The Lighter Classics in Music by David Ewen

composition at, the National Training School for Music. In recognition of his high estate in English music, he was the recipient of many honors. In 1878 he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and in 1883 he was knighted by Queen Victoria. It is irony fitting for a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera that the music on which Sullivan lavished his most fastidious attention and of which he was most proud has been completely forgotten (except for one or two minor exceptions). But the music upon which he looked with such condescension and self apology is that which has made him an immortal—in the theater if not in the concert world. For where Sullivan was heavy-handed, pretentious, and often stilted in his oratorios, serious operas, and orchestral compositions, he was consistently vital, fresh, personal, and vivacious in his lighter music. In setting Gilbert’s lyrics to music, Sullivan was always capable of finding the musical _mot juste_ to catch every nuance of Gilbert’s wit and satire. So neatly, even inevitably, does the music fit the words that it is often difficult to think of one without the other. Like Gilbert, Sullivan was a master of parody and satire; he liked particularly to mock at the pretensions of grand opera, oratorio, and the sentimental ballad, pretensions of which he himself was a victim when he endeavored to work in those fields. Like Gilbert, he had a pen that raced with lightning velocity in the writing of patter music to patter verses. Sullivan, moreover, had a reservoir of melodies seemingly inexhaustible—gay tunes, mocking tunes, and tunes filled with telling sentiment—and he was able to adapt the fullest resources of his remarkable gift at harmony, rhythm and orchestration to the manifold demands of the stage. He was no man’s imitator. Without having recourse to experimentation or unorthodox styles and techniques, his style and manners were so uniquely his that, as T. F. Dunhill has said, “his art is always recognizable.... The Sullivan touch is unmistakable and can be felt instantly.” Of the universality of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas, Isaac Goldberg wrote: “They [Gilbert and Sullivan] were not the rebels of an era, yet as surely they were not the apologists. Their light laughter carried a pleasant danger of its own that, without being the laughter of a Figaro, helped before the advent of a Shaw to keep the atmosphere clear. Transition figures they were, in an age of transition, caught between the personal independence of the artist and the social imperatives of their station. They did not cross over into the new day, though they served as a footbridge for others. Darwin gave them ... only a song for _Princess Ida_, their melodious answer to the revolt of woman against a perfumed slavery; Swinburne and Wilde ... characters for _Patience_. They chided personal foibles, and only indirectly social abuses. They were, after all, moralists not sociologists. It was in their natures; it was of their position. Yet something vital in them lives beyond their time. From their era of caste, of smug rectitude, of sanctimoniousness, they still speak to an age that knows neither corset nor petticoat, that votes with its women, and finds Freud insufficiently aphrodisiac. Perhaps it is because they chide individuals and not institutions that their work, so admirably held in solution by Sullivan’s music, has lived through the most critical epoch in modern history since the French Revolution. For, underneath the cataclysmic changes of history remain the foibles that make us the fit laughter of the gods.” Overtures to and potpourris from the principal Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas are integral to the repertory of salon and pop orchestras everywhere. In all cases, the overture is made up of the opera’s main melodies, and in most cases these overtures were written by others. _The Gondoliers_ was the last of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas to survive in the permanent repertory. It was produced on December 7,