Arthur Sullivan Totally Explained

Everything about Arthur Sullivan totally explained

Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (May 13 1842 – November 22 1900) was an English composer best known for his operatic collaborations with librettist W. S. Gilbert, including the still-popular H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mikado. Sullivan's artistic output included 23 operas, 13 orchestral works, eight choral or oratorio works, two ballets, incidental music to several plays, and numerous hymns and other church pieces, songs, parlour ballads, part songs, carols, and piano and chamber pieces.
Apart from his comic operas with Gilbert, Sullivan is best known for some of his hymns and parlour songs, including "Onward Christian Soldiers", "The Absent-Minded Beggar", and "The Lost Chord". However, his most critically praised pieces include his Irish Symphony, his Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, his Overture di Ballo, The Martyr of Antioch, The Golden Legend, and, of the Savoy Operas, The Yeomen of the Guard. Sullivan's only grand opera, Ivanhoe, was initially successful but has been little heard since his death.

Life and career

Beginnings

   Sullivan was born in Lambeth, now part of London. His father, Thomas Sullivan (1805–1866), was a military bandmaster and music teacher from Ireland, based for some years at the Royal Military Academy which lies between Sandhurst in Berkshire and Camberley (formerly Cambridgetown) in Surrey. Here Arthur became proficient with all the instruments in the band by the age of eight. His mother Mary Clementina (née Coghlan, 1811–1882) was of Italian descent through her grandfather, Joseph Righy or Righi. Following a stay at private school in Bayswater, he was admitted to the choir of the Chapel Royal, attending its school in Cheyne Walk and soon becoming a soloist. While there, he began to compose anthems and songs. His earliest published composition was a song called "O Israel", which was published by Novello in 1855. In 1856, he received the first Mendelssohn Prize and went to study at the Royal Academy of Music until 1858. He then continued his studies at Leipzig, Germany, at the Leipzig Conservatoire where he also took up conducting and where he met his friend Carl Rosa. There, he was influenced by Felix Mendelssohn's musical style.
   Sullivan credited his Leipzig period with tremendous musical growth. His graduation piece, completed in 1861, was a set of incidental music to Shakespeare's The Tempest. Revised and expanded, it was performed at the Crystal Palace in 1862, a year after his return to London, and was an immediate sensation. He began building a reputation as England's most promising young composer.
   Sullivan's early major works were those typically expected of a serious composer. In 1866, he premiered the Irish Symphony (though he may have completed it by 1863) and the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, his only works in each genre. In the same year, his Overture in C (In Memoriam), written in grief shortly after the death of his father, was a commission from the Norwich Festival, and during his lifetime it was one of his most successful works for orchestra. His single most successful work for orchestra, the Overture di Ballo, satisfied a commission from the Birmingham Festival in 1870. His long association with works for the voice began early. Significant commissions for chorus and orchestra included The Masque at Kenilworth (Birmingham Festival, 1864); an oratorio, The Prodigal Son (Three Choirs Festival, 1869); a dramatic cantata, On Shore and Sea (Opening of the London International Exhibition, 1871); the Festival Te Deum (Crystal Palace, 1872); and another oratorio, The Light of the World (Birmingham Festival, 1873).
   Sullivan's affinity for theatrical works also began early. During a stint as organist at Covent Garden, he composed his first ballet, L'Île Enchantée (1864) and had his first experience of opera, which was directed there by Sir Michael Costa. In the nineteenth century, straight plays were often accompanied by live incidental music, and Sullivan composed play scores on numerous occasions. Early examples included The Merchant of Venice (Prince's Theatre, Manchester, 1871); The Merry Wives of Windsor (Gaiety Theatre, London, 1874); and Henry VIII (Theatre Royal, Manchester, 1877). His earlier Tempest incidental music, although adaptable for this purpose, was originally composed for the concert hall.
   These commissions were not sufficient to keep Sullivan afloat. gave singing and piano lessons and composed some 72 hymns, most of them in the period 1861–75. The most famous of these are "Onward, Christian Soldiers" (1872, lyrics by Sabine Baring-Gould) and "Nearer, my God, to Thee" (the "Propior Deo" version). He also turned out over 80 popular songs and parlour ballads – again, most of them written before the late 1870s. His first popular song was "Orpheus with his Lute" and a popular part song was "Oh! hush thee, my babie."

First operas

Sullivan's first attempt at opera, The Sapphire Necklace (1863–64, libretto by Henry F. Chorley) wasn't produced, and is now lost, although the overture and two songs from the work were separately published.
His first surviving opera, Cox and Box (1866), was originally written for a private performance. The first Sullivan-Burnand collaboration was sufficiently successful to spawn a two-act opera, The Contrabandista (1867; revised and expanded as The Chieftain in 1894), which didn't achieve great popularity.

The collaboration with Gilbert

In 1871, John Hollingshead commissioned Sullivan to work with W. S. Gilbert to create the burlesque Thespis for the Gaiety Theatre. Conceived specifically as a Christmas entertainment, it ran through to Easter 1872. The work was produced rather quickly, after which Gilbert and Sullivan went their separate ways, with the exception of two parlour ballads in late 1874 and early 1875.
   In 1875, theatre manager Richard D'Oyly Carte needed a short piece to fill out a bill with Offenbach's La Périchole for the Royalty Theatre. Remembering Thespis, Carte reunited Gilbert and Sullivan, and the result was the one-act comic opera Trial by Jury. The success of this piece launched Gilbert and Sullivan on their famous partnership, which produced an additional twelve comic operas. However, Sullivan wasn't yet exclusively hitched to Gilbert. Soon after the successful opening of Trial, Sullivan wrote The Zoo, another one-act comic opera, with a libretto by B. C. Stephenson. But the new work wasn't a big hit, and Sullivan collaborated on operas only with Gilbert for the next 15 years.
   Sullivan's next opera with Gilbert, The Sorcerer (1877), was a success by the standards of the day, but H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), which followed it, turned Gilbert and Sullivan into an international phenomenon. Indeed, Pinafore was so successful that over a hundred unauthorised productions sprang up in America alone. Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte tried for many years to control the American performance copyrights over their operas, without success. Pinafore was followed by another hit, The Pirates of Penzance in (1879), and then Patience (1881). Later in 1881, Patience transferred to the new Savoy Theatre, where the remaining Gilbert and Sullivan joint works were produced, as a result of which they're sometimes known as the "Savoy Operas." Iolanthe (1882) was the first of their works to premiere at the new theatre.
   In 1883, during the run of Iolanthe, Sullivan was knighted by Queen Victoria. The announcement was made just before Sullivan's 40th birthday at the opening of the Royal College of Music. Although it was the operas with Gilbert that had earned him the broadest fame, the honour was conferred for his services to serious music. The musical establishment, and many critics, believed that this should put an end to his career as a composer of comic opera — that a musical knight shouldn't stoop below oratorio or grand opera. Sullivan too, despite the financial security of writing for the Savoy, increasingly viewed his work with Gilbert as unimportant, beneath his skills, and also repetitious. Furthermore, he was unhappy that he'd to simplify his music to ensure that Gilbert's words could be heard. But paradoxically, only two months before receiving news of the honour, Sullivan had signed a five-year agreement with Gilbert and Carte, compelling him to produce a new comic opera on six months' notice. Having agreed to this, Sullivan suddenly felt trapped. Princess Ida (1884, the duo's only three-act, blank verse work) was noticeably less successful than its predecessors, although Sullivan's score was praised. With box office receipts lagging, Carte gave the contractual six months' notice for a new opera. Gilbert proposed a libretto in which the plot depended on the agency of a magic lozenge. Sullivan pronounced it overly mechanical and too similar to their earlier work and sought to leave the partnership. The impasse was finally resolved when Gilbert proposed a plot that didn't depend on any supernatural device. The result was Gilbert and Sullivan's most successful work, The Mikado (1885). Ruddygore (1887, renamed Ruddigore) followed. It had a respectable nine-month run, but by Gilbert and Sullivan's standards, it wasn't a great success. When Gilbert again proposed a version of the "lozenge" plot for their next opera, Sullivan reiterated his desire to leave the partnership. Finally, Gilbert proposed a comparatively serious opera, which Sullivan immediately accepted. Although not a grand opera, The Yeomen of the Guard (1888) provided Sullivan with the opportunity to write his most ambitious score to date. After Yeomen and another brief impasse over the choice of a subject, Gilbert offered a scenario set in Venice, The Gondoliers (1889). This was their last great success together.
   The partnership suffered a serious breach during the run of The Gondoliers, when Gilbert questioned Carte over the cost of new carpeting for the Savoy lobby. Sullivan, who was already planning a grand opera, Ivanhoe, under Carte's management at another theatre, considered the dispute petty and sided with Carte. The resulting quarrel took several years to work out. Sullivan would collaborate with Gilbert twice more, on Utopia Limited (1893) and The Grand Duke (1896), but they were unable to recreate the success of their earlier collaborations.

Serious music from 1875 to 1890

During the years of Sullivan's most successful work with Gilbert, his career as a conductor and educator continued in parallel. Between 1875 and 1890, however, Sullivan wrote only two substantial compositions that were not comic opera, and both were cantatas for the triennial Leeds Festival, for which Sullivan was appointed conductor starting in 1880. For the 1880 Leeds Festival, Sullivan was commissioned to write a sacred choral work. For a source text, Sullivan settled on Henry Hart Milman's 1822 dramatic poem based on the life of Saint Margaret the Virgin. Sullivan found the poem unwieldy for his purposes. His operatic collaborator, W. S. Gilbert, adapted the text, altering Milman's metrical scheme in three of the work's sixteen numbers, and advising on selected abridgements in many of the others.
   Described as "A Sacred Musical Drama," The Martyr of Antioch had a successful premiere on the morning of October 15 1880. As thanks for Gilbert's help, Sullivan presented his collaborator with an engraved silver cup. Gilbert replied, "Pray believe that of the many substantial advantages that have resulted to me from our association, this last is, and always will be, the most highly prized." Sullivan dedicated the work to the Princess of Wales.
   In 1886, Sullivan once again supplied a large-scale choral work for the Leeds Festival, this time selecting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem The Golden Legend to set as a cantata of the same title. Outside of the comic operas with Gilbert, this cantata was Sullivan's most successful large-scale work. It was performed hundreds of times in Sullivan's lifetime, and at one point the composer even declared a moratorium on its performance, fearing that the work would become over-exposed. Sullivan didn't seriously consider writing grand opera again.
   Apart from Ivanhoe, Sullivan collaborated with no other librettists besides Gilbert from 1875 until their partnership collapsed following The Gondoliers. Richard D'Oyly Carte still had the Savoy Theatre to run, and he turned to other librettists to provide material for new comic operas by Sullivan, while scheduling Gilbert & Sullivan revivals and works by other composers when no Sullivan work was available.
   Sullivan's first comic opera after the break-up with Gilbert, Haddon Hall (1892, libretto by Sydney Grundy), enjoyed a modest success. Although still comic, the tone and style of the work was considerably more serious and romantic than most of the operas with Gilbert. After another Gilbert opera (Utopia Limited, 1893), Sullivan teamed up again with his old partner, F. C. Burnand. The Chieftain (1894), a heavily revised version of their earlier two-act opera, The Contrabandista, flopped. After The Grand Duke (1896) also failed, Gilbert and Sullivan were finished working together for good.
   In May 1897, Sullivan's full-length ballet, Victoria and Merrie England, opened at the Alhambra Theatre to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. The work's seven scenes portrayed events from English history. Its six-month run was considered a great success. The Beauty Stone (1898, libretto by Arthur Wing Pinero and J. Comyns Carr) was another opera more serious than Sullivan or the Savoy were accustomed to, and it failed miserably. Finally, in The Rose of Persia (1899, libretto by Basil Hood), Sullivan returned to his comic roots, producing his most successful full-length opera apart from Gilbert. Another opera with Hood quickly went into preparation. In addition to his knighthood, honours awarded to Sullivan in his lifetime included Doctor in Music, honoris causâ, by the Universities of Cambridge (1876) and Oxford (1879); Chevallier, Legion of Honour, France (1878); The Order of the Medjidieh, by the Sultan of Turkey (1888); and Membership in the Royal Victoria Order.
   Fanny was separated from her husband, but she was never divorced. Social conventions of the time compelled Sullivan and Fanny to keep their relationship private. In his diaries, he'd refer to her as "Mrs. Ronalds" when he saw her in a public setting, but "L. W." (for "Little Woman") or "D. H." (possibly "Dear Heart") when they were alone together, often with a number in parentheses indicating the number of sexual acts completed. It is thought that Fanny was pregnant, or believed herself pregnant, on at least two occasions, and procured an abortion on at least one occasion. In the 1999 biographical film Topsy-Turvy, Sullivan and Fanny discuss an abortion at around the time of the production of The Mikado.
   Sullivan had a roving eye, and the diary records the occasional quarrel when his other liaisons were discovered, but he always returned to Fanny. She was a constant companion (and was well known for performing some of Sullivan's songs) up to the time of Sullivan's death, but around 1889 or 1890, the sexual relationship seems to have ended. He started to refer to her in the diary as "Auntie", and the tick marks indicating sexual activity were no longer there, although similar notation continued to be used for his relationships with other women who have not been identified, and who were always referred to by their initials. In 1896, Sullivan proposed marriage to the 20-year-old Violet Beddington, but she refused him.
   Some books and websites claim or speculate that Sullivan was homosexual or bisexual. Brahms says that Sullivan had a relationship with the Duke of Edinburgh. It is undisputed that Sullivan and the Duke (who was married) were friends, but the only evidence cited for a sexual relationship is unspecified "Victorian cartoonists." The Gay Book of Days (Carol Publishing Corporation, 1985) and The Alyson Almanac (Alyson Publications, 1990) both list Sullivan as a gay composer, again not stating the source.

Leisure and family life

Sullivan loved to spend time in France (both in Paris and the south of France), where his well-connected friends included the princess Marie-Amélie of Orleans and Claude Debussy.
Sullivan was devoted to his parents, particularly his mother, with whom he corresponded regularly when away from London, until her death in 1882. Henry Lytton wrote, "I believe there was never a more affectionate tie than that which existed between [Sullivan] and his mother, a very witty old lady, and one who took an exceptional pride in her son's accomplishments. Sullivan was also very fond of his brother Fred, whose acting caree he assisted whenever possible, and of Fred's children. When Fred died at the age of 39, he left his pregnant wife, Charlotte, with seven children under the age of 14. After Fred's death, Arthur visited the family often and became guardian to all of the children. In 1883, Charlotte and six of her children emigrated to Los Angeles, California, in the U.S., leaving the oldest boy, Herbert "Bertie" Sullivan, in Arthur Sullivan's sole care. Despite Arthur's reservations about the move to Los Angeles, he paid for the trip and continued to give very substantial financial support to the family. Only a year after moving to Los Angeles, in January 1885, Charlotte died, leaving the six children to be raised mostly by her brother and the older girls, with the financial support of Arthur Sullivan.
From June through August 1885, after completing his work on The Mikado, Sullivan travelled to America to visit the family in Los Angeles and to take them on a sightseeing trip of the American West, including Yosemite Valley. Sullivan continued, throughout the rest of his life, and in his will, to take good care of Fred's children, continuing to correspond with them and to be concerned with their education, marriages and financial affairs. Bertie stayed with his uncle Arthur for the rest of Arthur's life.

Compositional style

Method

Sullivan composed without the use of the keyboard. "I don't use the piano in composition – that would limit me terribly," he told interviewer Arthur Lawrence. Sullivan explained that his process of composition wasn't to wait for inspiration like "a miner seated at the top of a shaft", waiting for "the coal to come bubbling up to the surface.... He has to dig for it.... The first thing I've to decide upon is the rhythm, and I decide on that before I come to the question of melody. The notes must come afterwards. ...I mark out the metre in dots and dashes, and not until I've quite settled on the rhythm do I proceed to actual notation."

Melody and Rhythm

As Sullivan told Lawrence, his melodies sprung from rhythm, In the comic operas, where many numbers were in verse-plus-refrain form, Sullivan frequently was required to produce two climaxes in the melodic line. Hughes instances ‘If you go in’ (Iolanthe) as a good example. Hughes goes so far as to say that though most of the tunes in the Savoy operas are good ones, Sullivan rarely reached the same class of excellence elsewhere when he'd no librettist to feed his imagination. Even so, on those occasions when Gilbert wrote in unvaried metre, Sullivan often followed suit and produced phrases of simple repetition, such as ‘Love is a plaintive song’ (Patience) and ‘A man who would woo a fair maid’ (Yeomen).
   Sullivan’s deliberate echoes of other composers are covered below under 'Musical Quotations', but other echoes may not have been conscious: Hughes cites the concluding bars of ‘Tell a tale of cock and bull’ from Yeomen as an example of Handel’s influence, and another critic found a theme in the slow movement of the Irish symphony ‘an outrageous crib’ from Schubert’s Unfinished. Sullivan’s tunes, at least in the comic operas, appeal to the professional as much as to the layman. Sullivan’s continental contemporaries such as Debussy, Leoncavallo and Saint-Saens held the Savoy operas in high regard. 'When Sullivan wrote what we call 'a good tune' it was nearly always 'good music' as well. Outside the ranks of the giants there are few other composers of whom the same could be said.' Harmonically his early works used the conventional formulae of Auber, Donizetti, Balfe and Schubert.
   In general, Sullivan preferred to write in major keys. In the Savoy operas there are only eleven substantial numbers wholly in a minor key, and even in his serious works the major prevails. Examples of Sullivan’s rare excursions into minor keys include the long E minor melody in the first movement of the Irish Symphony, ‘Go away, madam’ in the Act I finale of Iolanthe (echoing Verdi and even Beethoven) and the funeral march in the Act I finale of The Yeomen of the Guard. and Grove's Dictionary comment adversely on Sullivan’s over-use of tonic pedals, usually in the bass, which Hughes attributes to ‘lack of enterprise or even downright laziness’. Another Sullivan trademark criticised by Hughes is the excessive use of the chord of the augmented fourth at moments of pathos. In his serious works, Sullivan attempted to avoid harmonic devices associated with the Savoy operas, with the result, according to Hughes, that The Golden Legend is a ‘hotch-potch of harmonic styles’. Harmonic contrast in Sullivan’s Savoy works is enhanced by his characteristically resourceful modulation between keys, as in ‘Expressive glances’ (Princess Ida) where he smoothly negotiates E major, C sharp minor and C major, or ‘Then one of us will be a queen’ (The Gondoliers) where he writes in F major, D flat major and D minor.
   In the field of harmony Sullivan remained to the end an eclectic. ‘He had easily recognisable habits but his style never achieved individuality’. In the Savoy operas, fugal style is reserved for making fun of legal solemnity in Trial by Jury and Iolanthe. Less formal counterpoint is employed in numbers such as ‘Brightly Dawns our Wedding Day’ (The Mikado) and ‘When the Buds are Blossoming’ (Ruddigore).
   Sullivan’s best known contrapuntal device, which, if he didn't invent it, certainly became his trademark, was ‘the simultaneous presentation of two or more distinct melodies previously heard independently’. Sometimes the melodies were for solo voices, as in ‘Once more the face I loved so well’ (The Zoo), and ‘I am so proud’ (The Mikado), which combines three melodic lines; other examples are in choruses, where typically a graceful tune for the ladies is combined with a robust one for the men. Examples include 'When the Foeman bares his steel' (Pirates), ‘Gaily tripping’ (Pinafore), ‘In a doleful train’ (Patience), ‘Welcome, gentry’ (Ruddigore), and ‘Night has spread her pall once more’ (The Yeomen of the Guard). At other times, notably in ‘How beautifully blue the sky’ (Pirates), one theme is given to the chorus and the other to solo voices.

Orchestration

Gervase Hughes concludes his chapter on Sullivan’s orchestration: ‘in this vitally important sector of the composer’s art he deserves to rank as a master.’ Sullivan was a competent player of at least four orchestral instruments (flute, clarinet, trumpet and trombone) and a technically highly skilled orchestrator. Though sometimes inclined to indulge in grandiosity when writing for a full symphony orchestra, he was adept in using smaller forces to the maximum effect. Orchestral players generally like playing Sullivan’s music: ‘Sullivan never asked his players to do what was either uncongenial or impracticable.’
   Sullivan's orchestra for the Savoy Operas was typical of any other pit orchestra of his era: 2 flutes (+ piccolo), oboe, 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 cornets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion, and strings. Sullivan had argued hard for an increase in the pit orchestra's size, and starting with Yeomen the operas all included the usual complement plus second bassoon and bass trombone. Sullivan noted that the orchestration for an opera had to wait until he saw the staging, so that he could judge how heavily or lightly to orchestrate each part of the music.
   One of the most recognisable features in Sullivan's orchestration is his woodwind scoring. Hughes especially notes Sullivan’s clarinet writing, exploiting all registers and colours of the instrument, and his particular fondness for oboe solos. For instance, the Irish Symphony contains two long solo oboe passages in succession, and in the Savoy operas there are many shorter examples. In the operas, and also in concert works, another characteristic Sullivan touch is his fondness for pizzicato passages for all the string sections. Most of the operas have at least one number that's virtually a pizzicato ostinato, such as ‘Kind sir, you can't have the heart’ (The Gondoliers) and 'Free from his fetters grim (Yeomen).
Musical Quotations
To the delight of his generally well educated Savoy Theatre audiences, Sullivan often quoted or imitated famous themes and passages from popular tunes or well-known composers such as Schubert, Donizetti, Bellini and Mendelssohn.
   He also liked to evoke familiar musical styles, such as his "madrigals" in The Mikado, Ruddigore and Yeomen, "glees" in H.M.S. Pinafore and The Mikado and "gavottes" in Ruddigore and The Gondoliers. In The Sorcerer, there's a country dance and folksy duet between the men and women's chorus in "If You'll Marry Me." In several of the operas, the style of a hornpipe or sea shanty is woven into the music, or the military sound of the fife and drum is quoted. Sullivan uses the exotic musical styles of the Far East in The Mikado, with the composer even trying to replicate a popular war song in "Miya Sama". His trip to Egypt provided him with musical flavour for his later opera, The Rose of Persia.
   In early pieces, according to Debussy, in addition to his reflection of Mendelssohn (for example in his incidental music for The Tempest), Sullivan imitated Auber in his Henry VIII music and Gounod in The Light of the World. Examples of this include Mabel's aria "Poor Wand'ring One" in Pirates (compare this to "Sempre libera" from La Traviata and "Je veux vivre" from Gounod's Roméo et Juliette) and the duet "Who are you, sir?" from Cox and Box. The overture of Cox and Box also is influenced by Offenbach, while the scena, "Not long ago", echoes Rossini's "La Fioraia Fiorentina," and the lullaby "Hush-a-bye, bacon" is in the style of a then-popular ballad. Later, the influences of Handel, Schubert and especially Mendelssohn can be heard in Sullivan's work. The then-popular Michael Balfe (especially his The Bohemian Girl and The Maid of Artois (see, for example, "The rapture dwelling within my breast")) is parodied in The Sorcerer and The Pirates of Penzance, and "Twenty Love Sick Maidens" imitates Wallace's "Alas Those Chimes" from Maritana.
   In the Major-General's Act II song "Sighing softly to the river" from The Pirates of Penzance, Sullivan imitates Schubert’s partsongs for male voices, and the accompaniment parallels Schubert's song "Auf dem Wasser zu singen." The chorus "With catlike tread" from the same opera is an imitation of Verdi's "Anvil Chorus" from Il Trovatore. Sullivan also quotes the theme of Schubert’s song "Der Wanderer" in the choral entry of the family ghosts in Act II of Ruddigore. In Sullivan's songs, like "Orpheus with his Lute", Schubert's influence can be felt strongly in his use of modulation and construction of melodies. and the Act II quartet "The World Is But a Broken Toy" has been called "Gounodesque". In The Gondoliers, there are the Spanish cachucha, the Italian saltarello and tarantella, and the Venetian barcarolle. Hughes compares "Here is a case unprecedented" from The Gondoliers to the Act II quintet from Carmen. In "My Object All Sublime," when the Mikado mentions "Bach interwoven with Spohr and Beethoven," the bassoon quotes from the fugue subject of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542 (the subject is itself evidently a quote from Reincken). The Golden Legend, shows the influence of Liszt and Dvorak. One can certainly presume that he approved of them, since he invariably conducted on opening night.
   Those Sullivan wrote himself include Cox and Box, Thespis, Iolanthe, Princess Ida, The Yeomen of the Guard, The Gondoliers, and The Grand Duke. Sullivan's authorship of the overture to Utopia Limited can't be verified with certainty, as his autograph score is now lost, but it's likely attributable to him, as it consists of only a few bars of introduction, followed by a straight copy of music heard elsewhere in the opera (the Drawing Room scene). Thespis is now lost, but there's no doubt that it had an overture and that Sullivan wrote it.
   Of those remaining, the overtures to H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance are by Alfred Cellier; to The Sorcerer, The Mikado and Ruddigore are by Hamilton Clarke (although Geoffrey Toye's 1920 Ruddigore overture has largely replaced Clarke's); and to Patience is by Eugene d'Albert.
   Most of the overtures are in three sections: a lively introduction, a slow middle section, and a concluding allegro in sonata form, with two subjects, a brief development, a recapitulation and a coda. However, Sullivan himself didn't always follow this pattern. The overtures to Princess Ida and The Gondoliers, for instance, have only an opening fast section and a concluding slow section. The overture to Utopia Limited is dominated by a slow section, with only a very brief original passage introducing it.
   In the 1920s, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company commissioned its musical director at the time, Geoffrey Toye, to write new overtures for Ruddigore and The Pirates of Penzance. Toye’s Ruddigore overture entered the general repertory, and today is more often heard than the original overture by Clarke. Toye’s Pirates overture, however, didn't last long and is now presumed lost. Sir Malcolm Sargent devised a new ending for the overture to The Gondoliers, adding the "cachucha" from the second act of the opera. This gave the Gondoliers overture the familiar fast-slow-fast pattern of most of the rest of the Savoy Opera overtures, and this version has competed for popularity with Sullivan's original version.
Reputation and criticism

Early career
When the young Arthur Sullivan returned to England after his studies in Leipzig, critics were struck by his potential. His incidental music to The Tempest received an acclaimed premiere at the Crystal Palace on April 5 1862. The Athenaeum wrote:
Irish Symphony of 1866 won similarly enthusiastic praise:
   Sullivan was also occasionally cited for a lack of diligence. For instance, of his early oratorio, The Prodigal Son, his teacher, John Goss, wrote:
The transition to opera By the mid-1870s, Sullivan had turned his attention mainly to works for the theatre, for which he was generally admired. For instance, after the first performance of Trial by Jury (1875), the Times said that "It seems, as in the great Wagnerian operas, as though poem and music had proceeded simultaneously from one and the same brain." But by the time The Sorcerer appeared, there were charges that Sullivan was wasting his talents in comic opera:
Athenaeum's review of The Martyr of Antioch expressed a similar complaint:
The Daily Telegraph wrote, "The composer has risen to his opportunity, and we're disposed to account Iolanthe his best effort in all the Gilbertian series." Similarly, the Theatre would say that "the music of Iolanthe is Dr Sullivan's chef d'oeuvre. The quality throughout is more even, and maintained at a higher standard, than in any of his earlier works.... In every respect Iolanthe sustains Dr Sullivan's reputation as the most spontaneous, fertile, and scholarly composer of comic opera this country has ever produced."
Edward Elgar, to whom Sullivan had been particularly kind, rose to Sullivan's defence, branding Fuller-Maitland's obituary "the shady side of musical criticism... that foul unforgettable episode." In his History of Music in England (1907), however, Ernest Walker was even more damning of Sullivan:
Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which he edited, while Walker's History would be re-issued in 1923 and 1956 with his earlier verdict intact. As late as 1966, Frank Howes wrote:
Thomas F. Dunhill wrote an entire chapter of his 1928 book, Sullivan's Comic Operas, titled "Mainly in Defence," which reads in part:
Recent views In recent years, Sullivan's work outside of the Savoy Operas has begun to be re-assessed. It has only been since the late 1960s that a quantity of his non-Savoy music has been professionally recorded. The Symphony in E had its first professional recording in 1968; his solo piano and chamber music in 1974; the cello concerto in 1986; Kenilworth in 1999; The Martyr of Antioch in 2000; The Golden Legend in 2001. In 1992 and 1993, Naxos released four discs featuring performances of Sullivan's ballet music and his incidental music to plays. Of his operas apart from Gilbert, Cox and Box (1961 and several later recordings), The Zoo (1978), The Rose of Persia (1999), and The Contrabandista (2004) have had professional recordings.
   In recent decades, several publishers have issued scholarly critical editions of Sullivan's works, including Ernst Eulenburg (The Gondoliers), Broude Brothers (Trial by Jury and H.M.S. Pinafore), David Russell Hulme for Oxford University Press (Ruddigore), and R. Clyde

(Cox and Box, Haddon Hall, Overture "In Memoriam", Overture di Ballo, and The Golden Legend).
In a 2000 article for the Musical Times, Nigel Burton wrote:
Sullivan's views on Edison's phonograph and recorded music In 1888, Thomas Edison sent his "Perfected" Phonograph to Mr. George Gouraud in London, England. Recordings made by Gouraud on this equipment in 1888 were discovered at the Edison Library in New Jersey in the 1950s. On August 14 1888, Gouraud and members of the press made a recording that was sent to Edison in America. Edison hoped that the phonograph would become a common method of correspondence. One of the recordings played that night was a piano and cornet recording of Sullivan's "The Lost Chord," which was one of the first music recordings ever made.
Sullivan saw the phonograph and heard a demonstration of Edison's wax cylinder recording technology two months later on October 5 1888 at one of the "phonograph parties" and recorded a message to Edison on that occasion that included the following:

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Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.