Operas Every Child Should Know: Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous MasterpiecesBacon, Mary Schell Hoke
History
Operas Every Child Should Know: Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces
Bacon, Mary Schell Hoke
Music -- History and criticism -- Juvenile literature; Operas -- Stories, plots, etc.
"A plump and pleasing person!" At this blessed minute the daughter
Josephine, who does not love in the right place, and who is beloved
from all quarters at once, wanders upon the deck with a basket of
flowers in her hand. Then she begins to sing very distractedly about
loving the wrong man, and that "hope is dead," and several other
pitiable things, which are very funny. The Captain, her father, is
watching her, and presently he admonishes her to look her best, and
to stop sighing all over the ship--at least till her high-born suitor,
Sir Joseph Porter, shall have made his expected visit.
"You must look your best to-day, Josephine, because the Admiral is
coming on board to ask your hand in marriage." At this Josephine
nearly drops into the sea.
"Father, I esteem, I reverence Sir Joseph but alas I do not love him.
I have the bad taste instead to love a lowly sailor on board your own
ship. But I shall stifle my love. He shall never know it though I
carry it to the tomb."
"That is precisely the spirit I should expect to behold in my
daughter, my dear, and now take Sir Joseph's picture and study it
well. I see his barge approaching. If you gaze upon the pictured noble
brow of the Admiral, I think it quite likely that you will have time
to fall madly in love with him before he can throw a leg over the
rail, my darling. Anyway, do your best at it."
"My own, thoughtful father," Josephine murmurs while a song of Sir
Joseph's sailors is heard approaching nearer and nearer. Then the crew
of H.M.S. _Pinafore_ take up the shout, and sing a rousing welcome to
Sir Joseph and all his party. Almost immediately Sir Joseph and his
numerous company of sisters and cousins and aunts prance upon the
shining deck. They have a gorgeous time of it.
"Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!" the Captain and his crew cry, and then Sir
Joseph informs everybody of his greatness in this song:
[Music:
I am the monarch of the sea,
The ruler of the Queen's Navee,
Whose praise Great Britain loudly chants;
COUSIN HEBE.
And we are his Sisters and his Cousins and his Aunts;
His Sisters and his Cousins and his Aunts!]
When at anchor here I ride,
My bosom swells with pride,
And I snap my fingers at the foeman's taunts--
The chorus assures everybody that
So do his sisters and his cousins and his aunts.
In short, while we learn from Sir Joseph that he is a tremendous
fellow, we also learn, from his sisters and his cousins and his aunts,
that they are whatever he is. Among other things he tells precisely
how he came to be so great, and gives what is presumably a recipe for
similar greatness:
When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy to an attorney's firm.
I cleaned the window and I swept the floor,
And I polished up the handle of the big front door.
I polished up the handle so carefullee,
That now I am the ruler of the Queen's Navee.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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