Coming after the huge success of The Mikado, it was almost inevitable that the premiere of
Gilbert and
Sullivan's Ruddigore would fall short of the original audience's elevated expectations. It has never taken a place as one of the public's favorite
Gilbert and
Sullivan operettas, perhaps because of an ending that isn't fully realized. In spite of
Gilbert's unusually scattered plot elements, Ruddigore is one of
Sullivan's most sophisticated and varied scores. Its highlights include the memorably sinister "When the night wind howls," the wonderfully silly "I once was a very abandoned person," and the self-referentially mocking patter song "My eyes are fully open to my awful situation," a parody of a form that the pair had perfected and for which they were notorious, which concludes with the line "This particularly rapid, unintelligible patter isn't generally heard, and if is, it doesn't matter." The score is one of their most textually problematic; it went though various revisions, and it wasn't until 2000 that an authoritative scholarly edition was published. This lively reading from the 1962 Glyndebourne Festival, conducted by
Malcolm Sargent, uses the standard
D'Oyly Carte version available at the time, including a (quite good) medley overture arranged by
Geoffrey Toye. (
Sullivan had completed the score so close to the deadline for the premiere that he never got around to writing an overture himself.)