Gilbert and Sullivan

• 1. Introduction

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  Gilbert and Sullivan turned a dispute over a lobby carpet into the end of the most profitable partnership the Victorian stage had known. In April 1890, during the run of The Gondoliers, the dramatist W. S. Gilbert objected that Richard D'Oyly Carte had charged a new carpet for the Savoy Theatre to the partnership accounts. Gilbert stormed out. He later wrote that it was a mistake to kick down the ladder by which Carte had risen.

  This was the quarrel that nearly buried fourteen comic operas. Between 1871 and 1896, Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan wrote works that are still performed throughout the English-speaking world. H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado are among the best known. How did a witty barrister and a knighted composer of oratorios come to share a stage? Why did Sullivan keep asking to leave? And how did lines like "let the punishment fit the crime" enter the English language? The answers run from a Greek-gods extravaganza that is now lost to a company that gave well over 35,000 performances.

• 2. Topsy-Turvy Worlds

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  Fairies rub elbows with British lords. Flirting becomes a capital offence. Gondoliers ascend to the monarchy, and pirates turn out to be noblemen who have gone astray. These were the fanciful worlds Gilbert built, where each absurdity is taken to its logical conclusion. He developed this "topsy-turvy" style first in the Bab Ballads, his series of illustrated poems begun when he started writing illustrated stories, poems and articles in 1861.

  The director and playwright Mike Leigh described the "Gilbertian" style as one where, with great fluidity and freedom, Gilbert continually challenges our natural expectations. He makes bizarre things happen and turns the world on its head, so the Learned Judge marries the Plaintiff and soldiers metamorphose into aesthetes. Leigh wrote that Gilbert's genius was to fuse opposites with an imperceptible sleight of hand, to tell a perfectly outrageous story in a completely deadpan way.

  Gilbert insisted his worlds be played straight. He sought realism in acting and shunned self-conscious interaction with the audience. His standard of characterisation required that the characters were never aware of their own absurdity. He insisted actors know their words perfectly and obey his stage directions, something new to many actors of the day. He had followed the playwright and theatrical reformer Tom Robertson in developing his theories on stage direction.

  G. K. Chesterton compared The Mikado to Swift's Gulliver's Travels, writing that Gilbert pursued the evils of modern England till they had literally not a leg to stand on. Chesterton doubted there was a single joke in the play that fits the Japanese, but all the jokes fit the English. About England, he wrote, the character Pooh-bah is something more than a satire; he is the truth.

• 3. Two Careers Before The Meeting

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  Gilbert was born in London on the 18th of November 1836, the son of a naval surgeon, William, who later wrote novels and short stories, some illustrated by his son. When Gilbert began writing, theatre in Britain was in disrepute. He helped reform its respectability, especially through six short family-friendly comic operas, or "entertainments", for Thomas German Reed. At a rehearsal for one of these, Ages Ago, in 1870, the composer Frederic Clay introduced Gilbert to his friend, the young composer Arthur Sullivan.

  Sullivan was born in London on the 13th of May 1842, six years Gilbert's junior. His father was a military bandmaster, and by the age of eight Arthur was proficient with every instrument in the band. In 1856 he received the first Mendelssohn Scholarship and studied at the Royal Academy of Music, then at Leipzig, where he took up conducting. His graduation piece, a suite of incidental music to Shakespeare's The Tempest, was performed at the Crystal Palace in 1862 and was an immediate sensation.

  Sullivan built a reputation as England's most promising young composer. He wrote a symphony, a concerto, and overtures including the Overture di Ballo in 1870, plus the oratorio The Prodigal Son in 1869. These commissions were not enough to keep him afloat, so he worked as a church organist and composed hymns, popular songs and parlour ballads, among them "Onward, Christian Soldiers" in 1872.

  Sullivan's first comic opera was Cox and Box in 1866, written with the librettist F. C. Burnand for an informal gathering of friends. Gilbert, then writing dramatic criticism for the magazine Fun, judged that Sullivan's score was in many places of too high a class for the grotesquely absurd plot to which it was wedded. The two men had reviewed and met each other before they ever worked together.

• 4. The Producer Behind It All

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  Richard D'Oyly Carte's real ambition was to develop an English form of light opera that would displace the bawdy burlesques and badly translated French operettas then dominating the London stage. Managing the Royalty Theatre, he needed a short opera as an afterpiece to Offenbach's La Périchole. He knew Gilbert had written a libretto for the producer-conductor Carl Rosa, a project cancelled by the death of Rosa's wife in childbirth, and suggested Sullivan write a score for it.

  Trial by Jury was composed and staged in a matter of weeks in 1875, after Gilbert read the piece to Sullivan in February and the composer was delighted. The spoof of the law concerns a breach of promise of marriage suit, resolved when the judge marries the lovely plaintiff himself. With Sullivan's brother Fred as the Learned Judge, it was a runaway hit, outlasting the run of La Périchole.

  Fred Sullivan became the prototype for the "patter" comic baritone roles in the later operas. Burnand wrote that Fred was one of the most naturally comic little men he ever came across, and the very kindliest. Each later opera would feature such a comic little man, usually given the speedy patter songs and often the leading role.

  Carte built the large, modern Savoy Theatre during the run of Patience in 1881. It was the first theatre, and the world's first public building, to be lit entirely by electric lighting. He founded the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, which performed and promoted the works for more than a century. When the disgruntled former investors in Pinafore sent thugs to seize the scenery during a performance, stagehands warded them off, clearing the way for Carte to form that company.

• 5. Building Stars And A System

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  George Grossmith, Rutland Barrington, Richard Temple and Jessie Bond were relatively unknown when Gilbert and Sullivan engaged them early in the collaboration. They stayed with the company for many years and became stars of the Victorian stage. Grossmith was the principal comic, Barrington the lyric baritone, Temple the bass-baritone, and Bond the mezzo-soprano soubrette.

  Before The Sorcerer in 1877, Gilbert had built his plays around whatever established stars the theatre already had, as with Thespis and Trial by Jury. After it, he no longer hired stars. He created them. He and Sullivan selected the performers and wrote for ensemble casts rather than individuals.

  The repertory system meant the same comic patter character recurred across the operas. The actor who played the sorcerer John Wellington Wells would become Sir Joseph Porter, ruler of the Queen's navy, in H.M.S. Pinafore, then Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance. Mrs. Partlet in The Sorcerer transformed into Little Buttercup in Pinafore, then into Ruth, the piratical maid-of-all-work in Pirates.

  H.M.S. Pinafore relied on stock character types familiar from European opera: the heroic tenor and his soprano love-interest, the contralto older woman with a secret, the baffled lyric baritone father, and a bass-baritone villain. To these Gilbert and Sullivan added the comic patter-singing character. The result, with Gilbert overseeing sets and costumes and Sullivan the musical preparation, was a crispness and polish new to the English musical theatre.

• 6. The Run Of Hits

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  H.M.S. Pinafore ran in London for 571 performances in 1878, an exceptional run for the period, and scored the team's first international hit. It satirised the rise of unqualified people to authority and poked good-natured fun at the Royal Navy and the English obsession with social status. Hundreds of unauthorised, or "pirated", productions appeared in America.

  The Pirates of Penzance premiered in New York on New Year's Eve in 1879, in an unsuccessful attempt to secure the American copyright. Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte tried for years to control American performance rights without success. The opera revisited Pinafore's theme through the "modern Major-General", who knows everything except the military, and ended with peers resuming their ranks and legislative duties. It later enjoyed 1981 Broadway and 1982 West End revivals by Joseph Papp.

  The Mikado in 1885 made fun of English bureaucracy, thinly disguised by a Japanese setting. A Japanese village exhibition had opened in Knightsbridge, London, making the time ripe. Gilbert said he could not give a good reason for the piece being laid in Japan, but that it afforded scope for picturesque treatment, scenery and costume. It became the partnership's longest-running hit at 672 performances and remains the most frequently performed Savoy Opera.

  Iolanthe opened the Savoy in 1882, its fully electric stage making possible sparkling magic wands for the female chorus of fairies. The Daily Telegraph called it Sullivan's best effort in all the Gilbertian series. On the 13th of May 1883, at a party for Sullivan's 41st birthday, guests including the Prince of Wales heard a direct relay of parts of Iolanthe from the Savoy, probably the first live "broadcast" of an opera.

• 7. A Composer Divided

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  During the run of Iolanthe, in 1883, Sullivan was knighted by Queen Victoria, the honour conferred for his services to serious music rather than for the operas that had earned his broadest fame. The musical establishment and many critics believed this should end his career in comic opera, holding that a musical knight should not stoop below oratorio or grand opera.

  Sullivan increasingly viewed his work with Gilbert as unimportant, beneath his skills, and repetitious. He was unhappy that he had to simplify his music so Gilbert's words could be heard. Paradoxically, in February 1883, just after Iolanthe opened, he had signed a five-year agreement with Gilbert and Carte requiring a new comic opera on six months' notice.

  Gilbert and Sullivan disagreed several times over the choice of subject, often clashing over Gilbert's repeated proposal of a "lozenge" plot in which a magic lozenge would change the characters. Sullivan found it artificial and lacking in human interest and probability. As dramatised in the film Topsy-Turvy, the two were at an impasse until the 8th of May 1884, when Gilbert dropped the lozenge idea and agreed to a libretto without any supernatural elements.

  The tension grew from opposing personalities. Gilbert was often confrontational and notoriously thin-skinned, though prone to acts of extraordinary kindness. Sullivan eschewed conflict. After both Princess Ida and Ruddigore, the two operas less successful than their others, Sullivan asked to leave the partnership. On the 12th of March 1889, during the run of The Yeomen of the Guard, he wrote to Gilbert that he had lost the liking for writing comic opera and entertained grave doubts as to his power of doing it. He insisted the next opera be a grand opera.

• 8. The Quarrel And After

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  Gilbert wrote to Sullivan on the 5th of May 1890 that the time for putting an end to their collaboration had at last arrived, giving Carte notice that no more of his libretti were to be performed after Christmas 1890. The carpet was only one of several disputed items. As biographer Andrew Crowther explained, the real issue was whether Carte could be trusted with the financial affairs of Gilbert and Sullivan.

  Gilbert lost his temper and brought a lawsuit against Carte. He later cited an admitted unintentional overcharge of nearly one thousand pounds in the electric lighting accounts alone. Sullivan supported Carte with an affidavit erroneously stating that legal expenses from Gilbert's 1884 battle with Lillian Russell were outstanding, when they had already been paid. When Gilbert asked for a retraction, Sullivan refused. Sullivan had reasons to stay in Carte's good graces, since Carte was building a new theatre to produce his only grand opera, Ivanhoe.

  Gilbert won the lawsuit, but the partnership had been so profitable that Carte and his wife Helen sought to reunite the author and composer. After many failed attempts, their music publisher Tom Chappell stepped in to mediate, and within two weeks he succeeded. Two further collaborations followed. Utopia, Limited in 1893 was a very modest success, and The Grand Duke in 1896 was an outright failure.

  The last time they met was at the Savoy Theatre on the 17th of November 1898, at the celebration of the 21st anniversary of the first performance of The Sorcerer. They did not speak to each other. Sullivan died in 1900. Gilbert wrote that any memory of their rift had been completely bridged over, and that the most cordial relations existed between them. He recalled that Sullivan, a composer of the rarest genius, was as modest and unassuming as a neophyte should be but seldom is.

  Gilbert was knighted during the first of two repertory seasons he helped Mrs. Carte stage at the Savoy between 1906 and 1909. He died in 1911. The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company toured nearly year-round, performing exclusively the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, until it closed in 1982. During the 20th century, the company gave well over 35,000 performances.

  The operas drove a transformation in amateur theatre. Before the Savoy operas, the writers Cellier and Bridgeman noted, amateur actors were treated with contempt by professionals. After amateur Gilbert and Sullivan companies formed in the 1880s, professionals came to accept them as useful training schools for the legitimate stage. The National Operatic and Dramatic Association, founded in 1899, reported that nearly 200 British troupes performed Gilbert and Sullivan in 1914.

  The debt of the American and British musical was tremendous. Early authors and composers such as Ivan Caryll, P. G. Wodehouse and Victor Herbert admired and copied the team, as later did Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein II and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Gilbert's lyrics served as a model for Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart. Noël Coward wrote that the lyrics and melodies were hummed and strummed into his consciousness at an early age.

  Lines from the operas became part of the English language: "short, sharp shock", "What never? Well, hardly ever!", and "A policeman's lot is not a happy one". Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist added gold stripes to his judicial robes after seeing them used by the Lord Chancellor in a production of Iolanthe. Since 1994, the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival has been held every August in England, where a contemporary critic wrote that the special blend of charm, silliness and gentle satire seems immune to fashion.