The plot takes us onto now familiar ground with regard to tournaments and disguised champions. The title character, who has been disowned by his old-fashioned Saxon father for falling in love with his father's ward, Rowena, returns from the Third Crusade disguised as an unknown pilgrim. He defeats the Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert -- the opera's Baddie -- in a tournament. The latter is a sore loser and not only abducts Rowena but also Rebecca, who is overtly called a "Jewess" in the libretto. King Richard I (= "the Lion-Hearted") teams up with Friar Tuck and the other characters from Robin Hood to storm Brian's castle, but Rebecca is recaptured by the cruel and lecherous Templar, who now accuses her of witchcraft: She will be burnt to death at the stake unless someone comes forth to be her champion. Of course Ivanhoe, who if he is thinking "it's déjà vu over again," keeps it to himself, comes forth to again fight Brian, and this time he succeeds in killing him. The opera ends with the king's command that the other Templars -- who are Normans and therefore natural opponents of the Saxons even if they were to behave themselves - be exiled from his land.
The score is an intriguing mixture of very "English music" (in the sense wonderfully explored in a book of that name, by Peter Ackroyd), including a marvelous drinking song, "Ho! Jolly Jenkin"; a rather mysterious winding Orientalism that Sullivan associated with Jewishness of the character Rebecca; and a wonderfully nasty oiliness in his scoring for the villainous Templar's attempted seduction of her. In its not so subtle way, the opera celebrates both earlier nationalistic folk traditions of England and the imperialistic morality of the late 19th-century England (something not present to that degree in Scott's novel, published two decades before Victoria took the throne) of Sullivan's time. Thankfully a modern recording of this opera exists - and its libretto (by Julian Sturgis), at the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive -- so that we can savor just how well-written and eminently Victorian this forgotten opera of the Crusades really is...and maybe even go back to the well-written, avoided if not forgotten novel that inspired it.
