In 1876, the 21-year-old John Philip Sousa was in the orchestra of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, playing violin under the direction of Jacques Offenbach, who was livening the festivities with excerpts from his operettas. This could only have given a fillip to Sousa's ambition to succeed in the theater, and a stint conducting Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore in 1879 stoked that ambition further. Appointed leader of the U.S. Marine Band in Washington, D.C. in 1880, Sousa quickly gained a reputation as The March King. Nevertheless, his oeuvre is dotted with some 15 operettas, from the unperformed Katherine of 1879 to the unproduced Irish Dragoon of 1915, including, in between, the modest successes of Desiree (1883) and The Queen of Hearts (1885), the financial failure of The Smugglers (1882), and the variously successful The Bride Elect (1897), The Charlatan (1898), Chris and the Wonderful Lamp (1899), The Free Lance (1905), and The American Maid (1909). Among these efforts, the crown jewel is unequivocally El Capitan, which opened at Boston's Tremont Theatre April 13, 1896, moved to New York for a run of 112 performances, toured coast-to-coast, was revived in New York in 1897 and 1898, and played in England from July to November 1899.

In addition to Sousa's sparkling score, several matters of the moment spurred El Capitan's popularity. While the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were all the rage—often in pirated form (Sousa himself had orchestrated several from piano score)—native talent could not compete with Gilbert's verbal virtuosity and deft satire. Thus, when the young playwright Charles Klein produced a farce featuring such staples of Gilbertian comedy as mistaken identity, misplaced affections, eccentric characters, and a large military presence in chorus, Sousa seized upon it as the very thing he had sought. Moreover, the play complemented the composer's own strengths in calling for genres of which Sousa was a master—the sentimental ballad, the waltz, and (above all) martial music. Thomas Frost and Sousa supplied lyrics. For Don Medigua, the Spanish viceroy disguised as leader of the rebel troops, Sousa cobbled this introduction to the first strain of the eponymous march later extracted from the operetta:



Behold El Capitan;

Gaze on his misanthropic stare,

Notice his penetrating glare;

Come match him if you can.

He is the champion beyond compare.



Like the music, the texts are straightforward and effective. Too, the involvement of the impresario and enormously popular actor DeWolf Hopper—whose career reached its apogee in the role of El Capitan—virtually assured success. Finally, El Capitan hit the boards just as the tensions leading to the Spanish-American War of 1898 were taking shape, and Spanish despotism in a colonial Peruvian setting possessed undeniable topical interest. Indeed, aboard Admiral Dewey's flagship, as he sailed from Hong Kong to destroy the Spanish fleet in Manila, the band played the march El Capitan.

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