Iolanthe, or The Peer and the Peri
Iolanthe, or The Peer and the Peri (1882),English operetta with libretto by William S. Gilbert and music by Arthur Sullivan. The story is based loosely on one of Gilbert's Bab Ballads (1869), ‘The Fairy Curate’. By the late 19th century, the fairy bride motif beloved of the romantics had become a cliché and, for Gilbert, an object of parody. Iolanthe, a fairy (in Persian, ‘peri’), has been banished by the Fairy Queen for marrying a mortal—a crime which ‘strikes at the root of the entire fairy system’. Her son Strephon is ‘a fairy down to the waist—but his legs are mortal’. In the end, Iolanthe is reunited with her husband, now Lord Chancellor, while the entire House of Peers marry fairy brides as well and are magically transformed into a ‘House of Peris’. The operetta hints slyly at a family relationship between Wagner's Ring and the ‘fairy system’; the chorus of fairies are likened musically to...
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