Talking of books

Books and lyrics

Benny Green

In 1870 the dramatist William Schwenck Gilbert wrote a farce called The Palace of Truth, a melange so perverse that years later it tempted William Archer to suggest that Shaw's Arms arid the Man derived from it. In The Palace of Truth one of the characters is a musical pedant, and Gilbert, knowing less than nothing about musical pedantry, followed the tactics of Dickens' Count Smorltork, who made his discoveries about Chinese Metaphysics by reading up on China and Metaphysics and then combining the facts. In the encyclopaedia entries on Harmony, Gilbert came across a passage gilded with the grandiloquence of musical terminology, and being a bit of a street arab, found it excruciatingly funny:

If a composer has a musical theme to express, he can express it as perfectly upon the simple tetrachord of Mercury, in which there are no diatonic intervals at all, as upon the much more complicated dis-diapason, with the four tetrachords and the redundant note, which embraces in its perfect consonance all the simple, double and inverted chords.

Later in 1870 Gilbert was introduced to an unfortunate composer on whose head fell all Gilbert's considerable talent for derision whenever he suspected that people were being evasive or pretentious. Sizing the composer up as a bit of a wilting blossom, Gilbert opened the encounter with, "Tell me, Mr Sullivan, do you, believe that if a composer has a musical theme to express, he can express it as perfectly upon the simple tetrachord of Mercury. . ." and so on. Poor Sullivan, who had just had a great triumph with his music for The Tempest, and probably felt he was entitled to feeedom from persecution by madmen, asked Gilbert to repeat the question, then fell silent for a moment before replying, "I should like to think it over before giving a definite reply." The partnership's biographer Hesketh Pearson comments, "He must have thought it over for about thirty years, because Gilbert had not

received an answer when Sullivan died."

That overture to one of the funniest as well as one of the most fruitful collaborations in the history of the theatre sets the tone for the rest of the libretto. The robust masculinity of Gilbert's personality, the low boiling point which made his bristling irascibility one of the more regular sources of thunder and lightning in the second half of the nineteenth century, his contempt for shilly-shallying and procrastination, made him at once the best and the worst of

all possible partners for the snobbish, sentimental, gentle grafter Sullivan, who simply

wanted to be left in peace to back horses, endear himself to blue-bloods and write oratorios which he modestly considered to be equal to Mendelssohn's. There is very nearly

limitless laughter in the thirteen surviving Gilbert-and-Sullivan operas, but none of it 15

any more joyous than the spirit of the partnership itself, which bubbles with comic possibilities from that moment five years after the tetrachord-of-Mercury sketch when Gilbert trudged through the snow to Sullivan's house with the libretto of Trial By Jury in his overcoat pocket.

En route to Sullivan's house, Gilbert, disconcerted by the weather and suffering the anti-climactic depression of an author who has

come off the boil after writing something, grew angrier and angrier with himself for having

bothered to compose so contemptible a trifle. It was almost more than he could bring himself to do to read the lines aloud to Sullivan, who apparently sat there shaking with _silent laughter throughout the recital, although whether in appreciation of the libretto or the

behaviour of the librettist, posterity has no way of knowing. Gilbert spat the words out like a man with scorpions on his tongue, ending the

performance with a snort of self-disgust. This was the libretto which altered the course of comic opera and gave Victorian England its most substantial and enduring corpus of popular creative art since Dickens. That we should still be entranced and delighted by Gilbert and Sullivan a hundred years after the event is a tribute to three men, oily D'Oyly Carte for his insidious cunning as middle-man, Sullivan for enduring as long as he did the cracks across the back of the head administered with the cudgel of Gilbert's impatient muse, Gilbert, for finding enough supplies of conscience and morality to keep the

triumvirate in business for as long as he did. Today the thirteen libretti stand as a marvel

lous summary of what your bluff, no-nonsense uncomplicated Englishman thought of his world a hundred years ago. Of course Gilbert was about as uncomplicated as the Reverend Dodgson, but believing himself to be a simple, average chap, he put that belief into the attitudes of his libretti, which comprise a howl of laughter and a bellow of rage that humanity can be composed of such nitwits. The trials of musical collaboration are so rigorous that compared to them ordinary matrimony is a breeze, and nothing better illustrates the comic predicament of partners who intensely dislike each other but who are chained by financial and professional expe diency as Gilbert and Sullivan were, than the morning when the two men, each on boating holidays, made a rendezvous at the Half-Moon

Inn at Exeter, where they fixed the plot of lolanthe and then wished each other good

afternoon and scuttled back to the sanctity of

their boats. Gilbert was one of the shrewdest professionals who _ever drew royalties, for which reason it always amazed me that he did not perceive the inevitability of a fourteenth, Gilbert-and-Sullivan libretto, about a ladles man-composer with an eye on a knighthood, and a tactlessly honest bull of a librettist wh,0

are forced to hold hands because their collaboration is the only thing which will give them enough money to live in the manner to

which they would like to become accustomed. They might have called it The Savoyards, or Trial by Marriage.