Arthur Sullivan

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Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (May 13, 1842 – November 22, 1900) was an English composer best known for his operatic collaborations with librettist W. S. Gilbert.

1 Life and Career
- 1.1 Overtures
- 1.2 Gilbert and Sullivan inspired Ballet
2 Reputation and criticism
3 Works
4 References
5 External links

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Life and Career

Sullivan was born in Lambeth, now part of London. His father was a military bandmaster, and by the time Arthur had reached the age of 8, he was proficient with all the instruments in the band. Following a stay at private school in Bayswater, he was admitted to the choir of the Chapel Royal, attending its school in Cheyne Walk. While there, he began to compose anthems and songs. In 1856, he received the first Mendelssohn prize and became a student at the Royal Academy of Music until 1858.

In 1858, Sullivan travelled to Leipzig, where he continued his studies and took up conducting. He credited this period with tremendous musical growth, and his return to London in 1862 saw the production of his incidental music to Shakespeare's The Tempest performed at the Crystal Palace. He began building a reputation as Britain's premier composer, and 1866 saw the first performance of his Symphony in E Major (Irish). Other pieces from this period include the overture In Memoriam (1866), the oratorio The Prodigal Son (1869), the well-known tune to the hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers" (1872, lyrics by Sabine Baring-Gould) and the song "The Lost Chord" (1877, lyrics by Adelaide Anne Procter) , written in sorrow at the death of his brother Fred who had premiered the role of The Learned Judge in Trial by Jury .

In 1866, he wrote his first opera, Cox and Box. Originally written for a private performance, it was later produced at the Gallery of Illustration, where it ran for some 300 performances. This led to his most famous and lucrative works as a composer for the musical theatre. In the spring of 1867, the work was reviewed by W. S. Gilbert on behalf of a humor magazine called Fun, unknowingly taking the first step in their eventual working relationship.

In the autumn of 1867, he travelled with Sir George Grove to Vienna, returning with a treasure-trove of rescued Schubert scores.

In 1871, John Hollingshead commissioned Sullivan to work with Gilbert to create the burlesque Thespis for the Gaiety Theatre. The show was successful in the context that it was conceived specifically as a Christmas entertainment and as such ran through to Easter 1872. Plans to revise and revive the piece in 1876 were abandoned when Richard D'Oyly Carte's backers demanded a new show for their money and not a revival. The score was subsequently lost, though one song, Little Maid of Arcadee, was published by Cramer in 1872, and a chorus, Climbing over rocky mountain, was later re-used in The Pirates of Penzance.

Gilbert and Sullivan's collaboration continued in 1875, when Richard D'Oyly Carte commissioned them to write a one-act piece, Trial by Jury. Its success was so great that the three men formed an often turbulent partnership which lasted for twenty years and thirteen operettas. Trial was followed in 1877 by The Sorcerer, and in 1878 by their greatest success so far, H.M.S. Pinafore. This last was much pirated in America, and in 1879, Gilbert and Sullivan crossed the Atlantic to protect their copyrights, producing The Pirates of Penzance in New York.

The next Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Patience, opened in the Opera Comique, London, in 1881 and was transferred to the specially built Savoy Theatre later the same year. All the duo's subsequent collaborations, which include Iolanthe (1882), The Mikado (1885) and The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), opened there, and the genre of comic opera that they created is sometimes known as "Savoy Opera" as a result. The final two Savoy Operas were Utopia, Limited and The Grand Duke.

Sullivan's orchestra was typical of any other pit orchestra of that era: 2 flutes (+piccolo), oboe, 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 cornets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion, strings. By the time he got to composing Yeomen, Sullivan had argued hard for an increase in the pit orchestra's size. This was successful and Yeomen, Gondoliers, Utopia and Grand Duke all included the usual plus 2nd bassoon + bass trombone. Sullivan used horns crooked in many different pitches, and treated them rather like Brahms, with little chromatic language and economically. Sullivan's orchestration was delicate and concise (though never boring). Iolanthe has some interesting quotes of a Bach fugue (played by clarinets and bassoon) in one of the Lord Chancellor's patter songs.

In 1883, Sullivan was knighted by Queen Victoria. Contemporary critics felt that this should put an end to his career as an operetta composer, believing that a musical knight should not stoop below the level of oratorio or "grand opera". Sullivan too, despite the financial security the Savoy operettas gave him, increasingly viewed his work with Gilbert as unimportant and beneath his skills. Furthermore, he was unhappy that he was having to tone down his music to ensure that Gilbert's words could be heard. In 1886, Sullivan went some way to appeasing his critics by the production of the cantata The Golden Legend, which he and most of his contemporaries considered his masterpiece. Gilbert wrote the more serious The Yeomen of the Guard to satisfy Sullivan's urge for grand opera, and, while Sullivan was pacified for a time, in 1890, he broke away acrimoniously from Gilbert following the production of The Gondoliers and, with D'Oyly Carte, produced his only grand opera, Ivanhoe, at the new English Opera House. Subsequently however he returned to work with Gilbert on two more operettas and wrote three more with other collaborators.

Sullivan, who had suffered from ill health throughout his life, succumbed to pneumonia at the age of 58 at his house in London on November 22, 1900. A monument in his memory was erected in the Victoria Embankment Gardens (London) and is inscribed with W.S.Gilbert's words from The Yeomen of the Guard "Is life a boon? If so, it must befall that Death, whene'er he call, must call too soon". He wished to be buried in Bromley cemetery with his parents and brother, but by order of the Queen was buried in St Paul's Cathedral.

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Overtures

The overtures from Sullivan's comic operas remain popular, and there are many recordings of them. Most of them are structured as a potpourri of tunes from the operas. They are generally well orchestrated, but not all of them were composed by Sullivan. However, even those delegated to his assistants were probably based on an outline he provided, and in many cases incorporated his suggestions or corrections. One can certainly presume that he approved of them, since he invariably conducted on opening night.

Those Sullivan wrote himself include Cox and Box, Thespis, Iolanthe, Princess Ida, The Yeomen of the Guard, The Gondoliers, and The Grand Duke. Sullivan's authorship of the overture to Utopia Limited cannot be verified with certainty, as his autograph score is now lost, but it is likely attributable to him, as it consists of only a few bars of introduction, followed by a straight copy of music heard elsewhere in the opera (the Drawing Room scene). Thespis is now lost, but there is no doubt that it had an overture, and that Sullivan wrote it.

Of the remaining overtures, H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance are by Alfred Cellier; The Sorcerer, The Mikado, and Ruddigore are by Hamilton Clarke; and Patience is by Eugene D'Albert.

Most of the overtures are in three sections: a lively introduction, a slow middle section, and a concluding allegro in a sonata form, with two subjects, a brief development, a recapitulation and a coda. However, Sullivan himself didn't always follow this pattern. The overtures to Princess Ida and The Gondoliers, for instance, have only an opening fast section and a concluding slow section. The overture to Utopia Limited is dominated by a slow section, with only a very brief original passage introducing it.

In the 1920s, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company commissioned its musical director at the time, Geoffrey Toye, to write new overtures for Ruddigore and The Pirates of Penzance. Toye's Ruddigore overture entered the general repertory, and today is more often heard than the original overture by Sullivan assistant Hamilton Clarke. (Toye's Pirates overture did not last long, and is now lost.)

Sir Malcolm Sargent devised a new ending for the overture to The Gondoliers, adding the "cachucha" heard later in the opera. This gave the Gondoliers overture the familiar fast-slow-fast pattern of most of the rest of the Savoy Opera overtures, and this version has competed for popularity with Sullivan's original version.

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Gilbert and Sullivan inspired Ballet

Pineapple Poll is a comic ballet, with a scenario and choreography by John Cranko, and a score by Charles Mackerras arranged from the music of Sullivan. Mackerras used music from most of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, from Sullivan's overture "Di Ballo", and from the comic opera Cox and Box (which Sullivan wrote with librettist F. C. Burnand).

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Reputation and criticism

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Early career

When the young Arthur Sullivan returned to England after his studies in Leipzig, critics were struck by his potential. His incidental music to The Tempest received an acclaimed premiere at the Crystal Palace on April 5 1862. The Athenaeum wrote:

It was one of those events which mark an epoch in a man's life; and, what is of more universal consequence, it may mark an epoch in English music, or we shall be greatly disappointed. Years on years have elapsed since we have heard a work by so young an artist so full of promise, so full of fancy, showing so much conscientiousness, so much skill, and so few references to any model elect. (Quoted in Jacobs 1992, p. 28).

His Symphony in E of 1866 won similarly fulsome praise:

The symphony...is not only by far the most noticeable composition that has proceeded from Mr. Sullivan's pen, but the best musical work, if judged only by the largeness of its form and the number of beautiful thoughts it contains, for a long time produced by any English composer.... (The Times, quoted in Jacobs, p. 42).

But as Jacobs notes, "The first rapturous outburst of enthusiasm for Sullivan as an orchestral composer did not last." A comment that may be taken as typical of those that would follow the composer throughout his career was that "Sullivan's unquestionable talent should make him doubly careful not to mistake popular applause for artistic appreciation" (Jacobs, p. 49).

Sullivan was also occasionally cited for a lack of diligence. For instance, of his early oratorio, The Prodigal Son, his teacher, John Goss, wrote:

All you have done is most masterly – Your orchestration superb, & your effects many of them original & first-rate.... Some day you will I hope try another oratorio, putting out all your strength, but not the strength of a few weeks or months, whatever your immediate friends may say...only don't do anything so pretentious as an oratorio or even a Symphony without all your power, which seldom comes in one fit. (Letter of December 22 1869, quoted in Allen 1975a, p. 32).

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The transition to opera

By the mid-1870s, Sullivan had turned his attention mainly to works for the theatre, for which he was generally admired. For instance, after the first performance of Trial by Jury (1875), the Times said that "It seems, as in the great Wagnerian operas, as though poem and music had proceeded simultaneously from one and the same brain" (quoted in Allen 1975b, p. 30). But by the time The Sorcerer appeared, there were charges that Sullivan was wasting his talents in comic opera:

There is nothing whatever in Mr. Sullivan's score which any theatrical conductor engaged at a few pounds a week could not have written equally well.... We trust Mr. Sullivan is more proud of it than we can pretend to be. But we must confess to a sense of disappointment at the downard art course Mr. Sullivan appears to be now drifting into.... [He] has all the ability to make him a great composer, but he wilfully throws his opportunity away. A giant may play at times, but Mr. Sullivan is always playing.... He possesses all the natural ability to have given us an English opera, and, instead, he affords us a little more-or-less excellent fooling. (Figaro, quoted in Allen 1975b, pp. 49–50).

Implicit in these comments was the view that comic opera, no matter how carefully crafted, was an intrinsically lower form of art. The Athenaeum's review of The Martyr of Antioch expressed a similar complaint:

It might be wished that in some portions Mr Sullivan had taken a loftier view of his theme, but at any rate he has written some most charming music, and orchestration equal, if not superior, to any that has ever proceeded from the pen of an English musician. And, further, it is an advantage to have the composer of HMS Pinafore occupying himself with a worthier form of art. (October 25 1880, quoted in Jacobs, p. 149).

The operas with Gilbert continued to garner high praise. For instance, the Daily Telegraph wrote, "The composer has risen to his opportunity, and we are disposed to account Iolanthe his best effort in all the Gilbertian series" (quoted in Allen 1975b, p. 176). Similarly, the Theatre would say that "the music of Iolanthe is Dr Sullivan's chef d'oeuvre. The quality throughout is more even, and maintained at a higher standard, than in any of his earlier works.... In every respect Iolanthe sustains Dr Sullivan's reputation as the most spontaneous, fertile, and scholarly composer of comic opera this country has ever produced." (William Beatty-Kingston, Theatre, January 1 1883, quoted in Baily 1966, p. 246).

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Knighthood and maturity

Sullivan was knighted in 1883, and serious music critics renewed the charge that the composer was squandering his talent. The Musical Review of that year wrote:

Some things that Mr Arthur Sullivan may do, Sir Arthur ought not to do. In other words, it will look rather more than odd to see announced in the papers that a new comic opera is in preparation, the book by Mr W. S. Gilbert and the music by Sir Arthur Sullivan. A musical knight can hardly write shop ballads either; he must not dare to soil his hands with anything less than an anthem or a madrigal; oratorio, in which he has so conspicuously shone, and symphony, must now be his line. Here is not only an opportunity, but a positive obligation for him to return to the sphere from which he has too long descended. (Quoted in Baily, p. 250).

In Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Sir George Grove, who was an old friend of Sullivan's, recognised the artistry in the Savoy Operas while urging the composer to bigger and better things: "Surely the time has come when so able and experienced a master of voice, orchestra, and stage effect—master, too, of so much genuine sentiment—may apply his gifts to a serious opera on some subject of abiding human or natural interest" (quoted in Baily, p. 250).

The premiere of The Golden Legend at the Leeds Festival in 1886 finally brought Sullivan the acclaim for a serious work that he had previously lacked. For instance, the critic of the Daily Telegraph wrote that "a greater, more legitimate and more undoubted triumph than that of the new cantata has not been achieved within my experience" (quoted in Jacobs, p. 247). Similarly, Louis Engel in The World wrote that it was:

one of the greatest creations we have had for many years. Original, bold, inspired, grand in conception, in execution, in treatment, it is a composition which will make an "epoch" and which will carry the name of its composer higher on the wings of fame and glory. The effect it produced at rehearsal was enormous. The effect of the public performance was unprecedented. (Quoted in Harris, p. IV).

Hopes for a new departure were evident in the Daily Telegraph's review of The Yeomen of the Guard, Sullivan's most serious opera to that point:

The accompaniments...are delightful to hear, and especially does the treatment of the woodwind compel admiring attention. Schubert himself could hardly have handled those instruments more deftly, written for them more lovingly.... We place the songs and choruses in The Yeomen of the Guard before all his previous efforts of this particular kind. Thus the music follows the book to a higher plane, and we have a genuine English opera, forerunner of many others, let us hope, and possibly significant of an advance towards a national lyric stage. (Quoted in Allen 1975b, p. 312).

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The 1890s

The advance the Daily Telegraph was looking for would come with Ivanhoe (1891), which opened to largely favourable reviews, but attracted some significant negative ones. For instance, J. A. Fuller-Maitland wrote in The Times that the opera's "best portions rise so far above anything else that Sir Arthur Sullivan has given to the world, and have such force and dignity, that it is not difficult to forget the drawbacks which may be found in the want of interest in much of the choral writing, and the brevity of the concerted solo parts. (Quoted in Jacobs, p. 331).

In the 1890s, Sullivan's successes were fewer and far between. The ballet Victoria and Merrie England (1898) won praise from most critics:

Sir Arthur Sullivan's music is music for the people. There is no attempt made to force on the public the dullness of academic experience. The melodies are all as fresh as last year's wine, and as exhilirating as sparkling champagne. There is not one tune which tires the hearing, and in the matter of orchestration our only humorous has let himself run riot, not being handicapped with libretto, and the gain is enormous.... All through we have orchestration of infinite delicacy, tunes of alarming simplicity, but never a tinge of vulgarity, and a total absence of the cymbal-brassy combination which some ballets never do without. (Quoted in Tillett 1998, p. 26).

After The Rose of Persia (1899), the Daily Telegraph said that "The musician is once again absolutely himself," while the Musical Times opined that "it is music that to hear once is to want to hear again and again" (quoted in Jacobs, p. 397).

In 1899, Sullivan composed a popular song, "The Absent-Minded Beggar," to a text by Rudyard Kipling, donating the proceeds of the sale to "the wives and children of soldiers and sailors" on active service in the Boer War. Writing for The Times, Fuller-Maitalnd wondered, "......how can the composer of Onward, Christian Soldiers and The Absent-Minded Beggar claim a place in the hierarchy of music among the men who would face death rather than smirch their singing-robes for the sake of fleeting popularity?" [1] But Sullivan himself asked a friend, "Did the idiot expect the words to be set in cantata form, or as a developed composition with symphonic introduction, contrapuntal treatment, etc.?" (quoted in Jacobs, p. 396).

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Posthumous reputation

If the musical establishment never quite forgave Sullivan for condescending to write music that was both comic and popular, he was nevertheless the nation's de facto composer laureate. He was considered the natural candidate to compose a Te Deum for the end of the Boer War (which he did not live to see). On his death, Queen Victoria insisted upon his burial in St. Paul's Cathedral, overriding his wishes to be buried with his family in Brompton Cemetary.

But over the next decade, Sullivan's reputation would sink considerably. Shortly after the composer's death, J. A. Fuller-Maitland took issue with the generally praiseworthy tone of most of the obituaries, citing the composer's failure to live up to the early praise of his Tempest music:

Among the lesser men who are still ranked with the great composers there are many who may only have reached the highest level now and then, but within whose capacity it lies to attain great heights; some may have produced work on a dead-level of mediocrity but may have risen on some special occasion to a pitch of beauty or power which would establish their claim to be numbered among the great. Is there anywhere a case quite parallel to that of Sir Arthur Sullivan, who began his career with a work which at once stamped him as a genius, and to the height of which he only rarely attained throughout life?....

Though the illustrious masters of the past never did write music as vulgar, it would have been forgiven them if they had, in virtue of the beauty and value of the great bulk of their productions. It is because such great natural gifts – gifts greater, perhaps, than fell to any English musician since the time of Purcell – were so very seldom employed in work worthy of them.... If the author of The Golden Legend, the music to The Tempest, Henry VIII and Macbeth cannot be classed with these, how can the composer of Onward Christian Soldiers and The Absent-Minded Beggar claim a place in the hierarchy of music among the men who would face death rather than smirch their singing robes for the sake of a fleeting popularity? (Eden 1992, quoting Cornhill March 1901, pp. 301, 309).

Edward Elgar, to whom Sullivan had been particularly kind, branded Fuller-Maitland's obituary "the shady side of musical criticism...that foul unforgettable episode" (quoted in Young 1971, p. 264).

In his History of Music in England (1907), Ernest Walker was even more damning of Sullivan:

After all, Sullivan is merely the idle singer of an empty evening; with all his gift for tunefulness he could never raise it to the height of a real strong melody of the kind that appeals to cultured and relatively uncultured alike as a good folk-song does – often and often on the other hand (but chiefly outside the operas) it sunk to mere vulgar catchiness. He laid the original foundations of his success on work that as a matter of fact he did extremely well; and it would have been incalculably better for the permanence of his reputation if he had realised this and set himself, with sincerity and self-criticism, to the task of becoming – as he might easily have become – a really great composer of musicianly light music. But anything like steadiness of artistic purpose was never one of his endowments, and without that a composer, whatever his technical ability may be, is easily liable, to degenerate into a mere popularity-hunting trifler. (Walker 1907, quoted in Eden 1992).

Fuller-Maitland would incorporate similar views in the second edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which he edited, while Walker's History would be re-issued in 1923 and 1956 with his earlier verdict intact. As late as 1966, Frank Howes wrote:

Outside the Savoy operas little enough of Sullivan has survived.... Yet a post-mortem is a valuable form of inquest not only to ascertain the cause of death but to discover why Sullivan's music as a whole had not in it the seeds of the revival that was on the verge of taking place. The lack of sustained effort, that is artistic effort proved by vigorous self-criticism, is responsible for the impression of weakness, the streaks of poor stuff among the better metal, and the consequent general ambiguity that is left by his music. His contemporaries deprecated his addiction to high life, the turf, and an outward lack of seriousness. Without adopting the simplified morality of the women's magazines it is possible to urge that his contemporaries were really right, in that such addiction implied a fundamental lack of seriousness towards his art. (Howes 1966, quoted in Eden 1992).

Yet, there were other writers who came to Sullivan's defence. Indeed, in an entire chapter of his 1928 book Sullivan's Comic Operas titled "Mainly in Defence," Thomas F. Dunhill wrote:

It should not be necessary to defend a writer who is so firmly established in popular esteem that his best works are more widely known and more keenly appreciated over a quarter of a century after his death than they were at any period during his lifetime.

But no critical appreciation of Sullivan can be attempted to-day which does not, from the first, adopt a defensive attitude, for his music has suffered in an extraordinary degree from the vigorous attacks which have been made upon it in professional circles. These attacks have succeeded in surrouinding the composer with a kind of barricade of prejudice which must be sweat away before justice can be ddone to his genius. (Dunhill 1928, p. 13).

Gervase Hughes (1959) would pick up the trail where Dunhill left off:

Dunhill's achievement was that of a pioneer, a preliminary skirmish in a campaign whose advance has yet to be implemented. Today there may be few musicians for whom — as for Ernest Walker — Sullivan is merely 'the idle singer of an empty evening'; there are many who, while acknowledging his great gifts, tend to take them for granted.... The time is surely ripe for a comprehensive study of his music as a whole which, while recognising that the operettas 'for his chief title to fame' will not leave the rest out of account, and while taking note of his weaknesses (which are many) and not hesitating to castigate his lapses from good taste (which were comparatively rare) will attempt to view them in perspective against the wider background of his sound musicianship. (Hughes 1959, p. 6).

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Recent views

In recent years, Sullivan's work outside of the Savoy Operas has begun to be re-assessed. It has only been since the late 1960s that a quantity of his non-Savoy music has been professionally recorded. The Symphony in E had its first professional recording in 1968; The Golden Legend in 2001. Of his operas apart from Gilbert, Cox and Box had its first professional recording in 1961; The Rose of Persia in 1999; The Contrabandista in 2004.

In a 2000 article for the Musical Times, Nigel Burton wrote:

We must assert that Sullivan has no need to be 'earnest' (though he could be), for he spoke naturally to all people, for all time, of the passions, sorrows and joys which are forever rooted in the human consciousness. He believed, deeply, in the moral expressed at the close of Cherubini's Les deux journees: that the human being's prime duty in life is to serve humanity. It is his artistic consistency in this respect which obliges us to pronounce him our greatest Victorian composer. Time has now sufficiently dispersed the mists of criticism for us to be able to see the truth, to enjoy all his music, and to rejoice in the rich diversity of its panoply. Now, therefore, one hundred years after his death, let us resolve to set aside the `One-and-a-half-hurrahs' syndrome once and for all, and, in its place, raise THREE LOUD CHEERS. [2]

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