The Masterpiece: ‘The Mikado’

Abstract

The Savoy Operas can be divided into two broad groups whose differences are apparent in listing the settings for the operas (see table, pp. x—xi). Excluding Thespis, the first six operas — from Trial by Jury to lolanthe — are set in Victorian England. Their action is contemporary with the time of their composition, and they are full of elements drawn directly from the world of the London theatre audience of the 1880s: a police sergeant, a courtroom, the Palace Yard at Westminster, a regiment of Dragoons, a country vicar, a ship’s company of sailors, a Major-General in the British Army, and so on. Beginning with Princess Ida, the operas are set in times and places increasingly remote from Britain in the 1880s: Japan, Tudor England, eighteenth-century Italy, a South Pacific kingdom and a German principality. This shift in setting coincides with a decrease in social satire. The first six operas satirise various aspects of Victorian life, but in the later operas satire is diluted by increasing emphasis on music, comic characterisation and spectacle.