Still wading through Opera magazine, I came upon a review by Max Loppert of a revival of the ENO's production on August 17th 1973, between the pages of which I had scribbled a reply, which I apparently never finished or worked up. Loppert's review is quite a long one, I quote therefore only a few brief extracts from it (it appears in the October 1973 issue of Opera), followed by my notes (unrewritten).

LOPPERT:- "Coming to Gilbert & Sullivan from outside, as it were, poses an interesting problem ... one can write about Offenbach and not be French, Rossini and not be Italian but about Iolanthe and not be English? Well, here goes: Watching the revival of Frank Hauser's production at the Coliseum, I was struck by the different levels of musical inspiration. To summarise it crudely, the fairies have most of the musical interest, the humans least. ... It was instructive to read, in Arthur Jacobs's review of Ivanhoe in the August issue, the comment that "the restricted instrumental palette of the Savoy operettas gives no inkling of Sullivan's skilled use of a full-sized orchestra.” Certainly the impression I formed of the composer, on this admittedly short-term acquaintanceship, was of a distinctly fertile musical imagination tethered by the comedy framework of the libretto, and left very little room to expand."

ME:- "Max Loppert's review of Iolanthe is fair perhaps over-generous to the performance, less than fair to the opera and to Sullivan, but if the exercise proved anything it proved that the non-British (I use the term in preference to non-English) do not understand G & S. To begin with, he fell into the obvious trap of trying to consider Sullivan apart from Gilbert, and Sullivan is perhaps the only operatic composer whose work cannot be assessed apart from his librettist. It is interesting that Mr. Loppert makes no mention of Sullivan's primary virtue, his incredible ability to parody the styles of Grand opera composers, and the most memorable feature of this current series of performances was the skill with which Mr. Mackerras brought out the parody of Wagner in Sullivan's score - I cannot recall ever having heard these brought out so well - or indeed, having heard Sullivan so well conducted. To have parodied the greatest opera composer of all time, and to have done it with such taste and refinement, must surely set Iolanthe as one of the major light operas in the world's repertory." MICHAEL WALTERS

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