WILLIAM T. PRICE

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William Thompson Price, dramatic critic, creator of playwrights, was born near Louisville, Kentucky, December 17, 1846. He was educated in the private schools of Louisville, but the Civil War proved more interesting than text-books, so he ran away with Colonel E. P. Clay, whom he left, in turn, for John H. Morgan, and Generals Forrest and Wheeler. He was finally captured and imprisoned but he, of course, escaped. After the war Mr. Price went to Germany and studied for three years at the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin. From 1875 to 1880 he was dramatic critic for the Louisville Courier-Journal; and the following five years he devoted to editorial work for various newspapers, and to collecting material for his enormous biography of the Rev. George O. Barnes, a noted and eccentric Kentucky evangelist, which appeared under the title of Without Scrip or Purse (Louisville, 1883). Mr. Price went to New York in the early eighties, and that city has remained his home to this day. In 1885 he was dramatic critic for the now defunct New York Star, which he left after a year to become a reader of new plays for A. M. Palmer, the leading manager of his time, whom he was associated with for more than twenty years. Mr. Price's The Technique of the Drama (New York, 1892), gave him a high position among the dramatic writers of the country. A new edition of it was called for in 1911, and it seems destined to remain the chief authority in its field for many years. In 1901 Mr. Price became playreader for Harrison Grey Fiske; and in the same year he founded the American School of Playwriting, in which men and women, whom the gods forgot, are transformed into great dramatists—perhaps! His second volume upon the stage, The Analysis of Play Construction and Dramatic Principle (New York, 1908), is the text-book of his school. At the present time Mr. Price is editor of The American Playwright, a monthly magazine of dramatic discussion.

Bibliography. Letters from Mr. Price to the present writer; Who's Who in America (1912-1913).

THE OFFENBACH AND GILBERT OPERAS[33]

[From The Technique of the Drama (New York, 1892)]

The light-hearted genius of Paris composed a new style of opera for the general merriment of the world. Who can describe the surprises, the quaintness of song, the drolleries of action of the Offenbach school? It was the intoxicating wine of music. Gladstone, when premier of England, found time to say that the world owed as much in its civilization to the discovery of the fiddle as it did to steam.

This cannot be applied in its whole sense to Offenbach, but this master of satire and the sensuous certainly expressed his times. He set laughter to song. It was democratic. It spared not king, courtier, or the rabble. It was wisdom and sentiment in disguise. It was born among despotisms, and jested when kingdoms fell. It was the stalking horse behind which Offenbach hunted the follies of the day and bagged the absurdities of the hour. If it had double entendre, its existence had a double meaning. Its music and purpose defied national prejudices. Under its laughter-compelling notes the sober bass-viol put on a merry disposition, and your cornet-a-piston became a wag. It was flippant, the glorification of youthful mirth and feelings, and it made many a melancholy Jacques sing again the song of Beranger,

"Comme je regrette ma jambe si dodu."

It is not the purpose here to commend its delirious dances, but to admit that there was genius in it. In a technical sense the dramatic part of them are models compared with the inane and vague compositions of a later school.

The opera bouffe is in a stage beyond decadence, and no longer regards consistency, even of nonsense, in its dramatic elements. Some of the conventionalisms of its technique remain.

We hear again and again the old choruses, the drinking songs, the letter songs, the wine songs, the conspirators' songs, the departure for the war, the lovers' duets, and what-not, with the old goblets, the old helmets and all in use; but order is lost, and the topical song often saves the public patience, apart from the disjecta membra, upon which are fed the eye and the ear.

The Gilbert opera. The delicate foolery of Gilbert and the interpreting melody of Sullivan created an inimitable form of opera that delighted its generations. In its way perfection marks it. There is much in it that ministers to inward quiet and enjoyment. "Pinafore," "The Mikado," and all the list, are products of genius. "Ruddygore" is structurally weak, proving that even nonsense must have a logical treatment. Successful in a manner as "Ruddygore" was, it was filled with characteristic quaintness. We accept Rose Maybud as a piece of good luck, from the moment her modest slippers demurely patter to the front; and it is a sober statement to say that our generation has seen nothing more charming than her artful artlessness and innocence. She is worthy of Gilbert. His taste is refined beyond the point of vulgarity in essence or by way of expediency. His fancy is not tainted with the corruption of flesh-tight limbs, and he holds fast only to such physical allurements as the "three little maids just from school" in the "Mikado" or the impossibly good and dainty Rose Maybud may tempt us with. In the dance there is no lasciviousness, only joy. Gilbert and Sullivan have called a halt to the can-can and bid the world be decent. The whole history of comic opera is filled with proof that music first consented to lend itself to foolery on condition that there should be some heart in it; and even Offenbach, the patriarch of libidinous absurdities, could not get along without stopping by the wayside to make his sinners sing love-songs filled with pure emotion.

Rose Maybud is a piece of delicate coquetry with the mysterious simplicity of maidenhood, giving offense in no way. These authors are satirists, not burlesquers and fakirs.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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