The comic operas of John Philip Sousa, edited (lightly redacted and reconstructed) and lightly annotated by Arthur O’Dwyer. If there’s no link for a particular operetta below, it means that either I’m having trouble finding the book, or I’ve been too lazy to go look for it thus far. If you can help, please send me an email!
Eventually, if I collect a critical mass of these operettas, I will be very interested in publishing a book containing my own full annotations of all of them — annotations explaining why a vinaigrette might contain ammonium carbonate (The Queen of Hearts), what kind of person might be described as “veally” (The Smugglers), what kind of dance is the Aragonese Jota (The Wolf), why 2:05¼ was a good “gait” for a revolution (El Capitan), why one’s neighbors might drink Moxie to deal with late-night trumpet practice (The Free Lance), and so on — in the style of Isaac Asimov’s Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan. If you have the publishing connections to make that happen, please again send me an email.
See also “List of operettas by John Philip Sousa” on Wikipedia, and the plot summaries in Paul E. Bierley’s The Works of John Philip Sousa (1984).
With Sousa, different researchers have different interests, and some aspects of these operettas are “more lost” than others:
Note (and I myself likely haven’t properly internalized) that these works don’t necessarily have any “correct” or even “canonical” form. Tracey Chessum wrote in 2011:
Individuals producing and performing Sousa’s comic operas around the turn of the 20th century continually re-wrote his texts — swapping songs from previous operas by Sousa and other composers, including dialogue from other shows and other poetic interpolations, often until nothing but Sousa’s name survived [...] This constant re-writing made his scripts extremely difficult to return to any definitive form. As we have seen from the transcription, a good portion of the music contained within The Charlatan’s piano/vocal score was no longer in use by the time the show was produced in London. However, evidence suggests that this was not an anomaly. There was no definitive form of the operettas of this time period — they were meant to be constantly in flux, changing with audience taste, performer and creator agendas, and national and/or regional sentiments.
The Comic Opera Guild in Ann Arbor, Michigan, offers audio recordings of El Capitan, The Bride-Elect, The Charlatan, Chris and the Wonderful Lamp, and The Free Lance, all with dialogue reconstructed and/or edited by Tom Petiet.
Jerrold Fisher and William Martin (both now deceased, as far as I can tell), operating as Lyric Theatre International, ”restored, edited, and elaborated“ at least Désirée, El Capitan, The Charlatan, Chris and the Wonderful Lamp, and The Glass-Blowers; although it is unclear to me how much of Martin’s libretto in each case would have been mere editing and how much elaboration. As a reader, not a producer, the former interests me and the latter does not. (The latter would also be copyright-encumbered.) See this passage from “Performances of Note,” The Sonneck Society for American Music Bulletin 24:1 (Spring 1998), page 15, penned by Phyllis Danner—
And this from Tracey Chessum in 2011:Under the direction of Maestro Ian Hobson, the Sinfonia da Camera at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) presented the premiere of a newly-restored concert version of John Philip Sousa’s most famous operetta, El Capitan, on Saturday, 27 September [1997] at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Lyric Theatre International dramatist Dr. William A. Martin, Jr. and musicologist Dr. Jerrold Fisher, who recently completed the restoration, served as masters of ceremonies for the event along with Phyllis Danner, archivist for the Sousa Archives for Band Research at UIUC.
During a pre-concert lecture, Danner provided an overview of the UIUC Sousa Collection and Martin and Fisher discussed their work over the past 13 years toward restoration of El Capitan (1895), as well as their reconstruction of Sousa’s first operetta Desiree (1883), and of his Chris and the Wonderful Lamp (1899). Although the libretto has been lost, Martin and Fisher reconstructed the story line by consulting critical reviews of the day, stage directions, and other primary resources, including those held by the Sousa Archives for Band Research at UIUC. A compact disc recording of the 27 September performance will be available commercially in 1998. Fisher and Martin have recently released an AMDEC CD of a performance of Desiree by the Pocono Pops Orchestra and Chorus. [...]
A “playable” reconstruction of the libretto [of The Charlatan] was done in the 1980s by musicologists William Martin and Jerrold Fisher, in conjunction with the Sousa family. These have not been commercially published, but there is a copy of this finished libretto at the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music at the University of Illinois. The Martin/Fisher libretto is based around the original published piano/vocal score, and does not take into account any of the departures from the original material from the New York, Touring, or London production runs. Additionally, as with many reconstructions, Martin and Fisher were forced to make choices of their own when sufficient information was not available to fill in the comedic details, or to make the work accessible to modern audiences. I have compared the London production libretto to the reconstructed libretto, and while the book and dialogue are nearly identical, the reconstructed libretto is far more polished. Where the London script often shortens situational comic moments to BUS (or comic BUSiness), the polished [Martin & Fisher] score flushes them out.
Martin and Fisher’s Glass-Blowers was staged by director Christopher Alden in 2000 and 2002. Read a review of the 2002 production.
Theatre Arts Press (TAP) has published a “Historical Libretto Series” including three Sousa operettas: The Charlatan (2015, ISBN 1522947361), El Capitan (2021, ISBN 979-8595589260), and Chris and the Wonderful Lamp (2021, ISBN 979-8596398564). I find their typography and spellchecking to be extremely poor, and they don’t indicate their sources. I’ve since heard from TAP that their El Capitan was transcribed from one of the Harry Ransom Center’s sources below. Its lyrics vary somewhat from both Jorgensen and the piano/vocal score. TAP’s Charlatan is essentially identical to Tracey Chessum’s London version.
According to a 2018 inventory, the United States Marine Band Library and Archives’ collection of John Philip Sousa papers purport to contain:
The Paul Bierley papers (series 12/9/94) at the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music (SACAM) at UIUC contain:
The John Philip Sousa papers (series 12/9/51) at SACAM/UIUC purport to contain:
The Charles Klein collection (RLIN number TXRC03-A20) at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas–Austin purports to contain: