page_title: The Contrabandista
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: The Contrabandista / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Saint George's Hall, Langham Place. The London Illustrated News, 29 June, 1867. This engraving is out of copyright
context_page_description: The Contrabandista, or The Law of the Ladrones, is a two-act comic opera by Arthur Sullivan and F. C. Burnand. It premiered at St. George's Hall, in London, on 18 December 1867 under the management of Thomas German Reed, for a run of 72 performances. There were brief revivals in Manchester in 1874 and America in 1880. In 1894, it was revised into a new opera, The Chieftain, with a completely different second act.
  The piece was the first of Sullivan's full-length operas that was produced. Although it was not a great success, it exhibits many of the qualities and techniques that Sullivan would employ in composing his twenty further comic operas, including the famous series of fourteen Gilbert and Sullivan operas produced between 1871 and 1896.
context_section_description: In 1866, F. C. Burnand and Arthur Sullivan, then 24 years old, wrote the one-act comic opera Cox and Box for a private performance at Moray Lodge, where a group of friends called the "Moray Minstrels" gathered regularly.  The success of the performance led to productions for charity at the Adelphi Theatre, at Thomas German Reed's Gallery of Illustration (where it would enjoy a long run in 1869), and elsewhere.  Burnand had been a pioneer in Britain in the 1860s by collaborating on the creation of comic operas with original scores similar to Jacques Offenbach's highly successful French operettas, which had been a sensation in Paris beginning in the 1850s but were just becoming known in London.  This was a departure from the burlesque style of musical theatre that was then popular in Britain, which used musical scores compiled from existing operas, popular songs, music hall and classical music.
  Buoyed by the success of Cox and Box, Reed commissioned a two-act opera from Burnand, The Contrabandista, with original music by Sullivan, to open his new St George's Opera House, together with adaptations of two short Offenbach pieces, Ba-ta-clan (as Ching-Chow-Hi) and La Chatte métamorphosée en femme (as Puss in Petticoats). This opera did not enjoy its predecessor's popularity, and there was no suggestion of any further Burnand–Sullivan collaborations.  The Contrabandista was Sullivan's first produced full-length opera.  Although it was not a great success, it initially received some favourable notices.  The Musical Times wrote: "The excellent vein of humour so apparent in [Cox and Box], as well as in the more important Contrabandista, justifies us in the hope that Mr. Sullivan may give us, at no distant date, a real comic opera of native manufacture." Sullivan's next operatic effort did not come until Thespis, in 1871, with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert, which was followed by another 13 collaborations between Gilbert and Sullivan.  The Contrabandista was revived in Manchester in 1874 and was given a production in America in 1880. 
  In 1894, when Richard D'Oyly Carte needed a successor to fill the Savoy Theatre after the closing of Gilbert and Sullivan's Utopia Limited, he commissioned Burnand and Sullivan to revise The Contrabandista.  The result was The Chieftain, consisting of a slightly revised and expanded first act and a new second act.  It was not successful, and The Chieftain closed after just three months.
  The Contrabandista was hardly ever performed in the 20th century.  The Comic Opera Guild in the US and Fulham Light Operatic Society in the UK each produced the piece in 1972.  A professional concert of the opera was given in 2002 at Cheltenham, England, at the Sir Arthur Sullivan Society Festival, with professional soloists and the Cotswold Savoyards.  The opera has been seen at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival, most recently in 2012 in an updated staging by Glitter & Twisted Theatre Company, which also presented it in Cheltenham.  A professional recording by Hyperion Records in 2004 revived some interest in the work.  Reviewing the 2004 Hyperion recording, Raymond Walker wrote: "Despite a mundane book about Spanish brigands by Frances Burnand (who would later become Editor of Punch) there are good musical ideas in The Contrabandista.  These anticipate the more mature Sullivan of Gilbert & Sullivan fame. In The Contrabandista, Sullivan attempts a good variety of musical styles.  At times these are more reminiscent of Offenbach than the German and Italian operatic masters that Sullivan is likened to."  Sullivan repeated several of the musical ideas that give The Contrabandista a Spanish flavour many years later in The Gondoliers (1888).
caption: St George's Hall in 1867
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