Princess Ida Princess Ida Princess Ida; or, Castle Adamant is a comic opera with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It was their eighth operatic collaboration of fourteen. "Princess Ida" opened at the Savoy Theatre on 5 January 1884, for a run of 246 performances. The piece concerns a princess who founds a women's university and teaches that women are superior to men and should rule in their stead. The prince to whom she had been married in infancy sneaks into the university, together with two friends, with the aim of collecting his bride. They disguise themselves as
Gilbert and Sullivan outright failure. Neither work entered the canon of regularly performed Gilbert and Sullivan works until the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company made the first complete professional recordings of the two operas in the 1970s. Gilbert had also offered Sullivan another libretto, "His Excellency" (1894), but Gilbert's insistence on casting Nancy McIntosh, his protege from "Utopia", led to Sullivan's refusal, and "His Excellency" was instead composed by F. Osmond Carr. Meanwhile, the Savoy Theatre continued to revive the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, in between new pieces, and D'Oyly Carte touring companies also played them in repertory. After "The Grand Duke", the partners