Rodwell
Jack Sheppard
Simon Butteriss, Charli Baptie, Peter Benedict, Emily Vine, Daniel Huttlestone (soloists); Stephen Higgins (piano)
Retrospect Opera RO010 68:01 mins
Although it was a popular genre in its 19th-century heyday, the melodrama is sadly now pretty much forgotten.
As David Chandler’s notes accompanying this release inform us, this example was one of the most famous. It is based on the story of real-life thief and multiple prison escapee Jack Sheppard (born in 1702, and eventually executed in 1724), and his nemesis, ‘thief-taker’ Jonathan Wild – their tale was turned into a novel by Harrison Ainsworth, from where this piece also takes it lead.
First staged at the Adelphi Theatre in 1839, it held the boards for 18 years until effectively banned, presumably due to its perceived bad influence on public morals: because Sheppard (a trouser-role, here characterfully delivered by Charli Baptie) is undoubtedly the hero, and Wild the dastardly villain.
Sharing some territory with Oliver Twist (1838), the piece is set among the criminal classes and concerns their adventures and reverses and their fictitious connections to the highborn.
The original was a long piece – perhaps as much as four hours – here reduced to manageable proportions by means of cuts and a narrator, a role taken by national treasure Simon Butteriss, who also assumes another five parts, including that of Wild himself.
The play was the work of one John Baldwin Buckstone, the score by G. Herbert Rodwell (1800-52). There’s not a great deal of music, just a handful of songs – some of them drawing on pre-existing melodies and apparently long popular – plus some incidental music drawn by musicologist Valerie Langford from surviving fragments of another of Rodwell’s operatic successes, The Flying Dutchman.
Musically, the result is no great shakes but the whole thing fills up an hour or so very nicely as an example of a once hugely popular entertainment. George Hall