Chimeras
Benny Green
Sullivan and his Satellites Alan Hyman (Chappell-Elm Tree Oooks £7.50).
It may come as a surprise to some people to learn that Sir Arthur Sullivan had any satellites; it certainly came as a surprise to me, the implication being that about the substantial figure of Sir Arthur there revolved a kind of musical equivalent of General Wolseley's Ring. Theatre composers do not often go around in schools; that is a convenient reorganisation undertaken later on posterity's behalf by critics and historians, long after the pit musicians have put away their instruments, folded their crosswords and disappeared into the night. Satellites was perhaps not quite the right word for the author to have used; in his Foreword he hits on a much better phrase when he talks of Sullivan's 'rivals and successors', and then amplifies the definition by mentioning the names of Alfred Cellier, Edward Solomon, Ivan Caryll, Lionel Monckton, Sidney Jones and Leslie Stuart. All of which takes us much nearer to the book's sub-title, 'A Survey of English operettas, 1860-1914'.
I have to say that this interlude in English popular music has always been, critically speaking, something of an Augean stable, almost entirely owing to the fact that nobody has ever defined to anyone else's satisfaction the various terms. When does an opera become a comic opera? When does a comic opera shrink to an operetta? When is a musical comedy not a musical comedy? It may even be true to say that these questions have no answers because none are needed, and that all that matters is to drag the music out of its original setting and try to assess its merits dispassionately. Had! been Mr Hyman, I think I would have jibbed at finding definitions. His reckless courage in his Foreword frightened the life out of me: 'Gilbert and Sullivan stand alone because their libretti and music are so beautifully integrated that almost every number in each piece makes a contribution towards the development of the story'. While it is true that Gilbert deplored the extraneous item which was there simply because it was there, that is not at all the difference between the Savoy operas and the items which are discussed in this book. In ploughing through the history of works like San Toy, Floradora and The Shop Girl, Mr Hyman gives us some plot synopses that would curl up the most dedicated hack at twenty paces; the real reason why the Savoy operas survive and all the rest of the Edwardian musical sweetmeats do not, is that the Gilbert-and-Sullivan operas are about something. They are about England, the Condition of the Nation, or however you like to put it. But what they are not about is a succession of Ruritanian milkmaids masquerading as West End milliners in love with a poor footman who turns out at the final curtain to be a rich footman. In other words, what saved the Savoy operas from a fate worse than John Hanson was the fact that somebody connected with their genesis has a brain, and that that someone was Gilbert, an unpalatable truth for Mr Hyman to swallow. So unpalatable, in fact, that he has resolutely refused to swallow it.
In the early part of his book, devoted to the Savoy production, he makes Gilbert the conventional curmudgeon, the villain of the piece. While I admit that this is a response to the facts just as valid as, say, my own, the fact does remain that Carte was a sharp operator who sailed perilously close to the winds of petty larceny in the Great Carpet Dispute, and that Sullivan was a bit of a pill to have sided with him against his own partner. Gilbert's persistence in the Carpet affair has embarrassed more commentators than Mr Hyman, but then again while it is one thing to refuse to pay for a carpet, it is quite another to see your own welldeserved reputation swept under it. In any resume of English popular music for the stage in the last hundred years, Gilbert has to be the hero or the rest of the work will be out of joint with itself.
In a way it is a pity that the Savoy obtruded at all, for Mr Hyman's real purpose is clearly to bring a little light into that shadowy corner occupied by the forgotten lions of Edwardian musical comedy. He has collected +a few biographical facts that Olt be fresh to the non-specialist reader, and one or two of the photographs bring home more eloquently than any words the absurd peacock splendour of the bohemian roue of seventy years ago. Having studied the extraordinary vanity of Ivan Caryll, and having matched it against the wing-collared hauteur of Lionel Monckton, I come, incredulously to the conclusion that these birds really did sit up all night drinking champagne from ladies' slippers, that they really did go off with actresses for suppers In private rooms at Romano's, that they reallY did know all about the phenomenon of going to bed poor and waking up rich. Either that or they weren't real men at all, but only chimeras written up by the librettists of the day and played by professional actors.
The trouble with the period and the subject matter is that they become in the end so engaging that it is hard to be uncharitable about it all. I think that Leslie Stuart wrote better for the music hall than he did for the West End, and I doubt if in the end much will be left of the entrepreneurial reputation of George Edwardes. I am bewildered bY Mr Hyman's adherence to the orthodox platitude that the jazz invasion put an end to the romantic waltz, when in fact the great blossoming of the popular waltz in this century was brought about singlehanded by IrV
ing Berlin in the 1920s. I would like to give the proof readers a crack on the ear for allowing through 'Lily of Languna' and 'Little Dolly Daydreams'. But it is a pleasantly produced book, and it does discuss some appealing characters.
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