Patience. In some cases, Gilbert turned one-off jokes into major plot devices. Our Island Home features a reluctant pirate captain who entered that line of work when his nurse mistakenly apprenticed him to a pirate rather than a pilot, and on top of that, is never sick at sea.
Eyes And No Eyes most closely predicts The Gondoliers and The Mikado. The Mikado in how seriously concerned the characters are with flirting, and what the consequence of flirting should be. Nicolette is also essentially an early version of Katisha. You can practically hear her extolling the virtues of her right elbow. The Gondoliers is seen primarily in the interchangeable brothers, Pierrot and Arlequin. The two brothers are engaged to two sisters, but don't know or particularly care which -- or so they say. Much like Marco and Giuseppe, they do admit a preference after the actual pairing-up happens. There is a trio in which the brothers and Clochette remark how thoroughly interchangeable they are, which strongly suggests a couple of songs from The Gondoliers. Gilbert somewhat recycles a joke as well. In The Gondoliers, the Duchess of Plaza Toro tells how she decided to fall in love with the Duke, even though "several of [her] relations bet [she] couldn't." In Eyes And No Eyes, the situation is reversed, with the wealthy Cassandre deciding to fall in love with Nicolette, because he didn't like her at first, and decided to take it as a challenge, as he is "fond of acquired tastes."
As for the music, Florian Pascal's score is something of a mixed bag. Pascal wrote his score after Gilbert and Sullivan had run their full partnership, and it's clear that some songs take after them. The trio "Of Our Parents Each Child Is The Son" and the duet "When You Were Eight And Twenty" are both songs you could imagine coming out of the standard canon. The former follows Sullivan's usual structure for three-verse trios, albeit with a bit more chromaticism, and the latter takes after the multitude of baritone-contralto duets from the canon. In both cases, Pascal uses dance rhythms, which has been observed as a habit of his.
Clochette's solo, which opens the opera, is a lovely little melody, short, and accompanied by the sort of sixteenth-note figure in 3/8 time which seems to be musical shorthand for spinning wheels. The aria is in simple ternary form, with comfortable eight-bar phrases, and predictable rhythms that match the text well. As opening numbers go, it puts the audience on firm footing.
This is followed shortly by Nicolette's solo, which hardly seems to follow any structure at all. It is practically freeform, with only little fragments of melody coming in and out to keep the listener grounded. Though it tends to come back to D major and D minor, the song is perfectly happy to flit about from key to key, even just for a single bar. As per By John Franceschina (Incidental and Dance Music in the American Theatre from 1786 to 1923: Volume 3), "Though [Florian Pascal] was hardly original in his choice of dance music forms, he did often instil in them musical interest through unusual harmonizations and unexpected modulations, perhaps the most outstanding characteristics of his musical style." Pascal's free-form modulations pervade the score, but are most noticeable here, perhaps because the use of just one single voice makes it easier to have an even freer harmonic structure.
In the broadest sense, the song takes the four verses written by Gilbert, and sets the first as an introduction in 4/4 time. The next two verses are in 6/8, and the latter of the two is seen as a response to the former. (It is between the two 6/8 verses that the key goes from being mostly D minor to mostly D major. And then the final verse acts as a coda in 9/8 time. There is not as much of a clear distinction in the music as there is between the other verses.
In some sense, this ecclectic, almost medley-like form was inevitable in the setting, as Gilbert is incredibly inconsistent in the meter. Of course, free-form arias are common in many operas, but something like this is usually unexpected in anything with Gilbert's name attached. The closest analogue I can think of is "Alone And Yet Alive" from The Mikado. It begins with an introductory recitative, followed by a single highly rhythmed verse which states a musical theme, but does not repeat or develop it. The next verse (with a different textual structure) is contrasting, much more ballad-like, but still short, and really only contains the statement of a melody. But even though Nicolette is in many ways a proto-Katisha, Katisha's aria is much shorter. Nicolette's aria does at times feel meandering, especially at the very end, where there's a full thirty seconds of playout as she exits the stage.
(There is also a rather lengthy bit of exit music a few minutes later when Pierrot and Arlequin leave the scene. After having blocked both of these exits, I've come to the conclusion that Florian Pascal was working with a much larger stage or much slower actors.)
There are two quartets in Eyes And No Eyes. The first of them is primarily expository in nature, as it's when Columbine makes her first entrance and reveals to Clochette that she has lost the cloak. And so Clochette and Columbine sing in a rather frantic and freeform manner, with Pierrot and Arlequin occasionally interjecting with a refrain of "Oh, we love you fondly madly," set to a fairly regular waltz, the joke being that they just won't shut up. And what do you do when you have two sets of characters singing in two contrasting styles? Counterpoint of course! I won't go into the technical elements of the counterpoint too much. It's not as simple as what Sullivan usually does in these sorts of situations, but it mostly ends up sounding like Pierrot and Arlequin's waltz is the main theme while Clochette and Columbine are singing mostly ornamental figures. The most irritating part of this piece is the text setting in Clochette and Columbine's parts. They sing in pretty fast sixteenth notes, and where the syllables fall makes it difficult to get all the words out. As with much of the music in Pascal's score, the final product sounds good, but learning the music is no easy task. By the end, it sound much simpler than it actually is.
The second quartet (sung by the two sisters, Cassandre, and Nicolette) is generally friendlier for both the audience and the singer. It is composed of distinct "song" sections, with a recurring dance-like refrain. This one is actually about as simple as it sounds. I don't mean to say that it's especially simple or complex, but the level of simplicity at which it is is accurately represented by the sound of the finished product.
This brings us to the final sextet. If there is one overarching annoyance with Pascal's music in Eyes And No Eyes (I say "annoyance" after spending some months learning it and then teaching it) it is that his scoring is very dense. When writing for multiple voices, he is loath to have any two people singing the same note for more than a glancing second, and heaven forbid there are parallel lines! This comes to a head most in the sextet, because, naturally, there are six voices, and when each voice not only has to be distinct, but seemingly as far away from any other voice as possible, the music becomes something of a muddle. Once it's all learned, it sounds quite nice, but it's a feat, and I feel like Sullivan could have written a sextet with all the same melodies and harmonic structure, but simpler to learn and to sing, and without losing any appeal to the ear. I think it's worth noting that Pascal wrote this score for publication, but it did not receive a production at the time. I do wonder if Pascal might have revised the score if it had been connected with a specific revival and specific singers.
I am not the first person to note Pascal's tendency to overscore. In a review of his opera Cymbia printed in The Musical Standard in 1883, one of the first musical elements pointed out was that "a first hearing conveys the impression that in parts the accompaniment is overweighted." This might have been the scoring, it might have been the orchestration, or it might even simply have been the performance. I have not yet gone thoroughly enough through the score of Cymbia to say, although it does have this lovely little bit of scoring:
But dense or not, and even though Pascal is no Sullivan, Eyes And No Eyes is overall a pleasant little piece, and as long as there are crazed Gilbert and Sullivan fanatics, there will surely be someone somewhere deciding that this is the easiest of the German Reed entertainments to tack on to a production of Trial By Jury to make a full evening.
With this in mind, I am currently involved in directing a production of Eyes And No Eyes, which was the last one of these that Gilbert wrote. It is being produced by the University Of Michigan Gilbert And Sullivan Society, and we are presenting it along with two other one-acts connected to the Savoy to make for a full evening. Of all the German Reed entertainments, Eyes And No Eyes seems to be among the most frequently performed, with Ages Ago being the other one that tends to receive productions nowadays. (Albeit still less often than Utopia (Limited).) I expect other companies pick Eyes And No Eyes when they want to do an obscure Gilbert one-act for the same reasons I did. For one thing, it has a complete extant score. Not Reed's original, but a substitute score written in the 1890s by Florian Pascal. It is also relatively simple to follow, has few technical demands, and doesn't tend to stop for songs completely unrelated to the action.
***
Here is the plot:
The curtain rises on Clochette at her spinning wheel. (“As I At My Wheel Sit Spinning”) Her uncle, Cassandre, is going to be engaged to the elderly coquette Nicolette this day, and has sent Clochette’s sister Columbine to town to buy a magnificent cloak for the occasion.
In the meantime, Clochette and Columbine have been courted by two brothers, Arlequin and Pierrot. Nicolette warns Clochette that the brothers have flirted with her, but Clochette is unworried. She is all to aware that Arlequin and Pierrot are a pair of terrible rakes. (“Yes Yes, I Am That Miserable Beauty”)
Pierrot and Arlequin enter, and, along with Clochette, meditate on their peculiar state of birth. They are twins, which naturally makes them interchangeable in every way. (“Of Our Parents Each Child Is The Son”) It is agreed that Pierrot and Arlequin are going to marry Clochette and Columbine, but no one expresses any preference as to which brother shall marry which sister.
Columbine enters in a panic and forces Pierrot and Arlequin out of earshot. She explains to Clochette that she went and purchased the cloak, as Uncle Cassandre ordered, but she has now lost it. (“Well Here’s A Very Pretty State Of Things”) Clochette comes up with a plan: They will tell Cassandre and Nicolette that the cloak is a magic cloak, visible only to true lovers who never flirt. As the two are terrible flirts, they won’t question not being able to see the cloak, and they will both pretend to see it for fear of being exposed as untrue. The two sisters test this plan out on Pierrot and Arlequin to great success. Left alone, the brothers confess to each other that they could not actually see the cloak.
Alone, Cassandre and Nicolette flirt with each other. They remark on the peculiarity of their courtship. They met when Cassandre was eight-and-twenty, and so was Nicolette. Thirty years later, Cassandre is fifty-eight, but Nicolette is eight-and-twenty still. But she does not feel too young for him. (“When You Were Eight And Twenty”)
Columbine enters and explains the properties of the magic cloak, but panics before being able to produce it. She says that Clochette has it. Nicolette and Cassandre exit to review the marriage contract. Clochette enters with a basket, and informs Columbine that she has found the cloak. Columbine points out that, since she’s already told Cassandre that it’s a magic cloak, when he finds he can actually see it, he’ll know the story was fake. Clochette decides to keep the game going, and when Nicolette and Cassandre return, she explains that they were mistaken before, and the cloak is only visible to flirts, and invisible to true lovers. Sure enough, Nicolette and Cassandre are able to see the cloak, but do their best to pretend not to. (“Now Columbine The Magic Cloak Produce”)
Pierrot and Arlequin enter remorsefully. They explain that after the incident with the cloak earlier, they resolved to reform from their flirting ways. To determine whether they are worthy of marrying Clochette and Columbine, Cassandre decides to test them with the cloak. The brothers, still operating on the first set of rules, are thrilled when they can see the cloak, as to them it means they are now true lovers. Cassandre sees it differently. Clochette and Columbine perform one last bit of trickery to make everybody happy. (“Agony And Fell Despair”)
***
One of my favorite things about reading these early Gilbert libretti is seeing how he begins to explore ideas that would later be fleshed out in his full operas. Sometimes these are more thematic than anything. Happy Arcadia has elements that would be prominent in Iolanthe and Patience. In some cases, Gilbert turned one-off jokes into major plot devices. Our Island Home features a reluctant pirate captain who entered that line of work when his nurse mistakenly apprenticed him to a pirate rather than a pilot, and on top of that, is never sick at sea.
Eyes And No Eyes most closely predicts The Gondoliers and The Mikado. The Mikado in how seriously concerned the characters are with flirting, and what the consequence of flirting should be. Nicolette is also essentially an early version of Katisha. You can practically hear her extolling the virtues of her right elbow. The Gondoliers is seen primarily in the interchangeable brothers, Pierrot and Arlequin. The two brothers are engaged to two sisters, but don't know or particularly care which -- or so they say. Much like Marco and Giuseppe, they do admit a preference after the actual pairing-up happens. There is a trio in which the brothers and Clochette remark how thoroughly interchangeable they are, which strongly suggests a couple of songs from The Gondoliers. Gilbert somewhat recycles a joke as well. In The Gondoliers, the Duchess of Plaza Toro tells how she decided to fall in love with the Duke, even though "several of [her] relations bet [she] couldn't." In Eyes And No Eyes, the situation is reversed, with the wealthy Cassandre deciding to fall in love with Nicolette, because he didn't like her at first, and decided to take it as a challenge, as he is "fond of acquired tastes."
As for the music, Florian Pascal's score is something of a mixed bag. Pascal wrote his score after Gilbert and Sullivan had run their full partnership, and it's clear that some songs take after them. The trio "Of Our Parents Each Child Is The Son" and the duet "When You Were Eight And Twenty" are both songs you could imagine coming out of the standard canon. The former follows Sullivan's usual structure for three-verse trios, albeit with a bit more chromaticism, and the latter takes after the multitude of baritone-contralto duets from the canon. In both cases, Pascal uses dance rhythms, which has been observed as a habit of his.
Clochette's solo, which opens the opera, is a lovely little melody, short, and accompanied by the sort of sixteenth-note figure in 3/8 time which seems to be musical shorthand for spinning wheels. The aria is in simple ternary form, with comfortable eight-bar phrases, and predictable rhythms that match the text well. As opening numbers go, it puts the audience on firm footing.
This is followed shortly by Nicolette's solo, which hardly seems to follow any structure at all. It is practically freeform, with only little fragments of melody coming in and out to keep the listener grounded. Though it tends to come back to D major and D minor, the song is perfectly happy to flit about from key to key, even just for a single bar. As per By John Franceschina (Incidental and Dance Music in the American Theatre from 1786 to 1923: Volume 3), "Though [Florian Pascal] was hardly original in his choice of dance music forms, he did often instil in them musical interest through unusual harmonizations and unexpected modulations, perhaps the most outstanding characteristics of his musical style." Pascal's free-form modulations pervade the score, but are most noticeable here, perhaps because the use of just one single voice makes it easier to have an even freer harmonic structure.
In the broadest sense, the song takes the four verses written by Gilbert, and sets the first as an introduction in 4/4 time. The next two verses are in 6/8, and the latter of the two is seen as a response to the former. (It is between the two 6/8 verses that the key goes from being mostly D minor to mostly D major. And then the final verse acts as a coda in 9/8 time. There is not as much of a clear distinction in the music as there is between the other verses.
In some sense, this ecclectic, almost medley-like form was inevitable in the setting, as Gilbert is incredibly inconsistent in the meter. Of course, free-form arias are common in many operas, but something like this is usually unexpected in anything with Gilbert's name attached. The closest analogue I can think of is "Alone And Yet Alive" from The Mikado. It begins with an introductory recitative, followed by a single highly rhythmed verse which states a musical theme, but does not repeat or develop it. The next verse (with a different textual structure) is contrasting, much more ballad-like, but still short, and really only contains the statement of a melody. But even though Nicolette is in many ways a proto-Katisha, Katisha's aria is much shorter. Nicolette's aria does at times feel meandering, especially at the very end, where there's a full thirty seconds of playout as she exits the stage.
(There is also a rather lengthy bit of exit music a few minutes later when Pierrot and Arlequin leave the scene. After having blocked both of these exits, I've come to the conclusion that Florian Pascal was working with a much larger stage or much slower actors.)
There are two quartets in Eyes And No Eyes. The first of them is primarily expository in nature, as it's when Columbine makes her first entrance and reveals to Clochette that she has lost the cloak. And so Clochette and Columbine sing in a rather frantic and freeform manner, with Pierrot and Arlequin occasionally interjecting with a refrain of "Oh, we love you fondly madly," set to a fairly regular waltz, the joke being that they just won't shut up. And what do you do when you have two sets of characters singing in two contrasting styles? Counterpoint of course! I won't go into the technical elements of the counterpoint too much. It's not as simple as what Sullivan usually does in these sorts of situations, but it mostly ends up sounding like Pierrot and Arlequin's waltz is the main theme while Clochette and Columbine are singing mostly ornamental figures. The most irritating part of this piece is the text setting in Clochette and Columbine's parts. They sing in pretty fast sixteenth notes, and where the syllables fall makes it difficult to get all the words out. As with much of the music in Pascal's score, the final product sounds good, but learning the music is no easy task. By the end, it sound much simpler than it actually is.
The second quartet (sung by the two sisters, Cassandre, and Nicolette) is generally friendlier for both the audience and the singer. It is composed of distinct "song" sections, with a recurring dance-like refrain. This one is actually about as simple as it sounds. I don't mean to say that it's especially simple or complex, but the level of simplicity at which it is is accurately represented by the sound of the finished product.
This brings us to the final sextet. If there is one overarching annoyance with Pascal's music in Eyes And No Eyes (I say "annoyance" after spending some months learning it and then teaching it) it is that his scoring is very dense. When writing for multiple voices, he is loath to have any two people singing the same note for more than a glancing second, and heaven forbid there are parallel lines! This comes to a head most in the sextet, because, naturally, there are six voices, and when each voice not only has to be distinct, but seemingly as far away from any other voice as possible, the music becomes something of a muddle. Once it's all learned, it sounds quite nice, but it's a feat, and I feel like Sullivan could have written a sextet with all the same melodies and harmonic structure, but simpler to learn and to sing, and without losing any appeal to the ear. I think it's worth noting that Pascal wrote this score for publication, but it did not receive a production at the time. I do wonder if Pascal might have revised the score if it had been connected with a specific revival and specific singers.
I am not the first person to note Pascal's tendency to overscore. In a review of his opera Cymbia printed in The Musical Standard in 1883, one of the first musical elements pointed out was that "a first hearing conveys the impression that in parts the accompaniment is overweighted." This might have been the scoring, it might have been the orchestration, or it might even simply have been the performance. I have not yet gone thoroughly enough through the score of Cymbia to say, although it does have this lovely little bit of scoring:
This is not a fair representation of the score. This is one of those Act I finales where everyone's on stage
singing about how crazy everything is all of a sudden. But still, so many staves!
But dense or not, and even though Pascal is no Sullivan, Eyes And No Eyes is overall a pleasant little piece, and as long as there are crazed Gilbert and Sullivan fanatics, there will surely be someone somewhere deciding that this is the easiest of the German Reed entertainments to tack on to a production of Trial By Jury to make a full evening.
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