Gilbert and Sullivan

This chapter discusses Richard D'Oyly Carte's “Gilbert and Sullivan” (G & S) program, which was named after W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Carte's G & S program combined the appeal of superb craftsmanship with that of fresh material, replacing the previous derivative nature of extravaganza and burlesque. First of all, Carte commissioned Trial By Jury, G & S's only one-act production. It was a miniature comic opera. This led to the famous series of shows, now all with spoken dialogue, that changed the course of the Anglophone musical. However, by his involvement with Gilbert and Sullivan Carte had tasked himself weightily, as he now faced years of delicate diplomacy, keeping the act together when Gilbert got too prickly or Sullivan felt unappreciated. Next, Carte recruited G & S performers into the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. The aim was to tour internationally in the G & S canon and this tradition lasted for over one hundred years. The business became a family business. After Carte retired the business was managed by his son Rupert, and then by Rupert's daughter Bridget, before disbanding in 1982, albeit with sporadic initiatives thereafter. The chapter finally looks into more detail at the G & S canon, including titles such as The Pirates Of Penzance (1879) and Patience (1881).

Conclusion

Arthur Sullivan was no saint and certainly no ascetic. He enjoyed life to the full and was an unashamed pleasure seeker, adding gambling to the usual trinity of women, wine, and song. It is not surprising that he related so closely to the biblical figure of the Prodigal Son whom he resembled both in terms of his somewhat profligate lifestyle and in his bouts of remorse and regret. He had a remarkable capacity for generosity and a simple and trusting Christian faith. Although his life was not without its apparent contrasts and contradictions, his character, like his music, was distinguished by its simplicity, straightforwardness, and utter sincerity. Both exerted a softening and uplifting effect which it is not too much to describe as a divine emollient.

The 1860s

On his return from Leipzig, Arthur Sullivan earned his living as a church organist while making his way as a composer of anthems and serious orchestral works. In the mid-1860s he began a close, life-long friendship with George Grove, founder of the music dictionary which still bears his name and a leading Biblical scholar. As well as promoting Sullivan’s music and securing its performance at the Crystal Palace, Grove introduced him to leading figures in the world of Victorian culture and religion, and influenced his spiritual development and beliefs. He also played a key role in Sullivan’s first and rather tortuous love affair. The death of Sullivan’s father inspired his In Memoriam overture and he put much of his own faith into his first oratorio, The Prodigal Son (1869), which drew on an eclectic selection of Biblical texts and emphasized the themes of repentance, forgiveness, and reassurance that would recur in many of his sacred works.

1871‒1877

By now widely recognized as England’s leading composer, Arthur Sullivan devoted the first half of the 1870s to sacred works, including a massive Te Deum to celebrate the recovery of the Prince of Wales from typhoid fever (1872), his most significant oratorio, The Light of the World (1873), forty-two original hymn tunes and seventy-five hymn tune arrangements and numerous sacred songs and ballads. The Light of the World broke significant new ground by dispensing with a narrator and for the first time in English oratorio making Jesus a real character who appeared and sang and interacted with other characters. As well as acting as editor for a major Anglican hymnal, Church Hymns and Tunes (1874), Sullivan wrote numerous hymn tunes, including the ever-popular ST GERTRUDE for ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’ and NOEL for ‘It came upon the midnight clear’. He may also have had a hand in ST CLEMENT for ‘The day, Thou gavest, Lord, is ended’. In 1877, sitting at the bedside of his dying brother, he wrote the tune for his sacred ballad, ‘The Lost Chord’ which became the best-selling song of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Arthur Sullivan

Arthur Sullivan is almost certainly the best loved and most widely performed British composer in history. Although best known for his comic opera collaborations with W.S. Gilbert, it was his substantial corpus of sacred music which meant most to him and for which he wanted to be remembered. Both his upbringing and training in church music and his own religious beliefs substantially affected both his compositions for the theatre and his more serious work, which included oratorios, cantatas, sacred ballads, liturgical pieces, and hymn tunes. Focusing on the spiritual aspects of Sullivan’s life, which included several years as a church organist, involvement in Freemasonry, and an undying attachment to Anglican church music, Ian Bradley uses hitherto undiscovered or un-noticed letters, diary entries, and other sources to reveal the important influences on his faith and his work. No saint and certainly no ascetic, Sullivan was a lover of life and enjoyed its pleasures to the full. At the same time he had a rare spiritual sensitivity, a simple and sincere Christian faith, an unusually generous disposition, and a unique ability to uplift, soften, and assure through both his character and his music that can best be described as a quality of divine emollient.

Got Selenium?

ABSTRACT ‘There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hydrogen, and oxygen, and nitrogen and rhenium’—so begins ‘The Elements’ song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcS3NOQnsQM), whereby Tom Lehrer (Fig. 1) assiduously deconstructed the many painstaking decades of research effort by scores of scientists in assembling the Periodic Table as primarily based upon the atomic numbers of the elements. Lehrer instead opted for his imaginative rhyme, with its musical meter purloined from the patter song of Major General Stanley ("I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General’) as in the Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta ‘The Pirates of Penzance’. By some coincidence, however, three of the four named in the first stanza are Group 15 and 16 elements with which I have considerable microbiological research experience. Only one is missing (tellurium). Hence, by futzing with Lehrer's ‘libretto’ to suit my own needs for this issue of FEMS, I would pose the following introductory re-rearrangement: ‘There's antimony, arsenic, selenium, tellurium, and cadmium, and chromium, and calcium and curium’. While this may (or may not) sit well with Mr Lehrer, who at the time of this writing is still living, I hope it does not cause further discomfiture to the collective eternal peace of Professor Dimitri Mendeleev, Sir William Schwenk Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan. Nonetheless, I will use this preface to take departure for the primary subject of this manuscript, namely our efforts on selenium, which is where it all got started.

Téspis ou Os Deuses Envelhecem

Tradução do libreto de W.S. Sullivan para o musical homônimo, com música de Arthur Sullivan.