The Ida Problem
Or: Why It’s OK To Improve Flawed Art Or Or: How To Perform Gilbert’s Worst Script In 2023
Princess Ida is a three-act opera with libretto by William Schwenck Gilbert and music by Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan. Connoisseurs of my previous output (all three articles; my prolificity knows no bounds (and you definitely shouldn’t read the third one)) will note that I have not necessarily been kind to Ida in my discussions. Indeed, I said in the ranking that “Ida is the only one which I have no interest at all in ever being involved with”. I don’t agree with that sentiment any more, and not only because I ended the sentence with a preposition. The score to Ida has a decent claim to being Sullivan’s best work in the entire theatrical medium, and several of Gilbert’s characters are richly-drawn and witty — one of my favourite jokes in the entire canon can be found in act I:
FLOR. My lord, we love our King.
His wise remarks are valued by his court
As precious stones.
GAMA. And for the self-same cause.
Like precious stones, his sensible remarks
Derive their value from their scarcity!
Chief among these excellent characters is the eponymous soprano, Princess Ida herself. Ida is, by some distance, the strongest female character in the entire Savoy repertoire; while most Gilbertian women are defined either as young objects for men to compete for (almost all sopranos) or old and bloodthirsty tyrants (almost all altos) or absolutely flat and featureless vehicles for exposition (the other altos). Exceptions are few and far between; two are Ruddigore’s Mad Margaret (https://open.spotify.com/track/51mlVx6VHKV1MZQ9Fq8eql?si=6c59febb7efd4c98) and The Grand Duke’s Julia Jellicoe (https://open.spotify.com/track/65vz8dRtqv8F11n6447fWn?si=8b3be1daf98d4642), both of whom are afforded moments of genuine depth and pathos, but Ida stands head and shoulders above both.
She is a strong leader, with a personal ideology and identity that guides her actions, but she isn’t a saint-figure; Gilbert revels in her flaws as much as her strengths. Think through Gilbert’s roles and observe how rarely a female character is allowed a strong emotion besides “sad that she isn’t with her favourite man” or “happy that she’s with her favourite man”. This isn’t to say that they never have agency, but almost always that agency is directed either for or against a romantic pairing. Ida, meanwhile, over the course of the second act of her opera, goes from leading, to searching inside for inspiration, to imperious, to deeply melancholy, to furious, to defiant, to struggling with love, to defiant again, all in five songs and a handful of dialogue excerpts. She’s a tour de force for both writer and performer.
I’m being awfully nice about this opera that I used to hate, aren’t I? The fact that this article is entitled “The Ida Problem” is probably enough of a clue that I’m getting at something here. Well, let’s get into it.
The Problem
What is the problem with Princess Ida? Quite simply, the text is misogynistic. I don’t mean this in the sense that it depicts misogyny, or that there are aspects of it that simply make me justifiably uncomfortable; I mean that the text itself acts as a vessel for misogynistic ideology and is not, in any sense, value-neutral on that score. This may sound as a contentious claim to people who will bluster that art exists in a realm beyond politics, but quite honestly I don’t know if any of them will have read past the word ‘prolificity’ anyway, so let’s just crack on without them.
Remember when I said that Ida is the strongest and deepest female character in the G&S canon? That’s true only for the first 95% of the show. I apologize that now I have to summarize the plot of an opera in as concise terms as possible (regular readers will know how easy it is for me to be concise). Hilarion, Cyril and Florian, the male trio that make up what amounts to a diffused protagonist in structural terms, arrive at Castle Adamant part-way through Act II. Their goal is to seduce Princess Ida, who has forsworn all men in favour of academia (Hilarion was betrothed to Ida in infancy). They do so by dressing up as women to invade the female-only space of the university and, though their cross-dressing scheme is swiftly uncovered, Ida falls deeply in love with Hilarion (naturally; he is a tenor, after all). When Hilarion’s father King Hildebrand arrives at the end of Act II, he demands that Ida marry Hilarion at once, lest Hildebrand’s armies destroy Castle Adamant and force the union. Act III, which is much shorter, sees Ida’s father Gama propose that Hilarion and his friends fight Ida’s brothers in a duel (can a duel have six participants? a huel?) to determine whether Ida will have to marry Hilarion and give up her dreams of academia or whether she will be left in peace. Ida hates this plan — “Insult on insult’s head! Are we a stake / for fighting men?” — but reluctantly acquiesces, as she lacks the military power to repel Hildebrand alone. Hilarion triumphs and Ida is bound to marry him; she complains bitterly, but Hildebrand points out that feminism is doomed because women need men to procreate. I’m not joking.
HILD. But pray reflect –
If you enlist all women in your cause,
And make them all abjure tyrannic Man,
The obvious question then arises, ‘How
Is this Posterity to be provided?’
The worst is yet to come. Ida’s response to this? Ida, whom we’ve seen as a leader, a philosopher, an orator?
PRIN. I never thought of that!
Everybody sings a cheerful refrain about love, and Ida retires to Hilarion’s domicile to, presumably, be personified and conjugally matrimonified. What a happy ending. This is character assassination of the highest order; Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Princess Ida With Facts And Logic. In the Act II Song “A Lady Fair, Of Lineage High”, Ida is demonstrated to hold an explicitly anti-male philosophy:
For the Maiden fair,
whom the monkey crav’d,
Was a radiant Being,
With a brain farseeing
While Darwinian Man, though well-behav’d,
At best is only a monkey shav’d!
This is a character flaw that she, as a major character, might reasonably be expected to overcome in the pursuit of a happy ending — although, in comedy, terrible people remaining terrible is entirely valid, Ida is among Gilbert’s most serious works — but the plot already allows for her to do so purely through her love for Hilarion. Gilbert and Sullivan dearly love parodying Wagner, after all, and redemption through love is a key aspect of any Wagnerian ending. The real insult here is forcing her to leave her beloved university. Ida’s first aria is a masterpiece from Sullivan, an extremely simple tune that nevertheless through orchestration and shading constitutes one of his finest single achievements for the female voice. I can’t imagine any remotely competent performance of the song getting anything less than rapturous applause — the audience is guaranteed to remember it as a defining moment for her — and what we learn about Ida from it is that she loves learning, and loves knowledge, and loves passing both on to others.
RECITATIVE and ARIA — PRINCESS.
Minerva! Minerva! Oh, hear me!
Oh, goddess wise
That lovest light
Endow with sight
Their unillumined eyes.
At this my call,
A fervent few
Have come to woo
The rays that from thee fall.
Let fervent words and fervent thoughts be mine,
That I may lead them to thy sacred shrine!
https://open.spotify.com/track/6GrEnIVntJhp5sAqvzQ2bX?si=8f2639d080be497d
Returning her to domesticity as a wedded wife is a truly vicious attack on female agency in this opera; while other female characters are permitted to choose whether they stay at the university, Ida is forced through authorial fiat “I never thought of that” cock-and-bull horseshit to give up on her strongest character trait in order to become what every Gilbertian woman becomes eventually; a wife. This is what I mean when I say that the text does not merely portray misogyny but instead acts as a vessel for misogynistic ideology. In the closing minutes of the opera, Ida is not just wedded, but depersonalized; Gilbert’s view that Ida’s independence is a problem to be solved wins the fight for the ending, even over her own establishing character trait. (Purists here will point out that Cyril invites Ida to leave Hilarion if she finds him wearying; this does not help. They are fictional characters. They cease to exist when the curtain comes down). The thing is, this wouldn’t taste so bitter if Ida weren’t already such a nuanced character. All the Savoy operas are misogynistic in how they treat women in general, as wives-to-be; why am I so upset that Ida is the same?
Because Gilbert never got me invested in the agency and power of Rose Fucking Maybud, that’s why!
The Solution
The ending is the problem. Thus, any real reckoning with that problem must change an aspect of the ending. In this case, since the problem is the authorial seizure of Ida’s agency through her out-of-character “I never thought of that!”, the most elegant solution is to remove the necessity of that moment altogether. Have Ida’s brothers win the duel!
Note here that it’s absolutely fine that Ida falls in love with Hilarion — indeed, as mentioned earlier, it’s almost necessary for her to overcome her main character flaw, that being her belief that men are subhuman. Ida and Hilarion can (and, I believe, should) end up as a couple at the end of the show. The grand finale is a song extolling the virtues of love, so it might seem a trifle odd if that were to be retained without the principal match-up taking place. No, this is why you have Ida’s brothers win the duel; it allows for an almost identical ending, but with Ida’s agency kept intact and her strength and depth as a character retained. Hildebrand can retire to Castle Hildebrand having failed in his primary aim, but Ida, having overcome her hatred of men through her love for Hilarion, can marry him while remaining at her university. He stays with her, not the other way around. I don’t think it damages Hilarion’s character too much to do this — he’s established in act I as more of a hopeless romantic than a fighter:
HIL. Expressive glances
Shall be our lances,
And pops of Sillery
Our light artillery.
We’ll storm their bowers
With scented showers
Of fairest flowers
That we can buy!
Moreover, Ida’s brothers are explicitly stated to be fine warriors (and, indeed, to have literally nothing else going on up there):
SONG — ARAC.
We are warriors three,
Sons of Gama, Rex,
Like most sons are we,
Masculine in sex.
ALL THREE. Yes, yes, yes,
Masculine in sex.
ARAC. Politics we bar,
They are not our bent;
On the whole we are
Not intelligent.
ALL THREE. No, no, no,
Not intelligent.
ARAC. But with doughty heart,
And with trusty blade
We can play our part –
Fighting is our trade.
-so clearly it’s not out of character for Hilarion et al to lose a fight to the warriors three. Losing the fight and having to, in an ideological sense, submit to a woman would also resolve Hilarion et al’s serious misogyny problem — the musically excellent trio “Gently, gently, evidently” is dedicated to ridiculing women’s education as a concept and in the original text this goes unanswered (of course, because Gilbert also saw women’s education as a natural focus for ridicule). The only serious character arc it upsets is that of Lady Blanche, who chafes under Ida’s leadership and, at the end, is allowed to take over the university in the original text. I think this is a sacrifice worth making, however; Lady Blanche is not a terribly compelling character anyway. Her one aria, “Come, mighty must” is quite often cut from the opera after being found guilty of sucking shit, and most of her dialogue consists of references to an Abstract Philosophy that even Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Volkswagen Hegel would find impenetrably unfunny.
While it’s a shame to ruin somebody’s arc, I’d much rather ruin Blanche than ruin Ida, as the original text does. The beauty of this solution is that almost nothing has to change; less than a page of dialogue, much of which can be retained anyway. One could even choose to have Ida’s side win the battle, but Ida marry Hilarion and take something of an academic sabbatical; this line in the original text supports this, from a certain point of view:
PRIN. “We will walk this world
Yoked in all exercise of noble end!
And so through those dark gates across the wild
That no one knows!”
This may be arrogant of me, but I do genuinely think that this version of the story is stronger for these changes. We must not forget that the basic artistic unit in opera, and in theatre in general, is not the script, but the performance, and each performance is a new artistic object to be judged and critiqued at the moment of performance. With this in mind, the Ida that I propose — almost identical to the original — is a stronger artwork at the point of performance in 2023 than the original text can be. (The other change that I’d make would be to add the Ida segment of Belaye’s solo from Pineapple Poll [https://open.spotify.com/track/4yuvDx1OEY4OXGwecmsmvx?si=dfe56ab06ef84620] onto the end of the overture — Ida’s overture is uncharacteristically short and weak, consisting of only two tunes and little playfulness, and letting it finish with a boisterous Allegro rather than the touching but weak sloboe tune sets the audience up for a better time).
This leads us to the important question: is it actually OK for us to do this? Aren’t we sullying the original intention by imposing modern ideology onto a pre-existing work (and I won’t beat around the bush, that’s exactly what I’m doing. All text is suffused with ideology, and pretending it isn’t there is the best way to end up an artistic slave to dead men)? Can we really consider ourselves to have the right to change The Work that is Princess Ida?
Yes. Now leave me alone.
The Problems With The Solution
The obvious problem with rewrites in Gilbert is that, well, you have to rewrite Gilbert, and to my continuing annoyance, Gilbert was actually really quite a good writer. You can get away with it here and there — I’ve done lyric rewrites for the odd line in almost every G&S show I’ve been a part of, either to make topical jokes or simply to remove things that I find too distasteful even for Victorian opera (no, William, I’m not calling the residents of the Pacific island “half-clothed barbarians”, no matter how many times you put it in the script). However, rewriting in such a way as to change the actual direction of the plot is a different beast entirely; Gilbert was adept at masking simple or even facile endings with a wink in the cheek and a tongue in the eye (Ed. Check this metaphor) in a way that is difficult to imitate. Compounding the problem is the language of Ida itself; unlike all the other operas he wrote with Sullivan, Gilbert set Ida in iambic pentametric blank verse. This isn’t to say that the style is entirely inimitable — Gilbert wasn’t Shakespeare, after all — but it compounds the difficulty when the rewrite must take place not in prose but in relatively sophisticated poetry. There isn’t really a way around this — I am blessed in the Oxford University society to have access to people who are adept enough to pull this off (every English student is, at the least, eminently capable of knocking out a few lines of iambic pentameter if they have to) but not every society will be able to do this.
There’s another big problem with Ida that I don’t propose to fix at all, merely to draw attention to so discerning directors can take it under advisement; it’s a little bit transphobic, let’s be honest. I’m sorry, the last paragraph isn’t funny, it’s just me and my continued inability to live harmoniously in the world as a gender morlock. It’s all dogwhistles, none of them intentional — I shouldn’t imagine that Gilbert had even the slightest ability to conceptualize modern transgenderism — I don’t want to give the impression that there’s any moment in the opera where the lead tenor walks to the front of the stage and says “I stand with UKIP and J.K. Rowling against the child-grooming transsexual menace” (although somebody please do that staging, I would find that hilarious).
Rather, it’s a matter of framing. The basic thrust of act II is men dressing as women to invade a women’s space to engage in nefarious romance; you may recognize this as the same basic thrust as every single transphobic dogwhistle in the media today. This isn’t even Ida’s fault; after all, Gilbert thinks that Hilarion & co. are the Good Guys, and the operatic tradition of the Wholesome Crossdresser is not one that in the way of which I would ever wish to stand. (How’s that for a horrible sentence structured entirely to avoid ending with a preposition)? Rather, I would merely ask that directors, if they can, involve a trans person (ideally a woman) in their production who can point out when a piece of staging crosses a line from good fun into something that ruins our day; it’s easy to slip into a mindset that doing things in the spirit of humour is a good enough reason for anything. But trannies like to go to the opera too, and we’re human; don’t we deserve a little break from the opinion column slanders? Believe you me, nobody likes a good transphobic joke more than a trans person, but it has to be a good transphobic joke, and it has to feel like it’s got heart behind it.
A jab from a friend, deployed poorly, isn’t better than a brick from the mob.
Even in 2023, Princess Ida is worth putting on — the music alone makes it a jewel worth treasuring — so it’s well within the ability of any company to put it on in a way that means everyone leaves having had a lovely evening.
Except G&S text purists, of course. They can shut up, or fuck off, preferably both, in either order.
-Madeleine Lay, 2023