Resituating Gilbert & Sullivan: The Musical and Aesthetic Context

3 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan: the musical and aesthetic context benedict taylor Arthur Sullivan’s operas based on W. S. Gilbert’s librettos occupy a strange and to some extent bewildering place in nineteenth-century music. As both an outgrowth of a (so-called) ‘serious’ tradition of operatic culture (as is made witness not only by Sullivan’s rigorous training and fluent proficiency in the mainstream tradition of German music but in the numerous allusions to and parodies of this august operatic lineage contained within these works) and at the same time seemingly the predecessors to a less well-regarded line of operettas, musicals and shows, the Savoy operas dwell in a strange no man’s land between the serious (respectable) and popular (frivolous). This ambivalence is seen as borne out by that strange and still-present formulation, the double-barrelled, bicephalic entity referred to by all as ‘G & S’, even in contexts when only the music is being expressly referred to. At the same time, and not unrelatedly, these works have been afforded a remarkably polarised reception between enormous popular affection and critical opprobrium. To understand how this reception history has come about and where these works might most profitably be situated it is necessary to investigate more deeply the relationship of these pieces to their musical and aesthetic background, the sources, models and inspiration from which this unique series of operas grew, and to explore the impact such aesthetics might have had for their divided critical reception. Musical background and influences The position and reception of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas must be understood within the context of the cultural-sociological state of music in Britain prior to 1870. The considerable artistic culture Britain had was decidedly a literary one, based on common-sense virtues and rational thinking. A distrust of music was deeply rooted in the cultural mentality. Since the eighteenth century, the arts had been perceived by many as dangerously seductive and effeminate, a mischievous foreign influence that would lead to the emasculation of the British traits of reason and common-sense empiricism.1 [36] 37 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan Music was of course the most insubstantial and dangerous of all, in its insidious capacity for infiltration of the emotions and wayward freedom from rational explanation. ‘Music is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment’, wrote Joseph Addison in 1711, ‘but if it would make us incapable of hearing sense, if it would exclude arts that have a much greater tendency to the refinement of human nature; I must confess that I would allow it no better quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his commonwealth’.2 Years later Sullivan himself left the recollection that ‘At any great meeting on the subject of music, archbishops, judges, politicians, financiers – each one . . . will depreciate any knowledge of music with a smug satisfaction, like a man disowning poor relations’.3 Yet obviously there was a love of music among many. The upshot was that music was imported – a profession for foreigners to dabble in, who were of course allowed (even perhaps expected) to be wayward, morally suspect and over-emotional. Hence the extraordinary list of distinguished foreign musicians who were to visit Britain: Handel, J. C. Bach, Haydn, Clementi, Weber and Mendelssohn, to name just a few. As a result, those native talents that aspired to musical eminence found the going tough. Sullivan, like Thomas Beecham almost a century later, would complain of the hardships and obstacles facing the British musician confronted by such foreign competition. There was little institutional provision for ‘serious’ instrumental music, and opera (invariably given in Italian) was there to be chatted over. Britain was not das Land ohne Musik, but the native talent it possessed received scant encouragement from the existing state of society, and the path of musicians such as William Sterndale Bennett or George Macfarren was normally one of slow, sad decline from promising beginnings and overseas recognition, when exposed to accumulated years of public apathy. Music was simply not built into the society and cultural institutions of the country.4 It is against this social and cultural backdrop that the rise of Sullivan’s career to the 1870s and the initiation of his partnership with W. S. Gilbert should be charted. The details of Sullivan’s early career are well known: on winning the first Mendelssohn scholarship in 1856 and gaining a thorough training in that bastion of Germanic music, the Leipzig Conservatory, a performance in 1862 of his graduation piece, music to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, established him overnight as the great hope of English music. Thereafter Sullivan turned his attention to ballet (L’ı̂Ie enchantée), opera (The Sapphire Necklace, 1864, now mostly lost), symphony (1866), a cello concerto, overtures, songs (including the five notable Shakespeare settings and the first English song cycle, The Window, to words by Tennyson), numerous hymn settings and a small number of slight, though charming instrumental pieces. 38 Benedict Taylor The achievement in these works is often considerable; the symphony, for instance, is one of the brightest to emerge from the decades between Schumann and Brahms, and would remain unsurpassed in English music until Elgar four decades later. Stylistically, the influences of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Schubert in particular are felt in the more substantial orchestral works, but from the beginning in The Tempest there is the peculiar, intangible stamp of Sullivan emerging confidently from this familiar background. At the same time, such serious productions would not in themselves keep Sullivan’s body attached to the vertiginous flights of his soul, and in order to make a living he turned increasingly to the lucrative market for songs and ballads, a need which would eventually be satisfied by the financial independence provided by the extraordinary operatic success with Gilbert. The operatic backdrop to the emergence of Gilbert and Sullivan’s form of musical theatre in the 1870s is multifaceted. Standing behind any English operatic work of the time is the earlier tradition of ballad opera, a genre not directly relatable to the Savoy operas but present as a general precedent. More recently, the nineteenth century saw the growth of a genre, English Romantic opera, that survived into the twentieth century, even if this tradition is now little known; significant works include John Barnett’s The Mountain Sylph (1834), Michael Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl (1843), W. V. Wallace’s Maritana (1845) and Julius Benedict’s The Lily of Killarney (1862). This heritage provided an immediate context for a more serious (if hardly heavy) English opera, and indeed what we have of Sullivan’s early Sapphire Necklace clearly lies in this tradition. Two influential models can be found for Gilbert and Sullivan’s earliest work: French opéra-bouffe and the English theatrical burlesque. Offenbach’s opéra-bouffe – itself in part an outshoot of Auber’s opéra comique – was the initial impetus for Sullivan’s first comic operatic outing with his friend F. C. Burnand as librettist, Cox and Box, and both The Zoo (to a text by B. C. Stephenson) and Trial by Jury (Gilbert) of 1875 were run as starters to Offenbach works, though they quickly became the main attraction of the evening. Gilbert’s work grew out of the world of burlesque, and his first collaboration with Sullivan, the long-lost Thespis (1871), comes from this more humble stable. In conjunction, Sullivan brought his training in the wider European tradition to bear in his comic operas. He had been exposed to a wide range of operatic music in Leipzig and later at Covent Garden under Costa, besides having prepared vocal scores of numerous repertoire operas.5 Perhaps the most decisive influence and role model for his turn to comic opera was the figure of Rossini, whom Sullivan later claimed was probably the first person who ‘inspired me with a love for the stage and things operatic’.6 Sullivan had met the Italian composer in Paris in 1862 and by all accounts got on splendidly with the ageing master. Beyond this influence, the line of 39 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas in German (Lortzing, Nicolai, Cornelius) and French opéra comique (epitomised by Auber) must have provided notable precedent for his endeavours. Sullivan’s early comic works therefore relate to and stand at the confluence of several traditions. While Offenbach was the immediate catalyst, Sullivan would draw on a wider and deeper reserve for his comic operas. Musical characteristics The qualities indelibly associated with Sullivan scarcely need extensive exposition. Alexander Mackenzie, in an early account that remains one of the most perceptive and understanding to this day, identifies Sullivan’s characteristic ‘gifts of melody, graceful clearness of instrumentation, as well as a dramatic sense (which obtains results by obviously simple means)’.7 To these qualities one could add a deft sense of piquant harmonic colour, and not least a remarkable gift for imaginative and metrically apt word-setting. This latter quality is the one aspect of Sullivan’s compositional technique that has received adequate scholarly attention, and it is worth remembering that if Gilbert’s texts are commonly held up to be a more significant aspect of the combined work than in many other operas, much of the credit must go to Sullivan for enabling the words, in all their wit, to be perceived so clearly in the first place. Indeed, the two creators are the bequeathers of a near-perfect fusion of word and music rarely equalled in the history of musical drama. A further important feature of Sullivan’s music is of course his keen sense of musical humour as a correlate to Gilbert’s own comic gifts. This is seen especially in the use of parody that accompanied Sullivan throughout his career. The delight in parody and humorous pastiche obviously was fairly innate: Clara Barnett, a colleague at Leipzig, left an account of the composer during his student years taking ‘a wicked delight in sitting at the piano and parodying a Rossini cavatina’.8 As has often been noticed, though, Sullivan’s attitude to parody changed gradually across his operas. We see a general progression away from the obviously satirical Cox and Box and Trial by Jury with their often hilarious parodies of operatic tradition, through the sometimes ballad-opera feel of The Sorcerer and HMS Pinafore to the more complex, nuanced relationship of the mature Savoy style to earlier operatic tradition. Increasingly there is the infiltration of characteristic ‘English’ elements – Pinafore’s glees, Ruddigore’s hornpipes, gavottes and older dances (Sorcerer, Gondoliers, Haddon Hall), madrigals (Mikado, Ruddigore, Yeomen), ballads (Patience, Iolanthe). By the time of the move to the new, purpose-built Savoy theatre in 1881, Sullivan’s comic operas were 40 Benedict Taylor indisputably an art form in their own right, forming a new and distinctive tradition, sui generis. A closer investigation of the celebrated ‘ghost scene’ from Ruddigore (Act II) reveals several of the deeper musical qualities Sullivan could bring to his comic operas. This scene is notable as an instance of where the composer did not rein in his creative talent (causing no little irritation with Gilbert), and is consequently valuable for understanding the range of his musical capabilities in these works. The opening chorus (‘Painted emblems of a race’) immediately sets the solemn tone of the scene, a sombre D minor, the male chorus accompanied by low strings and punctuated by piano brass. In tone and idiom this passage immediately suggests the influence of mid-century Italian opera, most particularly the ‘Miserere’ chorus from Act IV of Verdi’s Il trovatore, which was doubtless in the back of Sullivan’s mind. This in itself is probably more a case of Sullivan calling on an allusion for straight expressive effect than of intended parody of this style.9 We are moving comfortably along familiar lines then, until Sullivan slips in a surprise at the approach to the cadence; the dominant moves down to a (major) subdominant chord and suddenly the Dorian mode opens up before us. From a fairly conventional, if effective, Verdian pastiche, a whole new realm is disclosed, an unmistakably English, crumbling Gothic atmosphere, stepping out from the past ‘into the world once more’, that forms one side of Ruddigore’s distinctive sound-world. Modality thus constitutes one of the integral elements of this scene, most notably the startling Phrygian passage of ‘Set upon thy course of evil’. The other feature is a pronounced chromaticism that seems to spill out of the prologue from Sullivan’s The Golden Legend of the previous year. The music is suffused with diminished-seventh complexes – a standard technique for musical horror, but treated with a systematic urge that recalls Liszt. Where these two elements intersect is in the emphasis on the flattened-second scaledegree contained within the Phrygian scale and the concomitant tritone made with degree 5̂. For the former, one should note the prominence given at the start of the scene to the Neapolitan harmony, E-flat – the home tonality of Sullivan’s opera. The latter interval is contained within the diminishedseventh complex and makes numerous appearances throughout the scene. It is seen in the eerie parallel-tritone part-writing of ‘Last of our accursed line’ and with the frightening continuation of the Phrygian passage, ascending via an octatonic scale from C to a climactic impasse on F-sharp. The emphasis on the tritone is then taken up at a larger scale in the ensuing number: ‘When the night wind howls’ – in Gervase Hughes’s words, ‘unquestionably the finest piece of descriptive music that Sullivan ever wrote’, in which ‘we may find . . . an apotheosis of his matured harmonic resource’.10 41 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan This song contains several characteristic Sullivan harmonic traits, most pertinently here the quasi-modal modulation to the flattened leading degree (D–C) followed by a common-tone switch from C to A-flat, characteristic of many nineteenth-century composers with an ear for harmonic colour but perhaps most familiar to Sullivan from Gounod. The upshot of these two typical progressions is, however, the quite atypical polarity created between the D minor outward frame of the piece and the tritonally dissonant A-flat passage at its centre. Truly these ghosts are diaboli in musica. The orchestration throughout is a model of imagination harnessed to clarity, and when the limited recourses of the pit orchestra he had at his disposal is taken into consideration, Sullivan’s achievement becomes even more impressive. The influence of Berlioz is often read into this song, though in truth there is no exact model for Sullivan by now. Thus, as this example shows, Sullivan would bring to a lighter more popular genre the skill and resources of a prodigiously gifted musician trained in the ‘serious’ Germanic tradition of Leipzig, and in time transform it into something unique and unparalleled. Just as Gilbert and Carte had a large part in turning the morally and socially suspect theatrical world of the burlesque into something eminently respectable, so would Sullivan transform the musical potential of light opera/opéra-bouffe into a genre comparable to that of Rossini, Auber or Lortzing. Aesthetic qualities and critical problems Sullivan was not prone to extensive philosophical reflection on the purposes and aesthetics of music. In common with many professional composers of an earlier age, writing music was his job, and he did it without feeling the need to construct elaborate systems or specious polemic to justify his ways. Yet on several occasions he left evidence of his general views on his music that can be enlightening for the modern reader trying to understand his aims. As he more than once complained to Gilbert, music should ‘act in its own proper sphere’, arising out of and intensifying the emotional elements of the situation. The stories set should be of ‘human interest and probability’, with a balance of dramatic, humorous and romantic aspects.11 An interview given to the San Francisco Daily Chronicle in 1885 presents a good picture of the composer’s aesthetic aims. The opera of the future is a compromise . . . Not the French school, with gaudy and tinsel tunes, its lambent light and shades, its theatrical effects and clap-trap, not the Wagnerian school, with its sombreness and heavy ear-splitting airs, with its mysticism and unreal sentiment; not the Italian school, with its fantastic airs and fioriture and far-fetched effects. It is a 42 Benedict Taylor compromise between these three – a sort of eclectic school, a selection of the merits of each one. I do not believe in operas based on gods and myths. That is the fault of the German school. It is metaphysical music – it is philosophy. What we want are plots which give rise to characters of flesh and blood, with human emotions and human passions. Music should speak to the heart, and not to the head.12 What is evident from this account is that Sullivan valued such qualities as emotional directness of communication, empathy and human relevance, and a stylistic pluralism that is not afraid to draw on a variety of national and historical styles. Attributes often prized in the Romantic era – such as the fixation on the artist’s own subjectivity and extreme emotional states, the individual genius, misunderstood in his lifetime, writing ‘for posterity’, and a radical, progressive musical language – are clearly not priorities for Sullivan. Such personal characteristics are notable as many of them potentially give rise to problems in relation to prevalent nineteenthand twentieth-century aesthetic ideologies, which may in part explain the sometimes negative reception his work has been afforded. A consequence of his polystylism is that the charge of ‘eclecticism’ has often been levelled at Sullivan. This term is commonly understood nowadays as an insult of some (indefinable) form, though Sullivan himself was quite open in expressing this feature – ‘I am very eclectic in my tastes’13 – ‘a sort of eclectic school’ – which, to the contrary, he seems to view as a positive attribute. A consequence of this relation to earlier music is that Sullivan’s music is also often marked by a certain conservatism of style and models. The criticisms here seem to be based on the assumption that (a) Sullivan’s music is ‘derivative’ and insufficiently original, and (b) that these attributes are defensible criteria for aesthetic judgement. Both propositions are in fact open to question. Towards the end of the eighteenth century new aesthetic ideologies in England and Germany began to see artistic truth and value as residing in the individual creator-genius, endowed with a unique subjective identity and originality, whose art works thus stand outside society and prior precedents. Beauty, earlier in the eighteenth century the central category of aesthetic judgement, becomes replaced by truth, understood either as metaphysical truth (related to the incomprehensible sublime or profound), emotional truth (often equated with the emotionally extreme and unstable) or historical truth (i.e., the modern and progressive). This explains the latent criticism directed at Sullivan through the ‘eclectic’ label, as the wealth of allusions, parodies and echoes of other music might seem to mitigate against any chance of artistic originality and personal ‘authenticity’. Yet this assumption is fundamentally undermined by the simple fact that 43 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan his music is so unmistakable; there are in fact few more characteristic composers. ‘Eclectic’, as a criticism levelled against Sullivan, is thus an empty charge, as no one has ever doubted that his music possesses in abundance an unmistakable individual quality, despite the separate elements that have gone to make it up. In a word, Sullivan sounds inimitably like Sullivan, and always has. One might better read ‘eclectic’ as ‘synthetic’, as the music of a pre-Romantic composer such as Mozart clearly was. Essentially, Sullivan’s taste coincides with a more eighteenth-century Enlightenment outlook on art. More substantial is the claim of conservatism. Despite some exceptions, it would be hard to deny that Sullivan’s music is not the most radical in existence. However, one must critically examine the grounds upon which this feature, if taken as a criterion for judgement, is based, since the unquestioned adherence to the ideology of modernity that lies behind this assumption became increasingly untenable in the last decades of the twentieth century. Accounts that actually seek to understand Sullivan’s music rather than automatically deciding its artistic value on an external scale of progressiveness must therefore move beyond the discredited clichés of unthinking criticism. Recent scholars have found more enlightening ways of understanding Sullivan’s historical approach by relating it to a richer, more subtle understanding of historical time than the simplistic linear model progressivism admits.14 Bound up with this stylistic conservatism is a desire for directness of communication, witnessed by Sullivan’s insistence on music that ‘speaks to the heart’. Mackenzie notes Sullivan’s distrust of over-complex/elaborate means, speaking of ‘his maxim of respecting the “fitness of things”; with the result that the “human touch” went very straight to its mark, and he took care that that touch should not be weakened, or obscured, by either unnecessary complications or diffuseness’.15 Directness of communication means working within publicly understood linguistic/expressive conventions, which explains the important function of Sullivan’s conservatism of language. An obvious result of this is his music’s accessibility and, as a consequence, popularity. This is one reason – its apparent straightforwardness – why his music may be reviled or patronised by those wanting more complex communicative techniques. It is only too easy to be able to dismiss something open and straightforward; because Sullivan does not condescend to us, we condescend to him.16 Clearly Sullivan cannot possibly be held to be a ‘bad’ composer in terms of technical proficiency or competence – indeed, he was one of the most gifted composers of the nineteenth century and had received a rigorous technical grounding.17 His fault, as much as it is one, is merely that his music is largely ‘conventional’, and seeks to convey 44 Benedict Taylor emotional states in an uncomplicated, direct manner accessible to many, not the few. Yet there is no definitive way of judging the emotional ‘truth’ of artistic expression (if there were, it is unlikely that academics and critics would have privileged access to it), and the numerous generations that have been captivated by his music might well bear out Percy Young’s contention that ‘Sullivan’s simplicities frequently carried their own kind of profundity’.18 One place where the issue does become more clouded is concerning the issue of Sullivan’s parodies. Opera – that most unrealistic of art forms – has so many expressive conventions and dramatic stocks-in-trade that it is amusing for a really talented composer and author to send it up. This gives a nice twist of irony to the issue above: Sullivan is doing it just as well or better than the model, showing how easy it is to copy or send up a style. As Thomas Dunhill contended with ‘Poor wand’ring one’ (Pirates of Penzance), Sullivan’s music is ‘fully equal to any of the songs it sets out to satirise’.19 Hence, appropriately, the last laugh is on operatic snobs, not by them. The resistance to Gilbert and Sullivan encountered in some surely relates to this parody of sacred operatic cows, which shows all too uncomfortably how baseless the snobbish fetishisation of certain names at the expense of others is (what else would explain the anger, the seemingly personal resentment detractors hold against these works? It has no musical basis). And, typical of Sullivan’s humane qualities, he does this affectionately, unmaliciously; hence it is easier to be scornful about this and ignore the satire, as it is too subtle for some detractors’ minds. Cultural issues These Romantic aesthetics that prized originality, sincerity and profundity had a further consequence in imbuing music with a moral imperative. Art has a serious ethical function; eo ipso all music must be serious music. By far the longest-lasting and most damaging effect on Sullivan’s reputation has been a cultural snobbery against popular music instigated during his lifetime and perpetuated long afterwards: the idea that true art must be serious, highbrow and ethically exemplary – what has been called the ‘gospel of earnestness’.20 As early as 1883, The Musical Review, following the announcement of Sullivan’s knighthood, wrote that ‘Some things that Mr Arthur Sullivan may do, Sir Arthur ought not to do . . . 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 . . . must not dare to soil his hands with anything less than an anthem or a madrigal; oratorio . . . and symphony, must now be his line.’21 A view that was becoming increasingly widespread 45 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan was that comic opera was at best a negligible activity for a composer of Sullivan’s talents, and at worst a prostitution of his ethical duty, a betrayal of ‘gifts greater, perhaps, than fell to any English musician since the time of Purcell’.22 This divide between serious and popular became increasingly evident during the nineteenth century and relates to a general ‘Teutonicising’ of English music and culture. Certain composers, recalled Charles Maclean, ‘almost exclusively German’, were regarded in the Victorian era ‘as “classical”; while the music of everyone else was treated as something out of the pale’.23 Though Sullivan had been trained in Germany and was a forceful advocate of Schumann and Schubert at a time when these composers were little appreciated in England, his aesthetics stopped short of the more extreme manifestations of a view which in a morally charged Victorian culture held art and entertainment to be mutually exclusive. These aesthetic and ethical values were spread through the value-system of a new group of critics and composers occupying leading institutional positions in Britain. In their groundbreaking and provocative study of the ‘English Musical Renaissance’, Robert Stradling and Meirion Hughes detail how a small group of musicians and critics emanating from narrow range of institutions (Oxford, Cambridge, the Royal Academy and Royal College of Music) propagated their own ethical and aesthetic agenda and as a consequence wrote their own values into the ‘official’ history of English music heard ever since. The effects of this ideology can be still seen in standard accounts of the development of English music over a century later.24 To be sure, one might justly see Sullivan himself as affected by this dichotomy in his constant desire to write a grand opera or something more worthy of his talents and his recurring dissatisfaction with the Savoy as a medium for his talent. But, though this aspect is undoubtedly present to an extent, this does not really point to Sullivan’s distaste for comic opera tout court; documentary evidence suggests it was more the inadequate provision for ‘human emotions and situations’ in Gilbert’s librettos and the feeling that the forms of these works restricted his creative potential that dissatisfied Sullivan. And when he did write a grand opera, Ivanhoe, the music has since been criticised for stepping out of the Savoy in places.25 The assumption that this was a subconscious reversion from a composer used to a lighter style is hardly a satisfactory explanation; one might better view this as demonstrating how good tunes, humour and popularity were not categorically distinct from serious music for Sullivan, unlike for many critics of his time and since. The two occupy differing stages on a continuum between weightiness and levity, as demonstrated by the intermediary style of the near contemporaneous Yeomen of the Guard or The Beauty Stone. This snobbery against Sullivan’s lighter music, conditioned by the underlying imperative 46 Benedict Taylor 6 Sullivan the musician: conducting the Leeds Festival. Illustrated London News (23 October 1886), p. 421. of moral earnestness and perpetuated by successive generations of critics whose desire for critical judgement no doubt outweighed their sensitivity to art (and finally, it must be said, their knowledge of Sullivan’s music), ultimately has fed into a wider snobbery against the Savoy operas. Little of this has significant musical basis; rather, it is primarily directed against a social class and culture associated with these works. This is due above all to the phenomenon of amateur performances and their association with middle-class Middle England. (The clear distasteful social snobbery here shows that this quality is still very much alive – and hence that Gilbert’s satire still has targets, ironically actually perpetuating these works’ relevance.) As David Cannadine has demonstrated, these operas, with the satire they poke at national institutions and the middle classes, eventually became institutionalised themselves and associated with these same conservative values.26 And the standards of amateur operatic performances are, obviously, not always the highest. (This is not to disparage amateur performances but 47 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan merely to suggest that if most people’s exposure to a repertoire comes from this source they are unlikely to hold it as highly in esteem as one featuring glittering star soloists in international opera houses.) The dominance of the amateur operatic society was caused by the deleterious effect of the D’Oyly Carte’s monopoly on performances. Until 1961 the copyright on the Gilbert and Sullivan operas was owned by the company created in their lifetime for their performance, who jealously guarded the rights and materials to these works, only allowing amateur groups to perform them (i.e., those who were unlikely to prove much threat to the D’Oyly Carte’s hegemony). Even Sullivan’s orchestral scores were not readily available for study (the well-known vocal scores give little indication of the full range of Sullivan’s instrumentation). This is one of the major reasons why the Savoy operas still largely occupy a position outside the mainstream repertoire of major opera houses such as Covent Garden. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, when opera companies in England were looking to establish a national repertoire, Sullivan’s works – by far the most popular survivors from the previous century – could not be considered. In place, earlier works by Balfe, Wallace and Benedict were revived. By the 1960s, it was too late: English opera had found a new mythical founder in the figure of Britten. If all this had not been the case, the story of the growth of English opera may well have been substantially different from the present historical narrative. It must also be admitted that the D’Oyly Carte Company themselves were not always the most musically accomplished of bodies. It may be a historical fact that the original performance conditions in Gilbert and Sullivan’s lifetime were musically limited, but such works are always capable of a new lease of life. Sullivan’s music should be allowed to shine in more fitting conditions; like all works of art, his operas are greater than their original production capabilities. ‘It is only when we treat Sullivan with the same artistic respect that we show to Mozart and Schubert’ wrote one commentator in 1938, ‘that his peculiar genius can shine untarnished’.27 Conclusions: musical position and significance To understand and appreciate Sullivan’s music one has to stand above the ingrained aesthetic norms passed down from one particular, rather narrow, strand of Romantic thought and reinstate the values of beauty, human sympathy, popular comprehension and accessibility valued in an earlier age. Like Rossini, Sullivan was not fully in sympathy with Romanticism in its more extreme, individualistic aspects. His music indeed has more affinities with that of Mozart or Rossini than with contemporaries such as 48 Benedict Taylor Brahms or Wagner. (In this light, it is notable that a distinguished opera scholar such as E. J. Dent would hold that ‘a course of Mozart in English might be the best step towards educating our on-coming public to a really intelligent appreciation of Sullivan.’28 ) The reasons why Sullivan’s operatic reputation has not followed that of Mozart or Rossini are bound up with this cultural situation of music within nineteenth-century Britain. In Vaughan Williams’s opinion, Sullivan was ‘a jewel in the wrong setting’,29 while for James Day, similarly, ‘Sullivan narrowly missed becoming an English Mozart . . . simply because Victorian art had to be serious and “chivalrous” for it to be taken seriously’.30 In his sense of harmonic and timbral colour, and the matchless gift for melody, Sullivan often calls to mind his near-contemporary Bizet, with whom he shares many affinities. The parallel between the two might indeed be instructive for understanding Sullivan’s cultural position and what he might have achieved had there been a stronger operatic tradition in England. Both composers, precociously talented, tended towards a postMendelssohnian/Schubertian idiom and were at their happiest in the smaller set-piece forms typifying the opéra comique that gave free reign to their unmistakable talents. (Sullivan’s affinities with French music and culture have often been noted – probably more so indeed than with any other national style.) The major advantage Bizet had over Sullivan was in being born in a country with a strong operatic culture, which enabled him to work within established traditions and institutional frameworks even if ultimately he would transform them (and, perhaps, in dying at just the right time to become mythologised). Without such a serious operatic heritage behind him Sullivan would fall foul of aesthetic avatars that sought to distance his music from what was considered serious culture. Yet perhaps Sullivan’s achievement was in fact commensurate with his potential. Within the aesthetic context of the time, Sullivan’s inclination for eclectic, synthetic music was in retrospect best suited to such comic operas. In these his comic gifts, his skill at parody of other music and flair for melody, rhythm and word-setting, would find its best vehicle. One should be wary of suggesting, because of this, that these works are the exclusive repository of his genius; Sullivan’s musical qualities were diffused throughout all his output and many of his greatest ‘serious’ works could not have been written within the confines of Gilbert’s texts and the style imposed by the conditions of the Savoy. Yet such was the nature of Sullivan’s talents and the cultural-aesthetic circumstances in which he lived and followed, that the comic operas with Gilbert provide perhaps the most consistently perfect expression of his inimitable qualities and without doubt the most enduring. Sullivan’s music – in its stylistic pluralism, accessibility, its good-natured blend of wit and sentiment, comprehensibility and erudition, moving 49 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan happily between high and low styles, and its own particular beauty – would have fitted perfectly within an eighteenth-century aesthetic, but suffered in an age and culture that in hindsight can only be described as well intentioned but misguided. In Ian Parrott’s words, ‘He was essentially the most broad-minded musician in perhaps the most narrow and unoriginal school of thought in musical history’.31 Only now, with the passing of time (but constancy of Sullivan’s presence in the repertoire and English culture), we may perhaps outgrow the narrow prejudices of a less understanding age, and recognise the unique talent that Sullivan possessed. Works that are still going strongly a century after their creation suggest that the ‘ephemeral’, insignificant ‘triviality’ of such creations – and the aesthetic under which they have been judged – has been mistaken.