Last week we discussed the British composer Gustav Holst and the week before that Mendelssohn (boffo in Britain, I’m telling yah), and this week we’ve had a really excellent parody of I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General (which is of course nothing new, patter songs, particularly the very popular ones lyricized by W.S. Gilbert, are often laced with satiric contemporary references that performers update to reflect their own environment).
All of which means that it must be time to mention Arthur Sullivan.
Ok, I can see you shaking your heads out there, muttering WTF? It’s perfectly obvious to me. Major General is from the famous light Opera (sometimes called Operetta or Musical Theater), The Pirates of Penzance composed by Sullivan in collaboration with Gilbert. Holst idolized Sullivan until he changed his allegiance to (shudder) Wagner. Sullivan was the first recipient of the Mendelssohn Scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music when he was 14 years old.
See, clear as mud (and remember, mud spelled backwards is dum). The important thing about my jokes is that they amuse me.
I’ll spare you a recapitulation of my career as Ralph Rackstraw, let’s just say I’m big with captive audiences in school assemblies and relatives who are supportive of macaroni and glue pictures.
But let’s talk about Artie for a while. In the first place, he would have hated that nickname because he always considered himself a serious and dignified member of the conventional “Art” Music establishment and certainly not a mere tunesmith writing ephemeral crap for beer soaked groundlings in a Music Hall (which everyone knows is the next thing to a brothel anyway). He composed 23 Operas, only 14 in collaboration with Gilbert, 13 oratorios and other major orchestral works, and 2 Ballets. This in addition to many pieces of chamber music, piano sonatas, and hymns of which probably the best known is Onward Christian Soldiers.
But he fell into the company of Richard D’Oyly Carte, this kind of sinister Brian Epstein/Tom Parker character who made him fabulously wealthy by forcing him to write wildy popular ditties hardly worthy of his talent.
Though that was not the cause of his split with Gilbert, nope, they broke up over a carpet.
Throughout most of his association with Gilbert they had quarreled over the plots and themes of their work. Gilbert was a decided populist and Sullivan entirely bourgeoisie. They both considered themselves better than their commercially successful Operettas. It was most often Sullivan who would threaten to quit and eventually Gilbert would respond with a libretto that was at least not totally unacceptable to Sullivan’s refined sensibilities and aristocratic asprations, but in the end it was Gilbert who walked away.
D’Oyly Carte used a lot of the money generated by their partnership to build a theater dedicated to staging their productions, the Savoy. At best he wasted a lot of it on maintenance, at worst-
In April 1890, during the run of The Gondoliers, however, Gilbert challenged Carte over the expenses of the production. Among other items to which Gilbert objected, Carte had charged the cost of a new carpet for the Savoy Theatre lobby to the partnership. Gilbert believed that this was a maintenance expense that should be charged to Carte alone. Gilbert confronted Carte, who refused to reconsider the accounts.
After all, the carpet was only one of a number of disputed items, and the real issue lay not in the mere money value of these things, but in whether Carte could be trusted with the financial affairs of Gilbert and Sullivan. Gilbert contended that Carte had at best made a series of serious blunders in the accounts, and at worst deliberately attempted to swindle the others. It is not easy to settle the rights and wrongs of the issue at this distance, but it does seem fairly clear that there was something very wrong with the accounts at this time. Gilbert wrote to Sullivan on 28 May 1891, a year after the end of the “Quarrel”, that Carte had admitted “an unintentional overcharge of nearly £1,000 in the electric lighting accounts alone.”
So Gilbert sued Carte and won. Sullivan supported Carte during this dispute and for a while the former collaborators barely spoke and created solo works that were resounding flops. They were eventually reunited by their music publisher Tom Chappell, but their new productions (Utopia, Limited and The Grand Duke were not nearly as well received as their previous work.
Sullivan died in 1900, Gilbert in 1911. Sullivan was considered by almost all his “serious” contemporaries a wasted genius. Of course they all languish in deserved obscurity but you’ll find people like me performing H.M.S. Pinafore to this very day, partly because they are public domain (next time we chat about Sullivan I’ll try and concentrate on their copyright litigation).
The piece I have selected is not a collaboration with Gilbert but does have a connection. It is a traditional “Grand” Opera, Ivanhoe. It was originally staged at the Royal English Opera House which was built by Carte expressly for the purpose. While moderately successful itself, Carte was unable to find enough suitable productions to make the Hall profitable and the Opera House was a commercial failure.
Unfortunately it’s in 13 parts so I’ll embed the playlist and hope that works-
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