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Librettist W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and composer Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) collaborated on a series of fourteen comic operas in Victorian England between 1871 and 1896.

Their works were originally produced by impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte, the third member of the partnership, who built the Savoy Theatre in London to present their operas, and formed the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, which performed them until it closed in 1982. The Savoy Operas have enjoyed broad and enduring international success, particularly in the English-speaking world, perhaps because of their combination of engaging melodies, witty lyrics and gentle satire. The Gilbert and Sullivan operas — H.M.S. Pinafore and The Mikado in particular — shaped the American musical of the 20th century.

Many cities, churches, schools, and universities have their own amateur Gilbert and Sullivan performing groups. The most popular G&S works are also performed from time to time by major opera companies, and there are a handful of professional groups that specialize in G&S. Every summer, there is a 3-week long International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton, England. Since the last copyrights on the G&S works expired in 1961, performance of these works has been free of restrictions and royalty requirements worldwide. This may have helped G&S survive fierce competition, especially at the amateur level, from modern musicals, most of which require the payment of royalties and restrict the producers' rights to alter the material.

History

First collaborations: Thespis and Trial

The first Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration was Thespis (1871). At the time, Gilbert was a successful dramatist and poet, widely known for both his plays and the Bab Ballads, a popular series of illustrated light verse. In the Bab Ballads, Gilbert had developed a unique "topsy-turvy" style, where the humour was derived by setting up a ridiculous premise and working out its logical consequences, however absurd. A typical example was "Reece", whose "sisters, cousins, aunts and niece" sailed on the H.M.S. Mantelpiece. Gilbert was also successful in the London theatrical scene, with a string of popular sketches, comedies, pantomimes, burlesques, extravaganzas and musical entertainments.

Arthur Sullivan was regarded as the bright young hope of serious English music. He was much in demand as a conductor and composer of oratorios, anthems and hymns. He was also earning a considerable income by churning out popular parlour songs and ballads, the Victorian equivalent of Top Forty hits.

Thespis was an extravaganza in which the gods of the classical world, who have become elderly and ineffective, are temporarily replaced by a troupe of actors and actresses. The piece mocked Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld and La Belle Hélène, which (in translation) then dominated the English musical stage. Thespis opened at the Gaiety Theatre on Boxing Day in 1871 and ran for 64 performances, which was average for a holiday entertainment of its kind (Rees 1964, p. 78). Gilbert directed the production himself, as he did all the later G&S operas. But unlike the later G&S works, Thespis was hastily prepared and of a more risqué nature, with a broader style of comedy that allowed for improvisation by the actors. Two of the male characters were played by women, whose shapely legs were put on display.

No one at the time anticipated that this was the beginning of a great collaboration, and Gilbert and Sullivan did not have occasion to work together for another four years. The musical score was never published and is now lost, except for one song that was published separately, a chorus that was re-used in a later opera, and the Act II ballet. There have been numerous revivals, either with original scores or adaptations of Sullivan's other music. *

Gilbert and Sullivan's first major hit was Trial by Jury (1875). Impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte was then managing the Royalty Theatre. He needed a one-act work to serve as an afterpiece for Offenbach's popular but short La Périchole. Gilbert had already written such a short piece on commission from another producer, whose unexpected death had left his libretto an orphan. Carte was delighted with it and suggested that it be set to music by Sullivan. Sullivan was equally delighted, and the piece was produced within a matter of weeks. Trial by Jury, with Sullivan's brother, Fred, as the Learned Judge, was added to the bill with La Périchole and proved itself even more popular than Offenbach's opera, running for 131 performances. *

The triumvirate: Sorcerer through Pirates

The Sorcerer (1877) was the first full-length example of what came to be known as the Savoy Operas (although the Savoy Theatre had yet to be built). Carte, who was now interested in developing an English form of light opera that would displace the French works that dominated the London stage, asked Gilbert for a comic opera that would serve as the centerpiece for an evening's entertainment. Gilbert found a subject in one of his short stories, "The Elixir of Love," which concerned a Cockney businessman who happened to be a sorcerer, a purveyor of blessings (not much called for) and curses (very popular). Gilbert and Sullivan were tireless taskmasters, seeing to it that The Sorcerer opened as a fully polished production, in marked contrast to the under-rehearsed Thespis. * The triumvirate of Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte was now an established entity that would survive though a dozen more collaborations.

With The Sorcerer, the D'Oyly Carte repertory and production system came into being. Previously, Gilbert had constructed his plays around the established stars of whatever theatre he happened to be writing for, as had been the case with Thespis. From The Sorcerer onwards, Gilbert would no longer hire stars; he would create them. He and Sullivan selected the performers, writing their operas for ensemble casts rather than individual stars. Gilbert oversaw the designs of sets and costumes, and he directed the performers on stage. Sullivan personally oversaw the musical preparation. The result was a new crispness and polish in the English musical theatre.

The libretto of The Sorcerer relied on stock character types, many of which were familiar from European opera: the heroic protagonist (tenor) and his love-interest (soprano); the elderly woman with fading charms (contralto) and a supporting bass-baritone or two. The "patter" or comic baritone, was often the leading role of their comic operas. This character most often gets to sing the speedy patter songs. Gilbert and Sullivan also fully integrated the male and female choruses into the action, making them, collectively, as important as any principal character.

The repertory system ensured that the comic patter man who would perform the role of the sorcerer, John Wellington Wells, would become the ruler of the Queen's navy as Sir Joseph Porter in H.M.S. Pinafore, then join the army as Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance, and so on. Similarly, Mrs. Partlet in The Sorcerer would transform into Little Buttercup in Pinafore, then into Ruth, the piratical maid-of-all-work in Pirates. Relatively unknown performers whom Gilbert and Sullivan engaged for The Sorcerer and Pinafore would stay with the company for many years, becoming stars of the Victorian stage. These included George Grossmith, the comic baritone; Rutland Barrington, lyric baritone and character actor; Richard Temple, the bass-baritone; Jessie Bond, the soubrette; and Rosina Brandram the contralto.

Gilbert and Sullivan scored their first international hit with H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), satirizing incompetent government officials, the Royal Navy and the English obsession with social status. Dozens of unauthorized, or "pirated", productions of this work appeared in America. The Pirates of Penzance (1879), written in a fit of pique at American copyright pirates, also poked fun at opera conventions, sense of duty, family obligation, and the relevance of a liberal education.

Savoy Theatre: Patience to Gondoliers

Patience (1881) satirized the aesthetic movement in general, and the poet and aesthete Algernon Swinburne in particular, as well as male vanity and chauvinism in the military. During the run of Patience, Carte opened the Savoy Theatre, which became the partnership's permanent home. Iolanthe (1882) was the first of their works to open at the Savoy. It poked fun at English law and the House of Lords and made much of the war between the sexes. Princess Ida (1884) spoofed women's education and male chauvinism.

The most successful of the Savoy Operas was The Mikado (1885), which made fun of English bureaucracy in a Japanese setting. Ruddigore (1887), a topsy-turvy take on Victorian melodrama, was less successful. The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), their only joint work with a serious ending, concerns a pair of strolling players—a jester and a singing girl—who are caught up in a risky intrigue at the Tower of London. The Gondoliers (1889) was a recapitulation of many of the themes of the earlier operas, taking place in a kingdom ruled by a pair of gondoliers who attempt to remodel the monarchy in a spirit of "republican equality." *

Partnership problems: the carpet quarrel

Throughout their collaboration, Gilbert and Sullivan quarreled occasionally over the choice of a subject. After both Princess Ida and Ruddigore, which were less successful than the seven other operas from Pinafore through Gondoliers, Sullivan asked out of the partnership, saying that he found Gilbert's plots repetitive, and that the operas were not artistically satisfying to him. While the two artists worked out their differences, Carte kept the Savoy open with revivals of their earlier works. On each occasion, after a few months' pause, Gilbert responded with a libretto that met Sullivan's objections, and the partnership was able to continue successfully.

During the run of The Gondoliers, however, Gilbert challenged Carte over the expenses of the production. Carte had charged the cost of a new carpet for the Savoy Theatre lobby to the partnership. Gilbert believed that this was a maintenance expense that should be charged to Carte alone. While the amount of money at stake was relatively small (£500), Gilbert felt that it was part of a pattern of deception that had been going on for many years. As scholar Andrew Crowther has explained:

After all, the carpet was only one of a number of disputed items, and the real issue lay not in the mere money value of these things, but in whether Carte could be trusted with the financial affairs of Gilbert and Sullivan. Gilbert contended that Carte had at best made a series of serious blunders in the accounts, and at worst deliberately attempted to swindle the others. It is not easy to settle the rights and wrongs of the issue at this distance, but it does seem fairly clear that there was something very wrong with the accounts at this time. Gilbert wrote to Sullivan on 28 May, 1891, a year after the end of the "Quarrel", that Carte had admitted "an unintentional overcharge of nearly £1000 in the electric lighting accounts alone." *

Sullivan sided with Carte, who was building a theatre in London for the production of new English grand operas, with Sullivan's Ivanhoe as the inaugural work. While the protracted quarrel worked itself out in the courts and in public, Gilbert and Sullivan wrote new comic operas with other collaborators: Gilbert wrote The Mountebanks with Alfred Cellier; and Sullivan wrote Haddon Hall with Sidney Grundy, while also completing Ivanhoe.

Last works

Once the squabble was finally resolved, Gilbert and Sullivan would work together twice more—on Utopia Limited (1893) and The Grand Duke (1896)—but the partnership had lost its sparkle, and neither opera was a financial success. After the outright failure of The Grand Duke, the partners saw no reason to work together again. Sullivan, by this time in exceedingly poor health, died four years later, although to the end he continued to write new comic operas for the Savoy with other librettists, leaving one of them (The Emerald Isle) incomplete at his death.

At their best, Gilbert's plots remain perfect examples of "topsy-turvydom," in which primeval fairies rub elbows with English lords, flirting is a capital offense, gondoliers ascend to the monarchy, and pirates are reconciled with major-generals. Gilbert's lyrics employ double (and triple) rhyming and punning, and served as the very model for such 20th century Broadway lyricists as Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Lorenz Hart. Sullivan, a classically trained musician who also wrote hymns and oratorios, contributed catchy melodies that could also be emotionally moving. As seamless as their onstage collaboration was, Gilbert and Sullivan were temperamentally incompatible, and it was only with great difficulty that their partnership survived as long as it did.

Cultural influence

Songs and parodies

The works of Gilbert and Sullivan, filled as they are with parodies of their contemporary culture, are themselves frequently parodied or pastiched; a notable example of this is Tom Lehrer's Elements song, which consists of Lehrer's rhyming rendition of the names of all the chemical elements set to the music of Major General's Song from The Pirates of Penzance. Lehrer also includes a verse parodying a Gilbert and Sullivan finale in his patchwork of stylistic creations Clementine ("full of words and music and signifying nothing", as Lehrer put it, thus parodying G&S and Shakespeare in the same sentence).

From The Pirates of Penzance, "With cat-like tread...," includes a segment that starts, "Come, friends who plough the sea...." This tune is used with the popular modern lyric, "Hail, hail, the gang's all here...."

Allan Sherman sang several parodies of Gilbert and Sullivan:

  • I'm called Little Butterball (about Sherman's admitted corpulence, based on a song from HMS Pinafore)
  • When I was a lad I went to Yale (about a young advertising agent, based on the patter song from HMS Pinafore)
  • You need an analyst, a psychoanalyst (a variant on "I've got a little list" from The Mikado)
  • Titwillow (about a Yiddish-talking bird that meets a sad fate, and based on the song from 'The Mikado' with the same title)

Anna Russell performed a parody called "How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera."

The Popeye theme song begins, "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man, I'm Popeye the Sailor Man!", which differs by only two notes from: "I am a Pirate King (Hurrah for the Pirate King!)".

Literature

In Runaround, a short story in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, Powell and Donovan encounter a robot who is in a state similar to drunkenness, singing "There Grew a Little Flower" (from Ruddigore), upon which Donovan remarks "Where did he pick up Gilbert and Sullivan?" Asimov, who was a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote other stories with reference to their operas, including one which revolved around a time-traveler saving the score to Thespis.

Stage and film

  • The score of the film Chariots of Fire (1981) draws heavily on the G&S repertoire.

  • Mike Leigh's film Topsy-Turvy (1999) is an acclaimed film depiction of the team and the creation of their most popular opera, The Mikado.

  • In the ninth Star Trek feature film, Insurrection (1998), the characters Captain Picard, Worf and Data sing "A British Tar" from H.M.S. Pinafore.

  • In Walt Disney's cartoon Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers (2004), there is a performance of The Pirates of Penzance.

Television

  • The TV series Family Guy drew from Gilbert and Sullivan with a parody of the Captain's Song from H.M.S. Pinafore.

  • In The Simpsons episode "Cape Fear," Bart asks Sideshow Bob to sing "the entire score of H.M.S. Pinafore" as a last request, which is fulfilled.

  • In another Simpsons episode, Bart identifies himself as "Ruddigore."

  • In Angel, in the fifth season Charles Gunn has the ability to be a good lawyer input into his head, along with a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan, because it's "great for elocution". He then mentions that he could sing all of The Pirates of Penzance, and later in the series breaks into "Three Little Maids" from The Mikado.

  • The episode "And It's Surely To Their Credit" (2x05) of The West Wing has several references to Gilbert and Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore in particular.

  • In the popular sci-fi series Babylon 5 one of Marcus' many comic interludes involves his singing the 'Modern Major General' song from The Pirates of Penzance over the closing credits of one episode, much to Doctor Franklin's distress.

  • The VeggieTales series refers to Gilbert and Sullivan many times:
    • In the episode "Lyle the Kindly Viking," Archibald Asparagus claims to have found a long lost Gilbert and Sullivan piece (it turns out to have been written by another Gilbert and Sullivan).
    • In the episode "The Wonderful World of Auto-Tainment," Archibald Asparagus performs "Modern Major General."
    • In the episode "The Star of Christmas," the two main characters (Cavis and Millward) are based on Gilbert and Sullivan. Also in this episode, Cavis's office wall include posters for two Gilbert and Sullivan operas (H.M.S. Pinafore and The Mikado).
    • The Mikado was also used as the inspiration for the VeggieTales episode, "Sumo of the Opera."
    • Finally, the VeggieTales song The Pirates Who Won't Do Anything is loosely inspired by The Pirates of Penzance.

Collaborations

Songs

  • The Distant Shore (1874)
  • The Love that Loves Me Not (1875)
  • Sweethearts (1875)

Alternative versions

= Non-English language versions
=

Gilbert and Sullivan operas have been translated into many languages, including Portuguese, Yiddish, Hebrew, Swedish, Estonian, Spanish (including HMS Pinafore, allegedly, in zarzuela style), and many others.

There are many German versions of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, including the popular Der Mikado. There is even a German version of The Grand Duke. Some German translations were made by Zell and Genée, librettists of Die Fledermaus and other Viennese operettas. They even translated such a lesser-known opera as Sullivan's The Chieftain ("Der Häuptling").

= Gilbert & Sullivan inspired Ballets
=

= Adaptations
=

See also

References

Further reading

External links

General

Appreciation societies

Performing groups

Operetta | Gilbert and Sullivan | Surname pairs

Gilbert und Sullivan | Gilbert & Sullivan

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Gilbert and Sullivan".

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