British Opera in America Children in the Wood, Music by Samuel Arnold, Libretto by Thomas Morton, American Premiere Volume I

The series aims to represent all the major genres and styles of musical theater of the century, from ballad opera through melodrama, plays with incidental music, parlor entertainments, pastiche, temperance shows, ethnic theater, minstrelsy, and operetta, to grand opera. This series of sixteen volumes provides for the first time ever a comprehensive set of works from a full century of musical theater in the United States of America. Volume 1 presents the earliest works in this series of Nineteenth-Century American Musical Theater. Indeed, the two tides reprinted here were composed in the prior century but enjoyed a currency in the early 1800s that helped establish conventions for generations of native-born dramaturges and composers. Moreover, Children in the Wood 1795 and Blue Beard 1811 are the only two works included in this series that were fully realized abroad, and imported for performance in the United States by musicians trained in the theaters of London. As editor Susan Porter points out in her Introduction, like all stage works, they were then adapted to suit the tastes of the times and places in which they were performed. (Indeed, Blue Beard was already an English adaptation of a French work.)