An affection for Gilbert and Sullivan has been with me as long as I can remember. When I was a lad I knew all the Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs by heart and performed them incessantly, driving to distraction my sisters and my cousins and my aunts. Indeed I was the very model of a modern major nuisance. Fortunately, for those concerned, I don’t perform those songs anymore. Well . . . hardly ever.
Later in life I came to know Martyn Green, the most famous of G & S comic performers, and I even produced and conducted a rare American performance of the last and least known of the collaborations, “The Grand Duke.” But never mind the why and wherefore. We’re here to talk about Gilbert with and without Sullivan.
At a broad view, Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) was an impeccably trained and accomplished composer with a gift for writing catchy tunes and sometimes reaching real heights of beauty. But except for the Savoy operas with Gilbert, his music has remained a part of the Victorian era and has had little impact on composers who followed.
Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1910), on the other hand, has maintained his importance to this day with near universal admiration for his brilliant wit and skillful use of rhymes. Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, and Oscar Hammerstein are among the well-known lyricists who acknowledged the influence of Gilbert on their writing. Songwriter Johnny Mercer (“Moon River,” “Blues in the Night”) said, “We all come from Gilbert.”
* * *
Gilbert’s father was a naval surgeon who became a novelist and playwright. Sullivan’s father was a bandmaster. (One wonders what the sons would have written if the family settings had been reversed!)
Gilbert was schooled in France and in London. After college he joined the Civil Service and then became a Barrister-at-Law for a while, but not a very successful one since he averaged only five clients a year. His amusing views of the legal profession do show up later in “Trial by Jury” and other of the operas.
During this time and throughout his life Gilbert wrote a remarkable amount of light poetry which he published under the title “Bab Ballads” (Bab was his nickname as a child.) And since he was a talented sketch artist, almost every Bab poem was accompanied with whimsical drawings. Here are a bundle of them on the cover of his collected poems.
These poems provided source material for his plays and comic operas, and gave him a chance to experiment, as in this surprising stanza mixing medical and musical terms.
They played him a sonata – let me see!
“Medulla oblongata” – key of G.
Then they began to sing
That extremely lovely thing,
“Scherzando! ma non troppo, ppp.”
And here’s another Bab Ballad, a piece of poetic concern that every stand-up comedian can relate to. Are there any jokes left?
Quixotic is his enterprise, and hopeless his adventure is,
Who seeks for jocularities that haven’t yet been said.
The world has joked incessantly for over fifty centuries,
And every joke that’s possible has long ago been made.
I started as a humorist with lots of mental fizziness,
But humor is a drug which it’s the fashion to abuse;
For my stock in trade, my fixtures, and the goodwill of the business
No reasonable offer I am likely to refuse.
Oh happy was the humourist – the first that made a pun at all —
Who when a joke occurred to him, however poor and mean,
Was absolutely certain that it never had been done at all —
How popular at dinners must that humourist have been!
Oh the days when some stepfather for the query held a handle out,
The door-mat from the scraper, is it distant very far?
And when no one knew where Moses was when Aaron put the candle out,
And no one had discovered that a door could be a-jar!
For you cannot call it very good, however good your charity —
It’s not the sort of humour that is greeted with a shout —
And I’ve come to the conclusion that the mine of jocularity,
In present Anno Domini, is worked completely out!
Though the notion you may scout,
I can prove beyond a doubt
That the mine of jocularity is utterly worked out!
* * *
By most reports, Sullivan was an amiable fellow. By all reports, Gilbert, as he might have put it himself, could be a quick-tempered, crochety, cantankerous curmudgeon. Well, let’s just say he could be difficult. Some feel that one of his songs from “Princess Ida” was descriptive of his own demeanor, and Gilbert later said, “I thought it was my duty to live up to my reputation!”
If you give me your attention, I will tell you what I am:
I’m a genuine philanthropist — all other kinds are sham.
Each little fault of temper and each social defect
In my erring fellow creatures, I endeavor to correct.
To all their little weaknesses I open people’s eyes;
And little plans to snub the self-sufficient I devise;
I love my fellow creatures — I do all the good I can —
Yet everybody says I’m such a disagreeable man!
And I can’t think why!
To compliments inflated I’ve a withering reply;
And vanity I always do my best to mortify;
A charitable action I can skillfully dissect;
And interested motives I’m delighted to detect;
I know everybody’s income and what everybody earns;
And I carefully compare it with the income-tax returns;
But to benefit humanity however much I plan,
Yet everybody says I’m such a disagreeable man!
And I can’t think why!
It’s likely that Gilbert carried a bit of a chip on his shoulder because Sullivan was knighted in 1883 and Gilbert not until 1907. But to be fair, Sullivan wrote a sizable amount of well-respected serious music including “The Lost Chord” and the ultimate Victorian marching song, “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
In 1889, after twelve productions together, relations between G & S took a sorry turn in what has become known as the Carpet Quarrel. Richard D’Oyly Carte, the owner of the Savoy Theatre where the operas were performed, decided to put in a new carpet and took some of the money out of the writers’ account. Gilbert took umbrage, and when Sullivan sided with management, Gilbert withdrew from the team. For four years before reuniting, G & S wrote with other partners, and achieved a reasonable measure of success. Gilbert’s stage piece with music by Alfred Cellier was called “The Mountebanks”, and it contained a delightfully slangy treatment of Hamlet and Ophelia.
Ophelia was a dainty little maid,
Who loved a very melancholy Dane;
Whose affection of the heart, so it is said,
Preceded his affection of the brain.
Heir-apparent to the Crown,
He thought lightly of her passion.
Having wandered up and down,
In an incoherent fashion.
When she found he wouldn’t wed her
In a river, in a meadder,
Took a header, and a deader
Was Ophelia!
* * *
Things are seldom or at least sometimes not what they seem. Sullivan often complained that Gilbert, the master humorist and craftsman, did not display enough emotion in his verses. But consider the pathos in Jack Point’s closing song in “The Yeoman of the Guard:”
I have a song to sing, O!
(ALL: Sing me your song, O!)
It is sung to the moon
By a love-lorn loon,
Who fled from the mocking throng, O!
It’s the song of a merryman, moping mum,
Whose soul was sad, and whose glance was glum,
Who sipped no sup, and who craved no crumb,
As he sighed for the love of a ladye!
There is also Gilbert’s little known poem called “Only a Dancing Girl” with its touching last stanza. It’s a reaching-out to every anonymous chorus girl.
Only a dancing girl,
With an unromantic style,
With borrowed colour and curl,
With fixed mechanical smile,
With many a hackneyed wile,
With ungrammatical lips,
And corns that mar her trips!
Hung from the “flies” in air,
She acts a palpable lie;
She’s as little a fairy there
As unpoetical I!
I hear you asking, Why —
Why in the world I sing
This tawdry, tinselled thing?
No airy fairy she,
As she hangs in arsenic green,
From a highly impossible tree,
In a highly impossible scene
(Herself not over-clean).
For fays don’t suffer, I’m told,
From bunions, coughs, or cold.
But change her gold and green
For a coarse merino gown,
And see her upon the scene
Of her home, when coaxing down
Her drunken father’s frown,
In his squalid cheerless den:
She’s a fairy truly, then!
Gilbert’s own final stanza at age 74 was emotional enough. There was a lake near his country house, and he heard a young lady, swimming over her depth, crying for help. He plunged in and swam to her and while sustaining her above water died of a heart attack. A nation mourned.
There is a memorial monument to W.S. Gilbert on the Thames River Embankment in London. It reads:
HIS FOE WAS FOLLY
& HIS WEAPON WIT
To which I would add:
HIS RHYMES WERE JOLLY
AND THEY ALWAYS FIT!
* * *
We turn now to our video which celebrates an occasion which would have astonished both Gilbert and Sullivan. It’s a concert performance of H.M.S. Pinafore in Royal Albert Hall in 2005 with a Proms audience of nearly 6,000 in attendance. Imagine!
In this excerpt, singing the role of Sir Joseph Porter K.C.B., is Richard Suart, the reigning patter performer. The conductor is Sir Charles Mackerras.
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: Gilbert With Sullivan
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