The Irish Dragoon

According to Paul E. Bierley’s The Works of John Philip Sousa, Sousa purchased Joseph Herbert’s libretto to The Irish Dragoon — based on Charles Lever’s 1841 novel Charles O’Malley, the Irish Dragoon — which included at least some music composed by another composer but then set that music aside and composed his own. “The operetta was to have been produced in October 1915,” writes Bierley, based on a press release from May 16, 1915; but in fact, it never made it to a theater. Sousa’s holograph scores, discovered in 1965, indicate that Sousa was still working on it off and on through 1916 and perhaps 1917. Sousa “made an unsuccessful attempt to revive the operetta in the late 1920s” with libretto by Bennett Chapple, but it’s unclear whether that libretto was ever completed; if so, whether it survives in any form; and whether Sousa wrote any more music than the fragments that survive at the Sousa Archives at the University of Illinois.