Esmeralda (opera)

Esmeralda is an opera in four acts composed by Arthur Goring Thomas to an English-language libretto by Theo Marzials and Alberto Randegger based on Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. It premiered in London on 26 March 1883 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane with Georgina Burns in the title role and Barton McGuckin as her lover, Phoebus.

Esmeralda was Thomas's first opera to receive a full staging. It was commissioned by the Carl Rosa Opera Company following a very successful performance of excerpts from his opera The Light of the Harem in 1879 at the Royal Academy of Music where he was a student at the time. Alberto Randegger (the musical director of the Carl Rosa company) and the eccentric British poet Theo Marzials co-wrote the libretto. Its subject, Esmeralda, a central protagonist in Victor Hugo's novel Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), had already been the focus of several earlier operas, including Louise Bertin's La Esmeralda (1836), Alexander Dargomyzhsky's Esmeralda (1847), and Fabio Campana's Esmeralda (1869).

In the tragic denouement of Hugo's original novel, Esmeralda dies on the scaffold. However, Marzials and Randegger's libretto gave the story a happy ending, a decision heavily criticised in a review of the premiere published in The Theatre:

That Esmeralda and Phoebus should get married at the close of the fourth act, and live happily for ever after, is all very well from the school-girl novel-reading point of view; but, as a new ending to Notre Dame de Paris, it appears to me no less revolting than impertinent.

The premiere of Esmeralda was staged by the Carl Rosa company on 26 March 1883 at London's Drury Lane Theatre in a performance conducted by Alberto Randegger. It was given its Scottish premiere at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh in November of that year, and over the next two decades proved to be popular both in London and in British provincial theatres. It was performed in German translation in Cologne and Hamburg in 1885 and was revived in Scotland in 1886 when it was toured to multiple theatres. In 1888, the opera reached Australia, where it was staged in Melbourne by Amy Sherwin and her company of singers. A revised version of Esmeralda was performed in a French translation of the libretto by Paul Milliet at the Royal Opera House in London on 12 July 1890 with Jean De Reszke as Phoebus and Nellie Melba in the title role. The revised version was also performed in English for the US premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City on 19 November 1900. The following month the same company staged Esmeralda in Chicago at the Auditorium Theatre.

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