Hello, from out of a distant past...
I started reading things here again after a passage of some years, and thought to ask about Frederick Corder's Nordisa (1887), the one opera commissioned by the Carl Rosa company that came close to being a hit (they regularly performed it until Rosa's death in 1889, then dropped it). Has anyone here in the past written about it, so I can look through the archives?
My interest stems from a conference in Newcastle I attended two years ago which took place in the 1869 Tyne Theatre and Opera House, a Victorian wonder which still has all its original stage machinery in working order. I was called upon at very short notice to play the opera's 2nd act finale, which culminates in an avalanche, in order to demonstrate the theatre's "thunder run". A thunder run is an inclined semi-enclosed chute loaded with cannonballs which runs down across two of a theatre's rear walls to simulate thunder (one in the Theatre Royal, Bristol, runs along three walls). In "semi-enclosed" I mean that it is basically open but with iron hoops set across the chute at intervals to prevent the cannonballs flying loose. Unfortunately, at one performance at the Tyne Theatre of Nordisa by the Carl Rosa a cannonball escaped the chute at high velocity and killed a stagehand, whose spirit is now supposedly the theatre's ghost.
Despite the sad history of the opera in Newcastle, I was intrigued by the music - it seemed very attractive and dramatic - so I sought out a vocal score of the whole opera. The entirety is indeed very attractive in my opinion, and the libretto (by Corder himself) more sensible than many English 19th-century operas. (Corder and his wife had done the earliest English translations of the Ring, so he had a nodding acquaintance in a literary sense of Wagnerian dramaturgy.) It is still something of a number opera with a full overture, though Corder divides the three acts into "scenes" rather than individual pieces, and although there is dialogue it is minimal (certainly in the context of English Romantic opera). It may rank with MacCunn's Jeanie Deans and Stanford's Shamus O'Brien as a late-Victorian opera worthy of staging, certainly of recording as the Stanford has been.
There's very little Corder left either printed or in MS, unfortunately. Corder had two children, Dorothy (Dolly) and Paul, and he taught Paul composition at the RAM. Paul became a professor of composition himself in 1907, but he and Dolly moved to Looe Island, Cornwall, in 1921, while their father remained in London. (The island was purchased by selling off Frederick's collection of rare first editions.) I don't know why this happened, but it may have been for Paul's health. It's a pretty isolated place, and the whole business seems rather odd. Frederick Corder married his second wife in 1927 and died in 1932 in London; Paul died in 1942, and evidently Dolly was so distraught at Paul's death she burnt all the manuscripts she had of both of them. (Dolly lived into her nineties.)
The MS full score of Nordisa still survives at the RAM, though, along with a few other works. (Corder wrote a concerto for cornet, for example, but only the second movement is extant.) I have a PDF of the vocal score, which was published by Forsyth Brothers in Manchester. Some of you may know Corder's Prospero overture, which was published and Hyperion recorded it with David Lloyd-Jones conducting. I find Prospero rather lovely and effective, and it and Nordisa show Corder was a fluent melodist. I haven't pursued this much, but I wonder if others have?
The manuscript full score of Nordisa has been digitized and added into Internet Archive in 2023. A pity that so many of this composer's works were destroyed!
Nordisa (full score digitization) (https://archive.org/details/GB-Lam_MS3683/page/n9/mode/2up)