Gilbert and Sullivan

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

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. Many cities and schools have their own amateur and professional Gilbert and Sullivan performing groups. The Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and The Mikado in particular, shaped the American musical of the 20th century.

1 History
2 Cultural influence
3 Collaborations
4 Alternative versions
- 4.1 Non-English language versions
- 4.2 Gilbert & Sullivan inspired Ballets
5 Well-known Gilbert & Sullivan actors
6 See also
7 References
8 Further reading
9 External links

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History

Image:Gilbert-GS.JPG Image:Sullivan-GS.JPG

The first Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration was Thespis (1871). At the time, Gilbert was widely known for for the Bab Ballads, a popular series of illustrated light verse. In the 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 ""Captain 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 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). No one at the time anticipated that it 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. [1]

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. [2]

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. [3]

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. 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 Ruth, the piratical maid-of-all-work. Relatively unknown performers whom Gilbert and Sullivan engaged for The Sorcerer 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; and Richard Temple, the bass-baritone.

Gilbert and Sullivan scored their first international success with H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), satirizing the Royal Navy and the English obsession with social status. 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. Patience (1881) satirized the aesthetic movement in general, and the poet and aesthete Algernon Swinburne in particular. 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. Princess Ida (1884) spoofed women's education.

Their most successful work was The Mikado (1885), which made fun of English bureaucracy in a Japanese setting. Ruddigore (1887) was a topsy-turvy take on Victorian melodrama. The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), their only joint work with a serious ending, concerned a strolling jester who is caught 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." [4]

Throughout their collaboration, Gilbert and Sullivan quarreled occasionally over the choice of a subject. After Princess Ida and Ruddigore, both of which were comparatively unsuccessful by the partnership's own standards, 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 as it had before.

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." [5]

Sullivan sided with Carte, who was building a new 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 operas with other collaborators. Once the squabble was finally resolved, they 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 were also 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.

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Cultural influence

Many cultural movements saw the influence of Gilbert and Sullivan. For instance, aestheticism, the cultural movement characterized by Oscar Wilde and satirized in Patience, was actually introduced to the United States by Richard D'Oyly Carte (who ran a lecture agency, in addition to his theatre) in order that Americans could understand the operetta. In terms of humour, the idea of extending a joke throughout a piece of literature and/or comedy work is prevalent in the Savoy Operas.

In 1992 Curtis Hanson's film The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, the entire score consisted of songs from various Gilbert and Sullivan's operettes.

In 1999 Mike Leigh's film Topsy-Turvy presented an acclaimed film depiction of the team and the creation of their most popular operetta, The Mikado.

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 operetta 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).

The Popeye theme song was apparently directly inspired by G & S. The first two phrases

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man, I'm Popeye the Sailor Man

are nearly identical to the first two phrases of the "Oh better far to live and die" song from The Pirates of Penzance

For I am a Pirate King! (Hoorah for the Pirate King!)

except for the high note on the first "King".

Another song from "Pirates", which starts "With cat-like tread..." leads up to a segment that starts "Come, friends who plough the sea..." which is more recognizable with its modern lyric, "Hail, hail, the gang's all here..."

Allan Sherman sang several parodies...

I'm called Little Butterball (about Allan's admitted corpulence)
When I was a lad I went to Yale (about a young advertising agent)
You need an analyst, a psychoanalyst (a variant on "I've got a little list")
Titwillow (about a Yiddish-talking bird that meets a sad fate)

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

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"?

In the early 1980s, around the time of the straight version of "Pirates" starring Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt, there was a parody (or "updated") film called The Pirate Movie starring Christopher Atkins and Kristy McNichol. The film Chariots of Fire also draws much from the G & S repertoire.

Some other references:

The popular TV series Family Guy drew from Gilbert and Sullivan with a parody of the Captain's Song from H.M.S. Pinafore.
Larry David's show Curb Your Enthusiasm uses Three Little Maids from The Mikado as background music.
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 the ninth Star Trek feature film Star Trek: Insurrection the characters Captain Picard, Worf and Data sing "A British Tar" from H.M.S. Pinafore.
The character Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark sings Pinafore tunes when he is excited or overjoyed.
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 broke into "Three Little Maids" from The Mikado.
The episode "And It's Surely To Their Credit" (2x05) of The West Wing has several references of Gilbert and Sullivan works, 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 Pirates of Penzance over the closing credits of one episode, much to Doctor Franklin's distress.

The VeggieTales series references 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' office wall include posters for two Gilbert and Sullivan plays (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 was loosely inspired by Pirates of Penzance.

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Collaborations

Thespis, or, The Gods Grown Old (1871)
Trial by Jury (1875)
The Sorcerer (1877)
H.M.S. Pinafore, or, The Lass That Loved a Sailor (1878)
The Pirates of Penzance, or, The Slave of Duty (1879)
The Martyr of Antioch (cantata) (1880) (Gilbert modified the poem by Dean Milman)
Patience, or Bunthorne's Bride (1881)
Iolanthe, or, The Peer and the Peri (1882)
Princess Ida, or, Castle Adamant (1884)
The Mikado, or, The Town of Titipu (1885)
Ruddigore, or, The Witch's Curse (1887)
The Yeomen of the Guard, or, The Merryman and his Maid (1888)
The Gondoliers, or, The King of Barataria (1889)
Utopia, Limited, or, The Flowers of Progress (1893)
The Grand Duke, or, The Statutory Duel (1896)

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Alternative versions

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Non-English language versions

Die Piraten - German language version of "The Pirates of Penzance."

Gilbert and Sullivan operas have been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Portugese, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Swedish, Estonian and many others.

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