Following a recent broadcast of Stanford’s The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan recorded at the 2019 Wexford Opera Festival, it is now available on the BBC3 player at the following LINK.
From Lalla Rookh, an Oriental Romance, by Thomas Moore, esq. Illustrated with Engravings Published by Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, Paternoster Row, London.
Composed to a libretto by William Barclay Squire, The Veiled Prophet is based on part of the oriental romance, Lalla Rookh, by Ireland’s national poet, Thomas Moore. Moore’s poetic masterpiece enjoyed great celebrity in its own time and was translated into many languages. It also formed the basis of several other musical settings including operas by Gaspare Spontini, Félicien David and Anton Rubinstein and, perhaps most famously, the cantata Das Paradies und die Peri by Schumann.
Moore read widely on the fashionable subject of orientalism and used his vivid imagination in constructing his oriental world for, indeed, he had no experience of it. The story of The Veiled Prophet is contained within a frame tale in which the princess, Lalla Rookh (her name means ‘tulip cheek’) is on a journey from Delhi to Cashmere where she is to be married. Along the way, the minstrel Feramorz entertains the princess with his colourful tales, the first of these being the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan.
Mokanna, the Veiled Prophet, has lost an eye in combat and hides his deformity under a veil while passing himself off as a god. He gains many followers and establishes his power in various parts of the Mavaralnahar. Aware of this power, the Caliph Mahadi sends an army to arrest Mokanna. However, when the prophet sees no route of escape, he administers poison to his followers, and when they are dead, he throws himself into the fire used to burn their bodies so that the Caliph’s soldiers can find no trace of him. While details of Barclay Squire’s libretto deviate in some respects from Moore’s original story, the striking feature of both can be seen in their likeness to a modern cult, the members of which blindly follow their master to their doom. It also foreshadows the final actions of dictators such as Hitler.
Una Hunt
Producer, The Veiled Prophet
Wexford Festival Opera 2019.
