Opera Books
THE OPERA
EDITED BY
ALBERT HILLERY BERGH
VOLUME IV.
1909
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Buck.
Dudley Buck was born
at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1839. Up to his sixteenth year he had
received no formal instruction in music, but set to work to educate
himself in the musical profession. In his junior year at Trinity College,
Hartford, he persuaded his parents to permit him to devote himself to
music. He studied in Germany and Paris, and on his return to America, in
1862, became an organist in his native city and a teacher of music. He
died Oct. 6, 1909.
Buck has composed a large number of pieces for the piano and the
voice, and in 1880 produced in New York an opera with the typically
American subject of the Mormon settlement at Deseret.
Comic opera in three
acts by Dudley Buck. Libretto by W. A. Croffut.
Characters: Rosamond; Arabella; Sally, wife No. 1; Major Clemm;
Joseph Jessup; Elder Scram; Lieutenant Montgomery; Setting Hen; Corporal
Riley.
Place, Utah. Time, the Nineteenth Century. First produced at New
York in 1880.
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Rosamond, a Mormon girl, is in love with Major Clemm, a United
States officer stationed at Deseret. She is promised by her father to
Elder Scram as his twenty-fifth wife. Joseph Jessup, an Indian agent at
Peseret, has discovered that Scram’s wife No. 1 is an old sweetheart of
his, and proposes to elope with her. Rosamond determines to run away
with Clemm, which she succeeds in doing after divers mishaps.
Jessup sends a note to wife No. 1, appointing an hour and a place
for their meeting; but Arabella, the daughter of the regiment, to whom
its delivery is intrusted, opens it, and seeing its import makes
twenty-four copies, sends them to all the wives, and the entire lot
elope with Jessup when he comes to serenade No. 1 and carry her off.
Rosamond and Clemm are happily settled, but Jessup is slaughtered
“by the savages” before he gets away very far with his stage full of
wives, and the latter, returning to get a cold reception, determine to
go on a lecturing tour.
Last updated April 20, 2007