A Sensation Novel is a comic musical play in three acts (or volumes) written by the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, with music composed by Thomas German Reed. It was first performed on 31 January 1871 at the Royal Gallery of Illustration. Only four of German Reed's songs survive. Nearly 25 years later, the music was rewritten and published by Florian Pascal (Joseph Williams, Jr). The story concerns an author suffering from writer's block who finds that the characters in his novel are dissatisfied.
The piece satirises the sensation novels popular as pulp detective fiction in the Victorian era. Later in his career, when Gilbert wrote the famous series of Savoy operas with Arthur Sullivan, he reused elements of A Sensation Novel in their opera Ruddigore.
Background
A Sensation Novel is the fourth in a series of six short musical entertainments written by Gilbert for Thomas German Reed and his wife Priscilla between 1869 and 1875. The German Reeds presented respectable, family-friendly musical entertainments at their Gallery of Illustration beginning in 1855, at a time when the theatre in Britain had gained a poor reputation as an unsavoury institution and was not attended by much of the middle class. Shakespeare was played, but most of the entertainments available in theatres consisted of poorly translated French operettas, risqué burlesques and incomprehensible broad farces. The Gallery of Illustration was a 500-seat theatre with a small stage that only allowed for four or five characters with accompaniment by a piano, harmonium and sometimes a harp. Pascal's new score, written nearly 25 years later, sounds like early Debussy, out of period for this 1871 work.
A Sensation Novel satirises the sensation novels popular as pulp detective fiction in the Victorian era. The play concerns stock melodrama characters who take on a life of their own and comment negatively on the absurd plot their author forces them into. Music is a continual and essential element of the dramatic action throughout the piece. As scholar Jane W. Stedman observes in her book Gilbert Before Sullivan, this play anticipates Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. Fans of Gilbert and Sullivan will notice that Sir Ruthven Glenaloon prefigures Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd, Baronet of Ruddigore; Alice Grey, the virtuous heroine, is a foundling like Rose Maybud in Ruddigore; and that other elements of the piece anticipate the Savoy Operas, including babies switched at birth and a self-decapitation. Gilbert's casting of the large, ungainly Richard Corney Grain as the "spirit of romance" was a joke that foreshadowed his casting of the rather large Rutland Barrington as the image of perfect manly beauty in Patience.
Like some of Gilbert's other pieces for German Reed, most of the original score of A Sensation Novel is lost – four songs survive – although there have been re-settings by other composers. One such re-setting by Mike Nash was produced in 1998 at The International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton, England, in 2015 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, and in 2017 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Roles and original cast
Author/Sir Ruthven Glenaloon (baritone) – Thomas German Reed
The Spirit of Romance/Gripper (bass) – R. Corney Grain
Herbert de Browne (tenor) – Arthur Cecil
Alice Grey (soprano) – Fanny Holland
Lady Rockalda (contralto) – Priscilla German Reed
Synopsis
Act I
In the first "volume", an author of sensation novels, despite having entered into a supernatural contract with the Spirit of Romance, is suffering from writer's block. Frustrated, he summons the Spirit, who informs him that the five characters he is using – the mild-mannered hero, the pure heroine, the villain and villainess, and the detective – are possessions that the Spirit has merely lent to him, and that they have lives of their own outside the text. The Spirit explains that the characters are all sinners who, as punishment for the crimes of their lives, must spend eternity playing a character that is the exact opposite to their true selves. Upon learning that his characters will come to life at the end of the first and second volume of his book, and before the final chapter of the third, the author, nervously reflecting that he has just finished the first volume, leaves his home before they appear, claiming to have an important meeting he had suddenly remembered.