Gilbert and Sullivan
The composer Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) and the writer and librettist William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911) together created 14 comic operas. Despite their own artistic work, they have become known and popular, especially in Great Britain and North America , mainly through their collaboration beyond London - the name duo Gilbert and Sullivan is a catchphrase for the English comic opera of the 19th century.
timeline
For the first meeting of Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert , it most likely arrived in July 1870 a reception at which the two by Sullivan's childhood friend, the composer Frederick Clay, were introduced to each other. It was not until late 1871 that John Hollingshead , the manager of the Gaity Theater, commissioned Sullivan and Gilbert to write a comic opera for the winter season at short notice. Because of the artistically limited possibilities of the theater, the result for Sullivan was unsatisfactory. The piece was forgotten, the score was lost and the two artists went their separate ways again. It was not until 1875 that the impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte brought Sullivan and Gilbert back together. The thoroughly composed one-act opera Trial by Jury in the Royalty Theater was so successful that the three continued to work together with interruptions in the years to come. Carte ensured that the following full-length operas from The Sorcerer (1877) onwards were played in the London Opéra Comique. Finally, in 1881, he opened the Savoy Theater, the first major theater building with electric lighting. Operas such as HMS Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1879) or Patience (1881) became crowd-pullers.
There were rifts between Sullivan and Gilbert as a result of artistic conflicts. For his operatic work, Sullivan always strived to set "humanly charming and believable stories" and "to reinforce the emotional moment not only of the words, but above all of the situation" in his music. Gilbert was unable to follow Sullivan's and Carte's plans to establish a national opera in the local language. He recycled old ideas so often that Sullivan grew tired of what he called his "puppet show". Serious arguments broke out in 1884 and 1889. Since Gilbert was not ready to respond to Sullivan's demand for new, convincing material, both went their separate ways and worked together with other librettists and composers. The last joint opera work was The Grand Duke in 1896 . After Sullivan's death in 1900, Gilbert stated: “A Gilbert is useless without a Sullivan - and I simply cannot find one” (Saremba, p. 278, see below).
Collaboration and creation
The alleged peculiarity of the connection “Gilbert and Sullivan” is often overemphasized. In the 19th century, the double naming of author and composer was completely normal in England, people talked about the works of "Gilbert and Sullivan" as well as those of "Desprez and Cellier" or "Gilbert and Clay". The name "Gilbert and Sullivan" was a label originally used by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company to market the operas. Later it took on a “life of its own” and it led to the negative side effect that both were hardly perceived as the individual artistic personalities they were all their lives. Sullivan and Gilbert had established themselves as Britain's leading composer and playwright by the mid-1870s. Gilbert (education: bachelor of arts (in science and literature) and barrister (lawyer)) worked as a translator and author of poems (Bab Ballads), farces and stage plays in addition to initial employment. Social criticism, cynicism and the so-called topsy-turveydom (the world turned upside down) are essential features of Gilbert's works. Meanwhile, Sullivan made a career as a composer who drew essential inspiration from his role models Mozart , Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz and Rossini . Sullivan's services to the English musical life brought him several honorary doctorates and an accolade in 1883 (Gilbert was only made "Sir William" in 1907).
With the so-called “Savoy Operas” - a term after the parent company of the operas by Sullivan and Gilbert, which has only now become synonymous with their works, but originally referred to all the pieces premiered in the Savoy Theater - the only genre-typological new development in English theater arose late 19th century. Sullivan's services to the English opera are that he established a national opera in his home country, whereby the achievements in the field of German opera by Weber, Marschner and Lortzing, which he was able to experience in Leipzig, had model character. The final impetus to write for the stage came through his meeting with Rossini, whom he met in Paris in late 1862.
Sullivan had a significant influence on the artistic development of the operas with Gilbert, the span of which ranges from early works such as The Pirates of Penzance to musically richer, lyrical-comic operas such as The Yeomen of the Guard . In collaboration with theater manager Richard D'Oyly Carte, Sullivan created a wide range of works for opera in English between 1875 and 1900. In doing so, he shaped the various archetypes of English music theater (cf. Eden / Saremba 2009).
The comic operas with Gilbert form an essential part of Sullivan's operatic output. Sullivan's and Gilbert's operas all have individual genre names such as “A Dramatic Cantata” ( Trial by Jury ), “A Fairy Opera” (Iolanthe), “An Entirely Original Supernatural Opera” ( Ruddigore ), “New and Original Opera” (The Yeomen of the Guard) or "An Original Comic Opera" (Utopia Limited) . Both artists never used the term “operetta”.
With their comical operas, which were also directed by the librettist Gilbert, the notorious punch lines and critical failures of English literature and pictorial satire found their way into music theater, which targeted the strengths and weaknesses of the citizens of an aspiring, capitalist industrial and affluent society. The music-dialogue structure of Sullivan's comic operas goes back to models of an opera in the national language as found in Mozart ( The Magic Flute, etc.) and Lortzing ( Zar and Zimmermann, etc.). Sullivan himself pointed out that a serious undertone runs through his comic operas, which often brings a tragic-comic element into the conflict-ridden plot. Sullivan thereby sets an important counterpoint to Gilbert's sometimes exaggerated texts and plots. In critical crisis situations in human existence - such as in the finale of Act 1 and the quartet "When a wooer goes a-wooing" by The Yeomen of the Guard or the confrontation with the ancestors in Act 2 by Ruddigore - Sullivan intensifies the music psychological differentiation and dramatic intensity that are unparalleled in comic opera of the 19th century.
For the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, Sullivan put together a high-quality, first-class ensemble that formed the basic line for all other productions from The Sorcerer (not just the operas with Gilbert): tenor and soprano as a lover, mezzo-soprano and baritone as another young woman along with Galan, a baritone as a comedian and bass and alto for an aging couple. Regardless of the constant basic requirements of the permanent ensemble, Sullivan succeeded in musically giving each piece and each figure an individual, unmistakable sound character. Avoiding clichés is essential: The catchphrase “Topsy-turvydom” (“wild mess, mess”) outlines the confusion of plot that often characterizes the plays by Sullivan and Gilbert with its nonsense logic, in which the stage world is symbolically upside down the increasingly faster pace of life in a technical, externally determined, materialistically oriented world.
A special feature of Sullivan's comic operas is the disillusioning structure of the music. He often composed against expectations: These include the exaggerated octave jump and the ironic melisms in the supposedly patriotic hymn "He is an Englishman" from HMS Pinafore or the tense drama in the ghost scene from Ruddigore, which many - not least Gilbert - in one considered comic opera to be inappropriate. For him, the “opera of the future” that Sullivan had in mind represented a compromise between the German, Italian and French schools. And so in his comic pieces he parodied musky pathos and theatrical clichés, but also used different elements of Central European opera in a virtuoso manner, which seemed to him suitable for his stage works and oratorios in order to be able to adequately represent moods and emotions. In return, he wanted his librettists to provide humanly credible material, especially in the field of comic opera. His empathic, humanistic attitude is shown, for example, by setting the arias of the old maidens, often mercilessly mocked by Gilbert, such as in the sensitive cello solo in Lady Jane's "Sad is that woman's lot" ( Patience ) or in Katisha's aria ( The Mikado ) , in which stylistic elements of expressive lamentations are not used parodistically, but as an indicator of emotional state in life crises. In dramatic works, Sullivan does not demonize the antagonists; for this he gives them individuality through rhythmic and melodic peculiarities, as well as an economical, individually used instrumentation, as in the aria of the Knights Templar “Woo thou thy snowflake” ( Ivanhoe , Act 2).
Sullivan's subtle handling of complicated metric structures (e.g. in “The sun whose rays” in The Mikado or “Were I thy bride” and “I have a song to sing, O” in The Yeomen of the Guard ) served as a model for the setting of English poetry. No less remarkable was his technical ability to achieve a great richness of sound with just a few instruments (e.g. in the overture to The Yeomen of the Guard ).
Works
- Thespis, first edition. 23 December 1871 London, Gaiety Theater (score not preserved)
- Trial by Jury , 25 March 1875 London, Royalty Theater (A Dramatic Cantata, 1 act)
- The Sorcerer, 17 November 1877 London, Opéra Comique (An Entirely New and Original Modern Comic Opera, 2 acts)
- HMS Pinafore , May 25, 1878 London, Opéra Comique (An Entirely Original Nautical Comic Opera, 2 acts)
- The Pirates of Penzance , December 30, 1879 Paignton, December 31, 1879 New York, Fifth Ave Theater (An Entirely Original Comic Opera, 2 acts)
- Patience or Bunthornes Bride , 23 April 1881 London, Opéra Comique (An Entirely New and Original Aesthetic Opera, 2 acts)
- Iolanthe, 25 November 1882 London, Savoy Theater (A Fairy Opera, 2 acts)
- Princess Ida, January 5, 1884 London, Savoy (A Respectful Operatic Per-version of Tennyson ’s “Princess”, 3 acts)
- The Mikado , March 14, 1885 London, Savoy (An Entirely New and Original Japanese Opera, 2 acts)
- Ruddigore , January 22, 1887 London, Savoy (An Entirely Original Supernatural Opera, 2 acts)
- The Yeomen of the Guard , October 3, 1888 London, Savoy (A New and Original Opera, 2 acts)
- The Gondoliers , 7 December 1889 London, Savoy (An Entirely Original Comic Opera, 2 acts)
- Utopia Limited, 7 October 1893 London, Savoy (An Original Comic Opera, 2 acts)
- The Grand Duke, 7 March 1896 London, Savoy (Comic Opera, 2 acts)
literature
- Percy M. Young: Sir Arthur Sullivan. London 1971, ISBN 0-460-03934-2 .
- David Eden: Gilbert and Sullivan - The Creative Conflict. Fairleigh Dickinson 1986.
- Meinhard Saremba: Arthur Sullivan - A composer's life in Victorian England. Wilhelmshaven 1993, ISBN 3-7959-0640-7 .
- Meinhard Saremba: Arthur Sullivan - The non-person of British music. In: Elgar, Britten & Co. - A history of British * music in twelve portraits. Zurich / St. Gallen 1994, ISBN 3-7265-6029-7 .
- Jane Stedman: WS Gilbert - A Classical Victorian and his Theater. Oxford University Press 1996.
- Michael Aigner: Gilbert & Sullivan - A Dual Biography. Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Meinhard Saremba: In the Purgatory of Tradition: Arthur Sullivan and the English Musical Renaissance. In: Christa Brüstle, Guido Heldt (Hrsg.): Music as a Bridge - musical relations between England and Germany. Hildesheim 2005, ISBN 3-487-12962-0 .
- David Eden: WS Gilbert - Appearance and Reality. Saffron Walden 2005.
- Meinhard Saremba: A Broad Field - About Gioachino Rossini and Arthur Sullivan. In: Reto Müller (ed.): La Gazzetta (magazine of the German Rossini Society), 18th year. Leipziger Universitätsverlag 2008, pp. 25–39, ISSN 1430-9971 .
- David Eden, Meinhard Saremba (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan. Cambridge University Press 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-71659-8 .
Films about Gilbert and Sullivan
- The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan . Great Britain 1953, directed by Sidney Gilliat , with Robert Morley (Gilbert) and Maurice Evans (Sullivan)
- Topsy-Turvy - turned upside down . UK 1999, directed by Mike Leigh , with Allan Corduner (Sullivan) and Jim Broadbent (Gilbert)
Novels about Gilbert and Sullivan
- Charlotte MacLeod's crime novel A simple old man (Engl .: A Plain Old Man has) the performance of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Sorcerer in a small town near Boston on the subject.
