This article appears in the Jerusalem Post weekend magazine for 24 December. It has been posted on this blog for the convenience of G&S fans
If so, it must befall
That Death, whene’er he call
These words are inscribed on a bronze bust that adorns the Victoria Embankment gardens in the heart of London. The memorial, which includes a sobbing woman representing the Muse of music, is to Sir Arthur Sullivan, the eminent 19th century composer, who formed one of the most enduring partnerships in musical history with the playwright and poet, W S Gilbert. The words are by Gilbert himself, and are taken from the most serious of the operettas the two wrote together: The Yeomen of the Guard – the only piece where a leading character falls to the ground at the final curtain, either dead of a broken heart, or overcome by grief, according to how the audience views it.
William Schwenck Gilbert was a prolific and
very successful playwright in mid-Victorian England. Arthur Sullivan had achieved great fame as a
composer of classical music. They were
introduced to each other in 1869, and agreed to collaborate on a light musical
piece of theatre, which Gilbert called Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old. The first night of this very first comic opera
by W S Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan took place on December 23, 1871. So December 23 this year, 2021, marks the 150th
anniversary of this auspicious event.
The anniversary is of great significance, even though history records that Thespis closed after just 64 performances, and that this first collaborative effort was so unimportant in Sullivan’s eyes that he did not even keep a copy of the score. It has been lost. All that survives are three musical passages, one of them the chorus ”Climbing over rocky mountains” which Gilbert transposed into a later comic opera, The Pirates of Penzance.
When the run of Thespis ended, Gilbert and Sullivan went their separate ways. It was to be four years before an enterprising musical impresario, Richard D’Oyly Carte, brought them together again. Carte was mounting a production of Offenbach’s operetta La Perichole which, by itself, did not provide a full evening’s entertainment. He needed a “filler”, and he asked Gilbert for a one-act piece which Sullivan could set to music. The result was Trial by Jury, a musical delight which was first performed on March 25, 1875. It was wildly successful and quickly became the main attraction. Audiences flocked to the Royalty Theatre in London not for the Offenbach, but for the latest theatrical sensation.
Trial by Jury takes place in a topsy-turvy courtroom, in which a young Lothario is being sued for breach of promise of marriage. The Judge starts the proceedings by explaining how he had reached his high position. As a penniless young lawyer, he’d needed a push up the ladder, so he decided to marry “a rich attorney’s elderly, ugly daughter.” The rich attorney, delighted at getting her off his hands, had assured him that “she could very well pass for forty-three in the dusk with the light behind her.” The Judge confides that, when it suited him, he’d thrown her over, “and now, if you please, I’m ready to try this breach of promise of marriage.”
When the jilted bride-to-be appears in court, dressed
in her wedding gown and accompanied by her bridesmaids, she wins the hearts of
the judge and all twelve jurymen. They
are quite unmoved by the defendant’s claim that it is quite in keeping with the
laws of nature to “love this young lady today, and love that young lady
tomorrow. Nor,” he continues, appealing
to their common sense, “is it the act of a sinner, when breakfast is taken
away, to turn your attention to dinner.”
The case collapses when the Judge decides to
marry the young lady himself.
D’Oyly Carte immediately appreciated the cultural potential of a working collaboration between Gilbert and Sullivan and – just as important – the business potential. He commissioned a full-length comic opera from them and formed his Comedy Opera Company to produce it. So was born the three-man partnership that was to create a fabulously successful theatrical phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Sorcerer, which ran for 178 performances, was considered
a success and encouraged the partnership to proceed to a new piece. HMS Pinafore opened at
the Opera Comique in London on May 25, 1878 and ran for
571 performances. It became an international sensation. In the absence of any copyright
agreements between the UK and the USA, the opera was pirated widely in
America. When Gilbert and Sullivan
hastened over the Atlantic to produce their “authorized version” on Broadway,
they found no less than 42 companies performing versions of HMS Pinafore
across the States.
In Pinafore another high-ranking official – in this case the First Lord of the Admiralty – explains how he reached his eminent position despite knowing nothing about the navy and never having been to sea. Sir Joseph Porter’s sung explanation was greeted with delight by a public keenly aware that Britain’s prime minister had recently appointed just such an individual to just this position.
And that junior partnership, I ween
Was the only ship I ever had seen.
But that kind of ship so suited me
That now I am the ruler of the Queen’s Navy.
Pinafore's extraordinary popularity in Britain, America and elsewhere was followed by ten further Gilbert and Sullivan works. The outstanding piece in later years was The Mikado which ran for 672 performances in the new Savoy Theatre, constructed in the heart of London’s West End by D’Oyly Carte especially to house the G&S comic operas. Set in Japan, but essentially a satire on Victorian England, The Mikado marked the high-water mark of the G&S collaboration.
In a song which became
famous the world over, the Mikado confides that his “object all sublime”, which
he reckoned he could achieve “in time”, was to “make the punishment fit the
crime”. The crimes he lists – various annoyances
common in middle class English society – extracted roars of delighted recognition
from the audience.
In all, fourteen works resulted from the G&S collaboration. With the exception of Thespis which is lost (although various attempts at reconstituting it have been tried, using the surviving musical fragments), all have defied the passage of time, and continue to be performed. G&S companies – professional, semi-professional and amateur – flourish across the English-speaking world, and not only there. The operettas have been translated into scores of languages, including Hebrew and Yiddish.
The Gilbert and Sullivan Yiddish Light Opera
Company was founded in New York in 1983, although it had its origins thirty
years before. In their productions the
characters speak a mixture of Yiddish and English. In HMS Pinafore Sir Joseph Porter
becomes “Reb Yosi Yitzhak Nimitzbaum”.
The song “He is an Englishman” that features prominently in the piece
becomes “Er iz a Guter Yid” (He’s a good Jew).
The company have produced recordings of their Yiddish productions of The
Mikado, HMS Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance – the last under
the title of “Di Yam Gazlonim” (Thieves of the Sea).
Coincidentally, it was also in 1983 that Robert Binder founded the Jerusalem Gilbert and Sullivan Society and affiliated it to the official London-based G&S Society. He was building on the pioneer G&S enterprise, the Light Opera Group of the Negev (LOGON), based in Beer Sheva. LOGON had begun mounting G&S operetta productions throughout Israel in 1981, including performances to sold-out houses in Jerusalem. LOGON remains a flourishing theatrical company. With an interesting history and in slightly new guise, the Jerusalem G&S Society also remains a thriving Israeli theatrical enterprise.
In those early days the Jerusalem G&S
Society consisted of a handful of enthusiasts who met in each other’s homes to
listen to G&S recordings, and who mounted an occasional performance, or a modest,
sometimes truncated production. It was
only when Paul Salter, a G&S aficionado, arrived from England on aliyah in
2000 that the society took wing. It soon
formed a theatrical company to stage the comic operas.
The company devised a
musical biography of Gilbert and Sullivan that they performed at the Khan
Theatre, Jerusalem under the auspices of JEST (the long-established Jerusalem
English Speaking Theatre), and then took this to the International Gilbert and
Sullivan Festival in Buxton, England – an annual event that attracts performing
companies and audiences from around the world.
On their return to Israel the company decided to present a full-length, fully-staged version of The Mikado with 30 performers, at the newly opened Hirsch Theater, Beit Shmuel. They originally scheduled four performances, but demand for tickets was so great they extended the run.
So began an annual
G&S production as part of JEST’s season. The Mikado was
followed by The Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe, HMS
Pinafore, and Patience. All were performed in
English at first, but one of their volunteers, Reuven Ben-Shalom, started
translating the libretti into Hebrew.
His work forms the basis of the surtitles which are now projected above
the stage at each performance.
The Gilbert and Sullivan operas, though assuredly rooted in Victorian England, have proved themselves timeless. Well over a century after they were first performed, they continue to be admired – perhaps even adored – by performers and audiences across the globe. A website run by the Gilbert and Sullivan Light Opera Company of Long Island lists more than 200 theatrical companies performing G&S operettas around the world. Their list, they say, “is lengthy, though doubtless far from complete.”
Anyone who can access YouTube these days has the complete G&S canon available to them, each operetta performed on TV, on stage or on recordings. There is a wide choice of theatrical companies, professional and amateur, to choose from. A few productions include subtitles, but to enjoy those that do not either summon up the libretto on a tablet, or acquire one of the volumes containing the complete G&S libretti. With book or tablet on your lap, you can appreciate Gilbert’s wit and his literary skill to the full.
I remember my delight as a teenager in seeing the comic operas for the first time. Back in the mid-twentieth century the D’Oyly Carte company used to run repertory seasons at the old Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, since rebuilt. Week after week I’d make my way there to see a new opera and to delight in the performances of Martyn Green, Peter Pratt, Darrell Fancourt and the rest of the G&S stalwarts, the orchestra under the baton of Isidore Godfrey. Their performances are preserved on recordings made in their heyday.
Whether you are so versed in the G&S canon that you can repeat the dialogue with the performers, or whether you await the inestimable joy of coming to the comic operas for the first time, Gilbert and Sullivan retain their appeal. They are here to stay. It is highly appropriate that we take a moment to celebrate the 150th anniversary of their very first collaboration.
No comments:
Post a Comment