Monday is “Grab Bag” day here at Entertainment Legends Revealed, with each Monday featuring a different area of the world of arts and entertainment (that is not featured on the other four days of the week, that is). They’ll eventually repeat, but for now, we’re still on the initial installments of each of the various “Grab Bag” legends!

This is the first in a series of examinations of legends related to operas and whether they are true or false.

Let’s begin!

OPERA LEGEND: The Pirates of Penzance was named as such after copyright piracy.

STATUS: True

Librettist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan formed one of the most famous musical partnerships this side of Rodgers and Hammerstein with their operas in the late 19th Century.

After a few modest hits with their operettas Trial By Jury (1874) and The Sorceror (1877), Gilbert and Sullivan had their first international smash hit with their operetta H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), which was a comic opera about the danger of incompetent people rising to high positions (while having some fun with the British Navy, as well).

The problem with having an international hit in 1878 was that British copyright laws, naturally, did not extend into the United States of America, so American productions of the opera took place without the permission of Gilbert and Sullivan (and certainly without any payment to the pair).

In fact, the first Copyright statute in the United States specifically stated:

nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book or books, written, printed, or published by any person not a citizen of the United States, in foreign parts or places without the jurisdiction of the United States. . . .

That basic law was still in place by the end of the 19th Century.

So naturally, Gilbert and Sullivan were quite irritated that their success did not translate into extra money from America.

They brought an “official” production to the United States in 1879, but still, they were so angered by the “piracy” of their work that they specifically wrote their next opera as a response to those pirates.

That opera was called, of course, The Pirates of Penzance…

It, too, was a smash success, and in an attempt to out-maneuver the “pirates,” Gilbert and Sullivan gave a small performance of the work in London on December 30, 1879 (to preserve British copyright) then debuted the work in New York City the next day to acquire the U.S. copyright.

However, it was determined that since it was first copyrighted in Britain that it still did not qualify for a U.S. copyright.

This happened to every other opera Gilbert and Sullivan produced, even as they tried out more and more elaborate methods of acquiring U.S. copyright. For instance, they did not even PUBLISH the orchestration for The Mikado, figuring it was better to not make money off of sales of the sheet music than to allow the orchestration to just be stolen. Instead, they brought over an American musician and had him do a piano version of The Mikado and had him copyright THAT. That was probably the closest they ever came to actually securing a U.S. copyright, but even then, the courts said that the libretto was not copyrighted and that anyone could just do The Mikado with their own orchestrations (stating that the similar orchestrations by the defendant were non-infringing).

Sullivan wrote at the time of his dismay that “every miserable thieving penniless scoundrel in the States” could do a production of The Mikado.

Don’t get me wrong, though, Gilbert and Sullivan were making money in the United States with “official” productions of all of these works, and their “official” productions were of a much better quality than the knock-offs ( John Philip Sousa, for one, did a number of knock-offs, and he admitted that the original orchestrations were much better than his). It is just that they were not paid for the knock-offs, and it was the knock-offs that proliferated throughout the country in the late 1880s, when operas were some of the most popular forms of entertainment in the United States (for all classes of people).

Edward Samuels has an absolutely brilliant piece on the struggles of Gilbert and Sullivan with regards to copyright up here. It’s well worth reading.

OPERA LEGEND: The great opera singer Leo Slezak once convinced an audience of reporters that he had just received a compliment from Christoph Willibald Gluck.

STATUS: False

Leo Slezak is one of the most popular tenors in the history of opera.

Born in what is now the Czech Republic, Slezak rose to prominence in the late 19th Century before settling into a regular spot in the Vienna State Opera’s ensemble, where he became a bit of a folk hero in Germany and Austria.

In 1909, he began a three-year run at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. It is his time there that we discussing today.

Slezak was a humorous fellow and he was well known to take any opportunity to crack a joke.

A very popular story tells of a time that Slezak was performing Armide.

Armide was a very popular opera first written by Jean-Baptiste Lully in 1686. It tells the tale of a sorceress (Armide) who fights a Christian knight named Renaud and uses her spells to ensnare him, but before she uses her dagger to kill him, she instead falls in love with him (what are the odds?). She uses her spells to make him love her, but two of his fellow knights show up and save him.

The legendary opera composer Christoph Willibald Gluck wrote his own version of Armide that was performed in 1777.

So as the story goes, Slezak was performing Armide at the Met when, during the curtain calls, he would bring an old, bearded man out from backstage and Slezak would genuflect in front of him.

After the show, as you might imagine, reporters wanted to know who he was. So at the post-show “press conference” (using the term loosely), Slezak would tell them, “That was Gluck, the composer of Armide. He told me that never in his life has he heard his opera sung as magnificently as I have sung it tonight.”

The statement made all the newspapers the next day, all, of course, missing the fact that Christoph Gluck died in 1787, over a hundred years before the performance.

It’s a great story, but the only problem is this - Slezak never performed Armide at the Met.

There’s another version of the story that’s a lot less grandiose (in which Slezak convinces a fellow tenor during rehearsal that an old man in the theater is Gluck, with the follow-up being that when a famous composer later DID come by to congratulate Slezak, the other tenor doubted the composer was legit) that might be accurate, but the Met one is totally bogus, even though it’s a wonderful story.

Thanks to Ethan Mordden’s Opera Anecdotes for the lowdown on this tale.

OPERA LEGEND: Richard Wilbur, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry and the second United States Poet Laureate, actually wrote the lyrics to a number of songs from Candide, including “Glitter and Be Gay.”

STATUS: True

Richard Wilbur (born in New York City in 1921) is one of the very best poets of the second half of the 20th Century, and even in the 21st Century he has continued his same, steady delivery of excellent poetry.

Wilbur, like most of the men in his generation, fought in World War Two. Wilbur served in the Army during the war and saw quite a bit of action in Europe from 1943 until the end of the war. His war experiences clearly influenced his poetry dramatically, as much of his most celebrated early work concerned itself with putting order to a chaotic post-War world.

Wilbur’s work, while beautiful, is written in a traditional style, similar to the work of Robert Frost. During the second half of the 20th Century, however, a more non-formalist style became the more celebrated style of poetry among critics, like the confessional poets Slyvia Plath, Robert Lowell and John Berryman (all peers of Wilbur, but all three killed themselves decades ago while Wilbur is still alive today).

Because of this, Wilbur sometimes almost seems to be overlooked in poetry history, as his work does not leap out as much stylistically, but he has significant amounts of accolades. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1957 and 1989 and he was named the second Poet Laureate of the United States in 1987 (the position existed for many years before 1987, it just wasn’t CALLED that until 1986).

However, one facet of his career that really has been overlooked is he actually did song lyrics for an operetta!!

Leonard Bernstein’s Candide began as an idea by Lillian Hellman to do a straight play adaptation of Voltaire’s classic novella of the same name. Hellman figured that a good idea would be to intersperse music occasionally into the play and she approached Bernstein about the idea. Bernstein was so thrilled with the idea that he soon basically took over the project, and to help him with the lyrics, he approached a practical Who’s Who of famous writers to do the lyrics.

First James Agee, then Dorothy Parker, then John Latouche and finally, Richard Wilbur!

Wilbur actually provided the lyrics for the most famous song from the operetta, “Glitter and Be Gay.”

Here’s Kristin Chenoweth performing it…

Thanks to catchoth for the clip!

Okay, that’s it for this week!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments, particularly other themes for future grab bag Mondays! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com