1852‒1861

Arthur Sullivan’s musical formation was effected during his teenage years in three institutions: the Chapel Royal, where he was a chorister between the ages of 12 and 15, the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied from 14 to 16 as the first Mendelssohn scholar, and the Conservatory of Music in Leipzig which he attended from the age of 16 until just before his 19th birthday. Each of these places had a considerable impact on him, deepening his childhood love of church music and laying the foundations of his later career as a composer and conductor of sacred works. His time at the Chapel Royal also played a significant role in his spiritual development, owing partly to the strong influence of Thomas Helmore, the master of the choristers. In his teens, Sullivan composed several anthems and got to know many of the leading church musicians of the day. His training in church music is compared to the similar grounding in church and religious music experienced by several of the most prominent Continental European composers of operetta in the mid-nineteenth century.

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.

1877‒1889

The period from 1877 to 1889 was dominated for Sullivan by his collaboration with W.S. Gilbert, with whom he wrote ten highly successful comic operas on an almost annual basis. He found the partnership increasingly frustrating, if highly lucrative. Away from the theatre, he wrote a dramatic cantata about an early Christian martyr, The Martyr of Antioch (1880), and a sacred cantata, The Golden Legend (1886), based on the poem by Henry Longfellow, which was performed more than any other choral work apart from The Messiah in the closing decade of the nineteenth century. In 1880, Sullivan took up the conductorship of the prestigious Leeds Festival which gave him a chance to conduct significant sacred works, including the first ever complete performance in Britain of Bach’s B Minor Mass over which he took considerable pains. An address on music which he gave in Birmingham in 1888 touches on his own faith and reveals his Biblical knowledge and deep attachment to church music. His own contributions to the Savoy operas on which he collaborated with Gilbert also reveal much about his spirituality.

Introduction

The critical reception of the 2018 recording of The Light of the World oratorio marked a milestone in the rehabilitation and rediscovery of Arthur Sullivan’s sacred music. Whereas in his lifetime, he was recognized as a serious composer with a strong commitment to church music, the twentieth century saw an almost total focus on his comic opera collaborations with W.S. Gilbert to the exclusion of virtually all his serious and sacred work. Allied to this, recent biographers and commentators have suggested that he had no real religious faith or commitment. In fact, there is clear evidence from his correspondence and diaries that, although naturally reticent and private about such matters, Sullivan did have a sure and simple faith and was deeply committed to sacred music, as his contemporaries recognized.

1842‒1852

Three of Arthur Sullivan’s grandparents were Irish and probably Roman Catholic. This chapter explores his ancestry and the Irish and Roman Catholic influences on his character, his faith, and his music. It considers and dismisses the suggestions made during his lifetime that he had Jewish and negroid antecedents. It covers his childhood in Sandhurst, where his father was military bandmaster, the influence of the parish church there, his early schooling, and his entrance into the Chapel Royal as a chorister.

The 1890s

Arthur Sullivan’s final decade was overshadowed by increasing and debilitating ill health and growing criticism of the light-weight nature of his work by critics associated with the English Musical Renaissance centred around two younger composers, C.H. Parry and C.V. Stanford. Sullivan did at last produce the grand opera, Ivanhoe (1891), which he had wanted to write for so long. He also continued to write comic operas for the Savoy Theatre, most of them with librettists other than Gilbert. He wrote a ballet and a hymn tune for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, set a patriotic song by Rudyard Kipling to raise funds for the families of troops serving in the Boer War, and wrote a Te Deum to be used when that war ended. He died in 1900, mourned and remembered as much as a church musician and for his sacred works as for his comic operas.