Home » Music » Opera » A Source of Innocent Merriment: The Mikado

A Source of Innocent Merriment: The Mikado

©

For months after the opening of Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy, people asked me whether the film was an accurate account of the making of The Mikado...and the answer was yes, to a mindboggling degree. While his idea for a story about a Japanese executioner had truly resulted from W.S. Gilbert's close call with a falling Japanese sword, surely he had long been aware that the British Empire was fascinated by Japan.

For centuries, the tiny island had closed its doors to the West. When they were prised open in 1853, 32 years before the operetta's premiere – how this was accomplished is colorfully examined in Sondheim's Pacific Overtures –- merchant ships scurried east to bring home goods that were uniquely "made in Japan." At first, in England, these imports were primarily embraced by the Aesthetic Movement, a trend parodied by Gilbert in his 1881 Patience. By 1884, British interest in Japanese life and products had become so widespread that an exhibit of five blocks of Japanese-style streets, populated by some 100 Japanese citizens, was built in Knightsbridge, London. This is where Gilbert bought the fateful sword.

Sullivan approached A.B. Mitford, who had been in a British envoy to Japan, regarding suitable music. However, his score remains resolutely Western, and indeed English, from a play on the song "A Fine Old English Gentleman" when Ko-Ko enters, to a madrigal, to even a little of Bach’s Fugue in G minor during "My object all sublime." Likewise, Gilbert's lyrics incorporate such traditional folk phrases as "derry down derry" and "tra-la-la." Only two pieces in The Mikado are in Japanese: the phrase "O ni! Bikkuri shakkuri to!" at the end of Act I (which Ian Bradley, editor of The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan, translates to "surprise, with a hiccup") and the "Miya sama" chorus, a genuine Japanese anthem.

Score aside, the original D'Oyly Carte production strove to be as authentically Japanese as possible. As shown in Topsy-Turvy, Gilbert did engage a woman from the Knightsbridge village to teach the female singers how to bow, giggle, and use their fans; and the entire cast was coached in the correct way to move in kimonos. Liberty of London, which had led the field in textiles during the Aesthetes' hunger for Japanese goods, supplied the theater with the fabrics for sets and costumes, even sending its own special envoy to Japan to make the selection. As a result, some the male performers wore genuine silk garments purchased in Japan, or expert reproductions of them (armor had been considered, but the real thing was found to be too heavy...and too small). The first Katisha wore a 200-year-old Japanese robe. Unfortunately, critics of the time did not appreciate such touches, complaining that the ladies looked like bolsters, that they were shaped too much like the men (remember, this was the era of corsets and bustles). However, the D'Oyly Carte company stood by such authenticity...and in fact continued to use some of the original costumes right up through the early 1980s.