Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan—musical half of the comic-opera team of Gilbert and Sullivan—was born in London, England, on May 13, 1842. The son of a bandmaster, Sullivan was appointed to the Chapel Royal School in 1854. One year after that his first published composition appeared, an anthem. In 1856 he was the first recipient of the recently instituted Mendelssohn Award which entitled him to attend the Royal Academy of Music where he studied under Sterndale Bennett and Goss. From 1858 to 1861 he attended the Leipzig Conservatory. After returning to London in 1862, he achieved recognition as a serious composer with several ambitious compositions including the Irish Symphony, a cello concerto, a cantata, and an oratorio. Meanwhile, in 1866, he had become professor of composition at the Royal Academy, and in 1867 he completed his first score in a light style, the comic opera Cox and Box, libretto by F. C. Burnand, which enjoyed a successful engagement in London.
In 1871, a singer introduced Sullivan to W. S. Gilbert, a one-time attorney who had attracted some interest in London as the writer of burlesques. An enterprising impresario, John Hollingshead of the Gaiety Theater, then was responsible for getting Gilbert and Sullivan to work on their first operetta. This was Thespis, produced in London in 1871, and a failure. It was several years before librettist and composer worked together again. When they did it was for a new impresario, Richard D’Oyly Carte, for whom they wrote a one-act comic opera, Trial by Jury, a curtain raiser to a French operetta which Carte was producing in London on March 25, 1875. Trial by Jury—a stinging satire on court trials revolving around a breach of promise suit—inaugurates the epoch of Gilbert and Sullivan. D’Oyly Carte now commissioned Gilbert and Sullivan to create a new full length comic opera for a company he had recently formed. The new light opera company made a successful bow with The Sorcerer, on November 17, 1877. Pinafore, a year later on May 25, 1878, made Gilbert and Sullivan a vogue and a passion both in London and in New York. In 1879 Gilbert and Sullivan came to the United States where on December 31 they introduced a new comic opera, The Pirates of Penzance, that took the country by storm. Upon returning to London, Gilbert and Sullivan opened a new theater built for them by D’Oyly Carte—the Savoy—with Patience, a tumultuous success on April 25, 1881. After that came Iolanthe (1882), Princess Ida (1884), The Mikado (1885), the Yeomen of the Guard (1888) and The Gondoliers (1889).
Gilbert and Sullivan came to the parting of the ways in 1890, the final rift precipitated by a silly argument over the cost of a carpet for the Savoy Theater. But the differences between them had long been deep rooted. An attempt to revive the partnership was made in 1893 with Utopia Limited, and again with The Grand Duke in 1896. Both comic operas were failures.
After 1893, Sullivan wrote a grand opera, Ivanhoe, and several operetta scores to librettists other than Sullivan. None of these were successful. During the last years of his life he suffered from deterioration of his health, and was almost always in acute pain. He died in London on November 22, 1900. Gilbert died eleven years after that.
Of Sullivan’s other achievements in the field of music mention must be made of his importance as a conductor of the concerts of the London Philharmonic from 1885 to 1887, and of the Leeds Festival from 1880 to 1898. Between 1876 and 1881 he was principal of, and professor of composition at, the National Training School for Music. In recognition of his high estate in English music, he was the recipient of many honors. In 1878 he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and in 1883 he was knighted by Queen Victoria.
It is irony fitting for a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera that the music on which Sullivan lavished his most fastidious attention and of which he was most proud has been completely forgotten (except for one or two minor exceptions). But the music upon which he looked with such condescension and self apology is that which has made him an immortal—in the theater if not in the concert world. For where Sullivan was heavy-handed, pretentious, and often stilted in his oratorios, serious operas, and orchestral compositions, he was consistently vital, fresh, personal, and vivacious in his lighter music. In setting Gilbert’s lyrics to music, Sullivan was always capable of finding the musical mot juste to catch every nuance of Gilbert’s wit and satire. So neatly, even inevitably, does the music fit the words that it is often difficult to think of one without the other. Like Gilbert, Sullivan was a master of parody and satire; he liked particularly to mock at the pretensions of grand opera, oratorio, and the sentimental ballad, pretensions of which he himself was a victim when he endeavored to work in those fields. Like Gilbert, he had a pen that raced with lightning velocity in the writing of patter music to patter verses. Sullivan, moreover, had a reservoir of melodies seemingly inexhaustible—gay tunes, mocking tunes, and tunes filled with telling sentiment—and he was able to adapt the fullest resources of his remarkable gift at harmony, rhythm and orchestration to the manifold demands of the stage. He was no man’s imitator. Without having recourse to experimentation or unorthodox styles and techniques, his style and manners were so uniquely his that, as T. F. Dunhill has said, “his art is always recognizable.... The Sullivan touch is unmistakable and can be felt instantly.”
Of the universality of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas, Isaac Goldberg wrote: “They [Gilbert and Sullivan] were not the rebels of an era, yet as surely they were not the apologists. Their light laughter carried a pleasant danger of its own that, without being the laughter of a Figaro, helped before the advent of a Shaw to keep the atmosphere clear. Transition figures they were, in an age of transition, caught between the personal independence of the artist and the social imperatives of their station. They did not cross over into the new day, though they served as a footbridge for others. Darwin gave them ... only a song for Princess Ida, their melodious answer to the revolt of woman against a perfumed slavery; Swinburne and Wilde ... characters for Patience. They chided personal foibles, and only indirectly social abuses. They were, after all, moralists not sociologists. It was in their natures; it was of their position. Yet something vital in them lives beyond their time. From their era of caste, of smug rectitude, of sanctimoniousness, they still speak to an age that knows neither corset nor petticoat, that votes with its women, and finds Freud insufficiently aphrodisiac. Perhaps it is because they chide individuals and not institutions that their work, so admirably held in solution by Sullivan’s music, has lived through the most critical epoch in modern history since the French Revolution. For, underneath the cataclysmic changes of history remain the foibles that make us the fit laughter of the gods.”
Overtures to and potpourris from the principal Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas are integral to the repertory of salon and pop orchestras everywhere. In all cases, the overture is made up of the opera’s main melodies, and in most cases these overtures were written by others.
The Gondoliers was the last of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas to survive in the permanent repertory. It was produced on December 7, 1889. After the operatic pretension of the Yeomen of the Guard which had preceded it, The Gondoliers represented a welcome return by the authors to the world of paradox, absurdity, and confusion. It has aptly been described as a “farce of errors.” The setting is Venice in the middle of the 18th century. The Duke and Duchess of Plaza-Toro come to Venice accompanied by their daughter, Casilda, and a drummer boy, Luiz, who loves her. In her childhood, Casilda had married the infant heir to the throne of Barataria. This heir had then been stolen and entrusted to the care of a gondolier who raised him as one of his two sons. In time the gondolier himself has forgotten which of his two boys is of royal blood. To complicate matters even further, the two gondolier boys, Marco and Giuseppe, are married. Thus it seems impossible to solve the problem as to who really is the heir to Barataria’s throne and by the same token Gasilda’s husband. But when this problem is finally unscrambled it turns out that the heir is neither Marco nor Giuseppe, but none other than Luiz.
The following are the principal selections from The Gondoliers: Antonio’s song, “For the Merriest Fellows Are We”; the duet of Marco and Giuseppe, “We’re Called Gondolieri”; the autobiographical chant of the Duke of Plaza-Toro, “The Duke of Plaza-Toro”; the duet of Casilda and Luiz, “There Was a Time”; the song of the Grand Inquisitor, “I Stole the Prince”; Tessa’s song, “When a Merry Maiden Marries”; the duet of Marco and Giuseppe, “For Everyone Who Feels Inclined”; Giuseppe’s patter song, “Rising Early in the Morning”; Marco’s serenade, “Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes”; and the song of the Duchess, “On the Day that I was Wedded.”