Julian Sturgis

Julian Russell Sturgis (21 October 1848 – 13 April 1904) was an American-born British novelist, poet, librettist, lyricist, and footballer.

Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, Sturgis distinguished himself in Eton's sporting activities and rowed for Balliol for three years. He then played association football as an amateur, from 1872 to 1876, and was the first foreign born person to play in, and the first to win, an FA Cup Final.

Sturgis qualified as a barrister, but he embarked on a writing career in 1874, producing novels, poetry, plays and libretti. He wrote the words for four operas, with music by Arthur Goring Thomas, Arthur Sullivan, Alexander Mackenzie and Charles Villiers Stanford, respectively. He is, perhaps, best remembered as the librettist for Sullivan's 1891 opera Ivanhoe.

Early life and education

Sturgis was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the fourth son of merchant and lawyer Russell Sturgis and his third wife, Julia Overing ( Boit; 1820–1888). His great-grandfather was another Russell Sturgis, and his older half-brother was John Hubbard Sturgis. When Julian was seven months old, the family moved to England, where Russell Sturgis joined Baring Brothers in London. The writer Howard Sturgis was Julian's younger brother. He also edited the Eton College Journal and was chairman of Pop. On leaving Eton, he went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he rowed for three years for the college.

Career

Law and sport After graduating in 1872, He also played for the Old Etonians, and in the FA Cup semi-final against Oxford University at The Oval on 19 February 1876, he scored the only goal for the public school old boys to take them to their second consecutive final, against the Wanderers. He played in the final at The Oval.

Sturgis's biographer Elizabeth Lee writes that he specialised in "light comedies, mostly set at Eton or Oxford."

In 1885, Sturgis wrote the libretto for Arthur Goring Thomas's opera, Nadeshda, which was first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on 16 April 1885. In a generally favourable review, the critic in The Times noted that Sturgis had taken the plot from an old Russian story recently adapted as a German novel, and commented, "Wherever or in what shape Mr. Sturgis may have found his materials he has treated them in a clever and workmanlike manner. His diction is not very refined or elevated, and his metre in rhymed lyrics or blank verse often defies the rules of prosody. But the incidents of the story are set forth simply and clearly, and more than one powerful situation is attained."

Sturgis continued to write novels during the 1880s. They were My Friends and I (1884), John Maidment (1885), Thraldom (1887), and The Comedy of a Country House (1889). Reviewing the second of these, The Manchester Guardian said, "Readers of Little Comedies know how patiently and ingeniously Mr. Sturgis can draw what may be called the minor scoundrel – the scoundrel whose scoundrelism is so successfully concealed from the world and from himself that it is only a few people who know him to be a scoundrel at all. He has made a fresh and more audacious study of this type in John Maidment, a study audacious but successful."

Sturgis's father died in 1887, leaving substantial legacies to his children.#tag:ref|The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography incorrectly gives the year as 1883. Russell Sturgis's death was noted in the press in November 1887. the equivalent of more than £20m in 2010 terms. Sturgis retained a house in London and divided his time between there and his country estate, first at Elvington, near Dover, and then at Compton, near Guildford, where he built a house, Wancote. His usual collaborator, W.S. Gilbert, declined to join him in writing a full-scale romantic opera, and recommended Sturgis as "the best serious librettist of the day". The opera, Ivanhoe (1891), is an adaptation of Walter Scott's long patriotic novel of the same title. Most critics praised the libretto. Bernard Shaw was an exception, accusing Sturgis of "wanton debasement of a literary masterpiece", turning "Scott's noble dialogue" into "fustian". The Times praised Sturgis's "remarkable fidelity and skill". The Observer also found his work skilful. The Manchester Guardian said that Sullivan was fortunate in his librettist, who "show[ed] himself capable of depicting ideas and events in a few words, and those words replete with rhythmical vigour and poetic beauty as well as significance of meaning." Sullivan's friend the critic Herman Klein called the libretto "a skilful and fairly dramatic adaptation of Scott's novel and a polished example of poetic lyric-writing". Although the opera was a success, initially running for an unprecedented 155 performances at Richard D'Oyly Carte's new Royal English Opera House, it passed into obscurity after the opera house failed. It was, Klein observed, "the strangest comingling of success and failure ever chronicled in the history of British lyric enterprise!" "Sleep" ("Beautiful up from the deeps of the solemn sea"), "Through the ivory gate" ("I had a dream last night"), and "Whence".

In 1901, Sturgis wrote the libretto for Charles Villiers Stanford's opera, Much Ado About Nothing, based on the play by Shakespeare. Sturgis's text was exceptionally faithful to Shakespeare's original. The Manchester Guardian commented, "Not even in the Falstaff of Arrigo Boito and Giuseppe Verdi have the characteristic charm, the ripe and pungent individuality of the original comedy been more sedulously preserved."

The libretto for Stanford was the last of the four that Sturgis wrote. He did not live to see the third of them staged. In 1899 he wrote a libretto for Alexander Mackenzie based on, and with the same title as, Dickens's story The Cricket on the Hearth. The text was published in 1901, and Mackenzie set it shortly afterwards. Accounts vary as to why it was not produced at the time. It may have been because the composer and the Carl Rosa Opera Company could not agree on terms, The piece did not reach the stage until ten years after Sturgis's death. It was given under the composer's baton by students of the Royal Academy of Music in 1914, with future stars of different operatic genres in the cast: Darrell Fancourt and Eva Turner.

Notes and references