W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

English composers

• Arthur Sullivan
• Born: May 13, 1842
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: November 22, 1900
• Place of death: London, England

• W. S. Gilbert
• Born: November 18, 1836
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: May 29, 1911
• Place of death: Grim's Dyke, Harrow Weald, Middlesex, England

In their musical collaborations, Gilbert and Sullivan forged a truly British character for light opera, in the process establishing operetta as a major dramatic subgenre and extending its boundaries to include melodrama, satire, and serious drama. Sullivan was one of the foremost British composers of the nineteenth century; he displayed an amazing range, from overtures and oratorios to operettas and hymns, but is primarily remembered for his collaborations with Gilbert.

Early Lives

William Schwenck Gilbert was the eldest of five children and the only son of William Gilbert, a sometime naval surgeon who became a prolific if not a talented novelist and playwright, and Anne Morris Gilbert, a doctor’s daughter who is remarkable only for the apparent lack of effect she had on her son’s life. When he was a toddler, he was kidnapped at Naples and held for ransom. His abductors demanded and received the princely sum of twenty-five pounds for their trouble, and it is possible that this experience provided part of the impetus behind the plot of The Pirates of Penzance: Or, The Slave of Duty (1879), in which a dim-witted nurse mistakes pirate for pilot, thus beginning the complications that dog young Frederick’s life.

More important than the kidnapping, though, was the influence the elder William Gilbert exerted over his son. The two were entirely alike in temperament: combative, active, confident to a fault. The father instilled in the son an almost unhealthy need to win and an overweening sense of his own worth. This arrogance was Gilbert’s early undoing, for at the Western Grammar School and later at Ealing he was a lazy student, until he realized, with a shock, that he was falling behind other boys whose intellectual capabilities he scorned. He began to apply himself, and at the age of sixteen he became head boy at Ealing, going on to enter King’s College, London, in 1853, and taking his degree in 1857.

The next period in Gilbert’s life looms large in its impact on his career as a dramatist. In 1855, he entered the Inner Temple to study law, and in 1857, the year he took his degree, he joined the militia, beginning twenty years of service there. Both his experiences at the bar and his military service provided grist for Gilbert’s satirical mill, not only in his operettas, but in The Bab Ballads (1869) as well. At any rate, his desire for military service in the Crimea was thwarted when that war inconveniently ended, and his service at the bar, beginning in 1863, was only slightly more successful; he earned only seventy-five pounds in two years.

In the meantime, Gilbert passed the long quiet time in his law office by becoming involved in literary affairs. His first lyric, a translation of the laughing song from Daniel-François-Esprit Auber’s Manon Lescaut, debuted in 1858, and in 1861 Gilbert began contributing to a new satiric magazine, Fun, which would become the principal rival of Punch, to which Gilbert also contributed in 1865. More important, he began his stage-writing career with Dulcamara: Or, The Little Duck and the Great Quack (1866), an operatic burlesque, the first of five that he would produce during the 1860’s. That same year also saw the publication of “The Yarn of the Nancy Bell” and in 1867 The Bab Ballads began to appear in Fun.

In August of 1867, Gilbert married Lucy Blois Turner, a military officer’s daughter. A tall man with a military bearing, Gilbert cut a handsome figure. His short brown hair swept back from his broad forehead and, together with his long muttonchop whiskers, framed a narrow face. A square chin combined with these other attributes to give him a stolid, formidable appearance that seemed to heighten his personal characteristics of stubbornness and feistiness. These characteristics served him well in his literary life, for he was so confident of his talent that he often went over editors’ heads and persuaded the owners of journals to publish his material. For this reason, and because he displayed a genuine talent for satire and parody, his literary career began to flourish, and by 1869, when he first met Arthur Sullivan, he had already achieved considerable success.

Six years younger than Gilbert, Arthur Seymour Sullivan was the second child of Thomas and Mary Coghlan Sullivan. Thomas Sullivan was a poor military musician and band director who provided his sons with a very early introduction to music, to which Arthur immediately took. Before he was twelve, young Arthur had mastered practically every instrument in the band. Singing and composing were Arthur’s fortes, and they gained for him entry to the Chapel Royal, even though, at the age of twelve, he was three years beyond the maximum age for admission. There he won, at the age of fourteen, the first Mendelssohn scholarship, an award that allowed him, two years later, to pursue his studies in Leipzig, at the conservatorium founded there by Felix Mendelssohn himself.

Thus began almost three years of incredible success for such a young musician. If Sullivan had been a prodigy before, he was now a marvel whose compositions gained public performance along with those of far more renowned artists. Indeed, his String Quartet in D Minor was played twice in rapid succession, a rare honor at that time, and both times the piece was received well. In addition, he was accorded the privilege of conducting the orchestra in its performance of his overture to a poem by Thomas Moore, an unheard-of honor for a mere student. The one-year scholarship had been extended for a second year, and at the end of that time, Sullivan was invited to stay on for further study, tuition-free. His masters were reluctant to see him go. Finally he was forced by financial exigency to return to London, where he faced his future with some trepidation. After the triumph in Leipzig, Sullivan feared that the know-it-all London critics would be waiting to ambush him.

Sullivan’s worries were needless. His return to London in the spring of 1861 passed largely unnoticed. Like any young artist, he settled in for a period of struggle that, for him, would not last long. This short, olive-skinned, dark-eyed and curly-haired youth with an open and appealing manner was too talented to go unnoticed for long. An engaging young man, Sullivan soon attracted influential acquaintances, and by 1862 his The Tempest music debuted with the Crystal Palace orchestra, and public and critical acclaim followed. From that time Sullivan’s reputation grew, and by 1866, his anno mirabilis, it soared. He was appointed professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music. Later that year, his In Memoriam , a musical response to the death of his father, firmly established him as the great hope of English music. He was twenty-four years old.

Lives’ Work

As the 1860’s progressed, Arthur Sullivan’s reputation grew. He took on the specter of Georg Frideric Handel with The Prodigal Son , an oratorio, and in that year he was accorded an honor unprecedented in one so young: The queen requested a copy of his complete works. Sullivan, however, always eager to extend his range of accomplishment, began what would become his greatest achievement, the resurrection of light opera in Great Britain. His early collaborator was F. C. Burnand, with whom he wrote, among other productions, The Contrabandistas (1867) and Cox and Box (1867), works that bore a strongly Continental flavor reminiscent of Gioacchino Rossini and Charles-François Gounod. These two operettas achieved growing popularity, and the form was on its way.

Meanwhile, William Gilbert was achieving a measure of prominence as a drama critic who wrote parodic reviews for Fun and as a librettist in his own right, providing plays and librettos for German Reed’s Royal Gallery of Illustration. At a rehearsal for one of these productions, the two men who would transform light opera into English operetta met, in 1869, but the meeting produced no immediate reaction. Sullivan was involved in a successful collaboration with Burnand, and Gilbert, at the time, was happy producing librettos for Frederic Clay and German Reed. Not until 1871 did Gilbert and Sullivan first collaborate, and then the product, Thespis: Or, The Gods Grown Old , was less than a triumph, for it closed within a month. That first stumbling effort was marked, nevertheless, by the kind of sensitive relationship between music and lyrics that would come to characterize Gilbert and Sullivan’s work and, as a result of their leadership, the English operetta.

Four years passed, during which Sullivan displayed his versatility, attempting oratorios, hymns (among which is “Onward Christian Soldiers,” 1874), and further involvements with both the serious and the comic stages. The awards and commissions rolled in, and he became universally recognized as the premier composer in Great Britain. Meanwhile, Gilbert was also achieving a large measure of success. His Pygmalion and Galatea (1871) earned for him forty thousand pounds, he continued to write serious dramas, and The Bab Ballads had also won for him separate recognition as a poet. Both men were rich and famous before they experienced success together, but in 1875 events started to unfold that would firmly establish them as a team.

Gilbert had written a libretto based on a satiric mock trial that he had sketched for an 1868 issue of Fun. During a visit to Richard D’Oyly Carte, he found that that impresario was looking for a curtain raiser for Jacques Offenbach’s La Périchole. Carte suggested that Gilbert write something that Arthur Sullivan could set to music, and the result, Trial by Jury , became not the curtain raiser but the main attraction. It opened March 25, 1875, and enjoyed a run of almost nine months. It was the first success for Gilbert and Sullivan, and their first teaming under the auspices of Carte. The success of this short operetta was a sign of things to come.

Though both men continued for a time to seek their separate fortunes, the team became famous in 1878 with the production of H.M.S. Pinafore: Or, The Lass That Loved a Sailor . Thus began a trying period of success for both. Together they completely reformed comic opera, moving operetta from the status of one-act light entertainment to full three-act main event, yet separately each man wished for a different kind of success. Gilbert longed to be taken seriously as a playwright, only giving up his dream in 1888, after the failure of Brantinghame Hall . Sullivan continued to think of himself as a serious composer, and he often chafed at what he believed was the disproportionate amount of attention the public paid to his operettas. The team became fabulously wealthy and famous as a result of their innovative efforts in operetta, yet both men felt stifled by that success, deprived of what each thought to be true destiny.

Despite their resentment of the operettas, the partners experienced one success after another. The Pirates of Penzance, their second full-blown operetta, led to American tours of both that operetta and H.M.S. Pinafore, and in 1881 the team debuted Patience: Or, Bunthorne’s Bride , a spoof of the Aesthetic movement, which opened in April and moved in October into Carte’s new theater, the Savoy, which was designed and built expressly for operetta. Iolanthe followed in 1882, Princess Ida: Or, Castle Adamant in 1884, The Mikado: Or, The Town of Titipu in 1885, Ruddigore: Or, The Witch’s Curse in 1887, The Yeoman of the Guard: Or, The Merryman and His Maid in 1888, and The Gondoliers: Or, The King of Barataria in 1889.

The collaboration had been fruitful indeed, but the two men were not without their problems. Always combative, Gilbert was jealous of Sullivan’s fame; he tended to bully the quieter Sullivan, who nevertheless believed that he, Sullivan, was the superior artist. The two fought often, several times breaking off their partnership, even during the periods of their greatest success. During the years from 1884 until 1890, Carte acted as referee, keeping the team together and smoothing over the affronts and slights, real and imagined. In 1890, however, Gilbert began a dispute that has become known as the carpet quarrel, an argument that ended in the dissolution of the partnership and in Gilbert’s successful lawsuit against Carte.

The split lasted for three years, at which time Carte managed to bring Gilbert and Sullivan back together for Utopia, Limited: Or, The Flowers of Progress (1893) and The Grand Duke: Or, The Statutory Duel (1896), their last operetta. In 1900, Sullivan, always physically weak and troubled, from the 1870’s onward, by serious recurrent kidney problems, contracted a cold that progressed into bronchitis. He refused to rest, and on November 21, his heart gave way. He died the next day. Gilbert also died of heart failure. On May 29, 1911, he rushed to the rescue of a woman who was drowning in a pond on his estate, Grim’s Dyke, and the exertion proved to be too much for Gilbert’s seventy-five-year-old heart.

Significance

During their long and tempestuous relationship, Gilbert and Sullivan accomplished much, both together and separately. Sullivan’s musical accomplishments, though overshadowed by the operettas, resulted in a resurgence in serious British music, for his fame and fortune made music a more respectable profession. Sullivan and Burnand resurrected comic opera, establishing it as a financially successful theatrical form. Sullivan brought the art of writing musical scores to a new height, providing all of his collaborators with music that enhanced but never detracted from their words. His scores complemented the librettos, a relationship that led to both the establishment of the musical theater and the increasing use of music as theatrical accompaniment. Today’s theater orchestras and film scores owe much to Sullivan’s pioneering work in the Victorian theater.

Gilbert, too, made his individual contribution. His nonsense verse, The Bab Ballads, made a major contribution to the genre. His muse was more acerbic than that of Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll, and he reestablished satire as a major subject for popular poetry. This vein he pursued avidly in his librettos, in which he lampooned his own abortive careers of law, the military, and even poetry. He rolled back the restrictions that Victorian society had long placed on the theater, determinedly and often gleefully violating conventional propriety with such exuberance and with such a deft comic touch that audiences and censors alike laughed, and acceded. Gilbert may not have achieved his dearest goal, that of becoming a serious poet and playwright, but his verse, in the form of librettos, forced open the narrow parameters of the English stage, preparing the way for the giants of early twentieth century British drama.

Together, Gilbert and Sullivan almost single-handedly reinvented musical theater. Before them, operetta was lightly regarded. It had arisen in response to the Licensing Acts that, from 1739 through 1843, restricted plays with spoken dialogue to a limited number of theaters: In London, only Covent Garden and Drury Lane could produce actual drama. Operetta, in which the lines were sung, not spoken, combined with pantomime and tableau to form a program entertainment in houses such as German Reed’s. It was Gilbert and Sullivan, however, who raised operetta to the stature of main attraction, ultimately propelling it to the point at which a full-length operetta was the only item on the evening’s bill of entertainment. Their financial success brought actors, artists, money, and, more important, attention and respectability to the British stage, and their expansion of operetta from one-act play to full-length production laid the foundation for modern musical theater, most especially the modern musical.

Bibliography

Ainger, Michael. Gilbert and Sullivan: A Dual Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. A biography, comparing the backgrounds, personalities, and artistic aspirations of Gilbert and Sullivan. Ainger argues the pair’s success was a result of their clashing personalities, with each man forcing the other to create his best work. Includes previously unpublished draft librettos and personal letters.

Bradley, Ian, ed. The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Contains the complete works of Gilbert and Sullivan with extensive annotations and commentary on the text and stage directions. An informative book that describes the basis for each opera, identifies the real people mentioned therein, and more.

Goldberg, Isaac. The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan: Or, The “Compleat” Savoyard. New York: AMS Press, 1928. Reprint. 1970. A gossipy but detailed and fairly reliable account of the lives and careers of Gilbert and Sullivan, together and apart.

Helyar, James, ed. Gilbert and Sullivan. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1972. A collection of essays covering much territory; includes essays by scholars who led the movement to reevaluate Gilbert and Sullivan’s work.

Jones, John Bush, ed. W. S. Gilbert: A Centenary of Scholarship and Commentary. New York: New York University Press, 1970. Spanning the century from 1868 to 1968, Jones’s judiciously chosen collection provides a solid introduction to Gilbert’s reputation through the years. The essay by Jane Stedman, in particular, is vital to an understanding of Gilbert’s impact on the theater and the literary world of his day.

Moore, Frank L., ed. The Handbook of Gilbert and Sullivan. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972. An encyclopedic fact book about the famous partnership and all the collaborative productions. The book does not go into depth, but it covers a wide range of material about the operettas and the D’Oyly Carte company.

Stedman, Jane W. W. S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Well-written and accurate biography of Gilbert based on original sources and interviews with surviving contemporaries of the writer.

Wren, Grayden. A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Art of Gilbert and Sullivan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Includes a separate chapter about each opera, arranged in chronological order, providing analysis of the work. Also includes information on the men’s careers before and after their collaboration. Wren analyzes the pair’s legacy, crediting the lasting popularity of their operas to universal themes and the characters’ humanity. Includes an appendix of plot summaries and a bibliography.