RTHUR SULLIVAN (1842-1900)
By W. J. TURNER HE musical and mathematical gifts seem to be more generally inherited than any other kind of talent, and Sullivan was no pion to the majority of famous composers in being the son of
musician. His father, an Irish soldier, became sergeant of the at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and later, in 1857, essor of the clarinet at Kneller Hall. Arthur entered the Chapel al as a chorister and in 1856 won the Mendelssohn scholarship the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied under Sterndale en and others, proceeding to Leipzig in 1858 where he had ns from such well-known musicians as Moscheles (for piano- ), Rietz (for composition) and David (for orchestral conducting), ning to London in 1861. In the following year his music Shakespeare's Tempest was performed by August Manns at a stag Palace Saturday concert and he was thus launched on a fessional career. For some time he was organist at St. Michael's,
ester Square, and he settled down to the routine of an English ician's life—which meant teaching, choir-training, and composi- of miscellaneous music in his spare time.
So far, his career was on the conventional pattern of nineteenth- ry English musicians. Unlike their Continental counterparts have always been compelled to look to the Church and not to stage for a livelihood and Sullivan was no exception. As a h musician his gifts would not have carried him further than ming a Cathedral organist and a not very inspired composer the Three Choirs and other provincial festivals. For in spite some excellent hymn tunes such as " Onward! Christian Soldiers " tributed in 1872 as editor of " Church Hymns with Tunes " for S.P.C.K.—Sullivan cannot for one moment be compared with great English masters of church music such as, for example, Orlando Gibbons or Purcell. It is a pity that even today Cued Englishmen are not fully aware of the magnificence of our tenth and seventeenth century religious music. Every one of the t names in English music before the eighteenth century—and all best composers flourished before that century—was a church ician and composed for the church. At King's College, Cam- e, and New College, Oxford, and at some of our cathedrals, great music of our golden age can still be heard, but nothing of value has since been added to it, even during the last century. , certainly, was not the man ever to do it. Some of his rers in his later years urged him to what they considered e serious work, but they mistook his genius.
This genius, like all true genius, made several tentative starts before it flowered. He composed a ballet, L'Ile Enchantee, and several overtures, In Memoriam and Marmion. They fell dead from his pen, although they were performed in various places once or twice and are occasionally brought out again to be recognised as skeletons. All through his life Sullivan, goaded by that infirmity which Milton seems to have deprecated, struggled to achieve a grander sort of fame by writing works which we can justly describe as ambitious ; but always in vain. In 1873 he wrote an oratorio for Birmingham, Light of the World. The pious Sir George Grove publicly expressed the hope that Sullivan would apply his talents to serious opera or some " subject of abiding human or national interest." Sullivan, who was a very modest and decent man, anxious to do his duty as a citizen, made the effort and composed his first and last grand opera, Ivanhoe, for which, out of the immense profits of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, Richard D'Oyly Carte had built a big new opera house at Cambridge Circus, now known as the Palace. Ivanhoe was produced there on Saturday, January 31st, 1891. It ran for 16•3 nights, but Carte had miscalculated, and a few weeks after the production of its successor, an opera by Messager, sold the theatre to a music-hall syndicate. Ivanhoe was no
worse and no better than many other successful operas, but it was not a work of genius—whilst the Gilbert and Sullivan operas were. Carte's intention of establishing opera failed and deserved to fail. It was on his part a mere speculation ; but the lack of a Living operatic stage in this country has been a great disadvantage to English musicians. Opera is too expensive to exist without private or public endowment, such as it has always had on the Continent and still has today, not only in Germany and Italy but also in Russia.
It was in 1867 that Sullivan made his first essay in the genre which was to make him world-famous. A libretto by F. C. Burnand, of Punch, twas set to music under the title of Cox and Box and was privately performed and then put in the repertory of the German Reeds, who, similarly, produced a second musical play by Burnand and Sullivan, Contrabandista. In 1871 his name was linked for the first time with W. S. Gilbert in Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old, which was, however, not very successful ; but in 1875 D'Oyly Carte induced Sullivan to collaborate with Gilbert in Trial by Ittry, which was produced in March that year with immediate success. This was the first of that unique series of works which make up England's chief musical contribution to European history in the nineteenth century. Besides them everything else in our music of that period is negligible, for it is my opinion that the music of Sullivan's operas at its best will outlive the works of Elgar, Stanford, Parry and all our other nineteenth-century composers.
The partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan was not an easy one. Sullivan was not a difficult man, although an Irishman ; it was Gilbert who was difficult, but then Gilbert was also a man of genius and a far more extraordinary character than Sullivan. It is recorded that Sullivan often groaned in desperation on reading a new libretto received from Gilbert and finding in it the same old mixture of changelings, fairies and frustrated spinsters. It is doubtful whether he had much sympathy with Gilbert's realistic and ironical intelli- gence. What he did appreciate was Gilbert's amazing rhythmical invention. Gilbert was not musical, not as far as tonal values were concerned, he had perhaps no sense of melody—which was Sullivan's strongest point—but his flair for rhythm was most remarkable, and his verse rhythms inspired Sullivan with nearly all his happiest ideas. Without Gilbert's astounding virtuosity in rhythm (as well as rhyme) Sullivan's melodies would very likely have been much more commonplace than they are, so that it is right that their names should never be separated in discussing the operas. Nobody would ever dream of saying that Figaro or that Don Giovanni was by da Ponte and Mozart, and one only has to compare the music of Figaro with that of The Yeoman of the Guard to perceive how immeasur- ably greater a musician Mozart was than Sullivan. But the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan are, in their uniqueness, supreme ; there is nothing like them and, as far as mortal things may, they will live for ever.
Previous page
