Background

Opera in Britain has a complicated history. While opera in English was performed in the latter half of the 17th century, by the early 18th century Italian opera had become the predominant form and remained so for around two centuries with its main venue at the King's Theatre until the second half of the 19th century when Covent Garden became the prime location. However, beginning with John Gay's The Beggar's Opera in 1728, English opera in various forms was also performed during much of this time.  

The form of Gay's opera was Ballad Opera, spoken dialogue interspersed with songs and similar, superficially, to Singspiel or Opéra Comique but with more emphasis on,  often satirical, dialogue and with the music using existing  tunes, usually popular ones of the day. Later in the 18th century, the fashion moved to pasticcio where the music was taken from other composers, usually continental ones, and the dialogue and plots became more that of melodrama.  By the early 19th century, there was a greater direct use of continental operas but these were not only translated into English but adapted for the supposedly different British taste sometimes by a wholesale rewriting and often with extra dialogue, actors or scenes.

It is not surprising that when Carl Maria von Weber was commissioned to compose the English opera, Oberon, for performance at Covent Garden in 1826, he wrote to his librettist, James Planché, that "The English [opera] is more a drama with songs" and despaired of the use of  "principal actors who do not sing" and "the omission of music in the most important moments", all of which would make it "unfit for all other theatres in Europe".

The situation was further confused by the regulations governing British theatres and by the theatres' performance practices. In London, only Drury Lane, Covent Garden and, for the summer season, the Haymarket had licences to perform spoken drama. The obvious way for other theatres to get round this prohibition, which was not lifted until 1843, was to add music. Thus the boundary between such plays with music and English opera can easily become blurred and it can be difficult to categorise a piece.

Theatres of the time advertised two, three or even four separate productions in an evening, firstly an opera or substantial play and then one or two short plays, often comedies or farces, but again with music included. Sometimes the additional item was a single act from an opera and sometimes two operas only were given in an evening.

In 1834, just before the start of Victoria's reign, Samuel J. Arnold re-opened the Lyceum Theatre after a fire renaming it "The English Opera House" (EOH) and advertising it for "the presentation of English operas and the encouragement of indigenous talent". From the opening address at the theatre he clearly intended to stimulate a British genre to rival continental and, most particularly, Italian opera. However, the venture collapsed within a year. Others tried over the next 30 years to fulfill these aspirations, but all were eventually to fail. The period 1834-1866 has been given the title of English Romantic Opera, although the romanticism is of a rather tepid, feel good, nature compared with the Romantic literature earlier in the century.

Arnold's efforts did succeed in establishing some significant changes to English opera. Although  they still largely used dialogue and song, the music, now for the most part original, held primacy and the use of non singing actors was greatly curtailed. Michael William Balfe was the mainstay of this period but other composers, notably John Barnett, Julius Benedict, Edward Loder, George Alexander Macfarren and William Vincent Wallace, also played a significant part. Many of their operas enjoyed initial success but few managed to hold the stage until the 20th century and even those essentially disappeared within the first two decades.  

After the Royal English Opera went bankrupt in February 1866, there was a gap of nearly 10 years without any major new English opera being staged. However, that did not mean that there was no English opera performed. There was considerable activity but very disjointed with no determined effort to establish a permanent English Opera presence in London as Bunn and Pyne and Harrison had tried in earlier years. As then, most companies rarely lasted very long. Given their normally precarious finances, they kept to a tried and tested diet of continental opera in English together with some popular English operas from earlier years and did not  risk anything new. In this they were more conservative than those in the English Romantic era, who had been able to offer the latest London operas. See the Interregnum page for more details. 

It was during this interregnum that the Carl Rosa Company was established in 1873. It quickly established itself as the premiere touring company, partly down to Rosa's organisational abilities but also being well funded as a result of Rosa's American tours. This company continued to perform throughout the rest of the century and up to 1960. The bedrock of Rosa's repertoire was the usual continental opera in English together with a few older English operas. However, in 1876, he staged a new English opera, Frederic Cowen's Pauline, and continued to commission occasional new English operas up to his death in 1889. Even so, his repertoire and more particularly that for other companies was decidedly limited and conservative. There were also new English operas staged by others than Rosa, the most notable being Sullivan's Ivanhoe (1891) at D'Oyly Carte's short lived Royal English Opera House and Stanford's Shamus O'Brien (1896) at the Opera Comique in London. Some composers, notably De Lara, Smyth and Stanford, resorted to continental opera houses in order to get their operas performed. As in the earlier era, these English operas sometimes had initial success but ultimately failed to gain a hold in the repertoire. This period of English opera is outlined on the Victorian English Opera website and comprehensively discussed in Paul Rodmell's Opera in the British Isles, 1875-1918, (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2013).

One notable feature of this last period was that the operas were heavily influenced by continental opera. Cowen had put down the failure of Pauline to its old fashioned dialogue and song format and after that all serious operas were through composed. The operas were often dramatic and the tragic, as opposed to the unremitting happy endings of English Romantic opera. The English opera model of dialogue and song  did not disappear but became confined to lighter works. This direction was reinforced by the success of opéra bouffe, imported from France, which was much in vogue from the late 1850s with efforts to emulate it in Britain from the early 1860's with a string of short, often comic, operas and operettas. These efforts eventually led to the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, who had their first major success with Trial by Jury in 1875, as well as the myriad variety of musicals, which are still thriving today.