William S. Gilbert

W.S. Gilbert
1836-1911
photo credit: Brown Bros.

We recently passed the centennial of William S. Gilbert’s death on May 29^th, 1911. The 74-year-old man died when he swam to the rescue of a young lady who was struggling in the lake at his country house, Grim’s Dyke.  Upon reaching her, he told her to hang onto him but then sank below the surface.  When his body was recovered from the lake, it was determined that he had died from a heart attack.  The heroic and chivalrous nature of this story suits Sir Gilbert, the greatest English playwright of the Victorian era.  

W.S. Gilbert is best known for the fourteen Gilbert & Sullivan comic operas he wrote with Sir Arthur Sullivan between 1871 and 1896 including HMS Pinafore, the Pirates of Penzance, Patience, Iolanthe, The Mikado, Yeoman of the Guard, and The Gondoliers.  However, he had established his reputation as a playwright and satirist long before he met Sullivan.  As a boy, he was interested in writing and theatre.  He even ran away to join a theatre troupe but was promptly sent home by the troupe’s manager who knew Gilbert’s father.  After his schooling, Gilbert was a civil servant (which he hated), and then a barrister-at-law (at which he wasn’t very good).  Fortunately, he continued to write and draw little caricatures.  He published his humorous stories and verses in a weekly journal called ‘Fun’ and signed them ‘Bab’, his childhood nickname.  The ‘Bab Ballads’ as they were soon known are extremely funny, witty little verses on a variety of social subjects and were often accompanied by a small drawing by Gilbert himself.  Through these ballads, Gilbert developed his lyrical skills and topsy-turvy storytelling.  Many of the G&S plots can be traced to them.

Gilbert then turned his attention to the stage with a series of burlesques, farces, and pantomimes with ridiculous stories and laden with puns.  During this period, Gilbert learned a great deal about stage management and direction from his mentor Tom Robertson, a successful producer of his day.  As his reputation as a playwright grew, Gilbert wrote and staged many successful plays which often included his trademark topsy-turvy plots.  Ages Ago (1869) for example involved painted ancestors stepping out of their frames (a device he would use again in Ruddigore).  In 1871, he threw together a Christmas spectacular called Thespis with the well-known English composer Arthur Sullivan, although they went their separate ways soon after it closed.  Several years later, Richard D’Oyly Carte remembered Thespis and asked Gilbert for a one-act play to be set to music by Sullivan.   Trial by Jury was an immediate success and launched the two-decade collaboration between these three men.  The G&S operas were huge international successes and massive cultural phenomena as well.  About half of the G&S operas are still performed regularly today.

I’ve been studying Gilbert & Sullivan my entire adult life and still can’t explain to non-believers what is so great about them.  I even teach a class on G&S and have never been satisfied that I get to the core what makes the operas so good.  I’ve procrastinated on this blog post for two weeks because, as well as I know this subject, I’m afraid I’ll still miss the mark.  And I’m not alone.  Myriad books have been written about the G&S operas during the past 100 years and, while the biographical ones are interesting, the analytical ones are invariably ambiguous and unsatisfying.   Nonetheless, here goes…

The Music.  The true magic of G&S comes from the perfect marriage of Gilbert’s lyrics and Sullivan’s music.  As early as Trial by Jury, critics noted that “it would be difficult to conceive the existence of Mr. Gilbert’s verses without Mr. Sullivan’s music, as of Mr. Sullivan’s music without Mr. Gilbert’s verses.  Each gives each a double charm.”  The words and music seem to come from the same brain.  Moreover, no matter where Gilbert goes, Sullivan finds a tune to match the humor, the wit, the drama, the pathos, or the sentimentality.  Iolanthe, in the middle of the canon, has the best examples of this.  The importance of this magic to the success of G&S is also supported by the fact that when it’s missing, as it is in the final two operas, the result is more than disappointing.  Also, Sullivan’s melodies are wonderful and his music, at times, quite sublime.

The Stories.  Gilbert spent almost a decade honing his topsy-turvy stories before he met Sullivan.  The world of the operas is fraught with absurdities and sometimes supernatural occurrences.  Babies switched at birth, a love potion that makes you fall for the first person you see, pirates who turn out to be noblemen, ancestors stepping out of their frames, a shepherd who’s a fairy down to the waistcoat, and a prisoner who hides in plain sight by shaving his beard can all be found in G&S.  Perhaps even funnier are the choices the characters make in all earnestness: Frederick asking Mabel to wait for him until 1940 because he is a slave of duty (Pirates), Koko allowing Nanki-Poo to marry Yum-Yum so that he can execute him a month later (Mikado), Jack Point allowing his fiancée Elsie to marry Colonel Fairfax because it pays and the latter will be dead soon anyways (Yeoman), and Princess Ida putting just about everyone in jeopardy for the sake of her feminine ideals (Princess Ida).  The stories are absurd but, as Jack Point says in Yeoman, “Oh, winnow all my folly, and you’ll find a grain or two of truth among the chaff.”

The Lyrics.  Gilbert’s use of language is on a par with the greatest of English writers.  This is regularly overlooked because the operas seem so superficial and silly on the surface.  For a modern audience, the lyrics race by, allowing little time to be appreciated.  Most true G&S fans have found themselves enraptured by the lyrics only after listening to them many, many times.  The patter songs, such as ‘I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major General’ from Pirates, the Nightmare Song from Iolanthe, and the ‘It Really Doesn’t Matter’ patter trio from Ruddigore, show Gilbert’s ability to simply overwhelm with a torrent of syllables.  But his poetry can be quite profound as in Katisha’s song from The Mikado or Sighing Softly to the River from Pirates.  Finally, Gilbert’s rhymes are unforgettably outrageous, particularly the multi-syllabic feminine rhymes like:

Pray observe the magnanimity
We display to lace and dimity!
Never was such opportunity
To get married with impunity,
But we give up the felicity
Of unbounded domesticity,
Though a doctor of divinity
Resides in this vicinity. (Pirates of Penzance)

The Characters.  There are two G&S series of Players Cigarette cards with each card featuring a single character (Marco and Guiseppi share a card - of course!)  Perusing these cards, I’m always amazed how each character is unique and fully developed.  Most of them contain a human quality or weakness that we easily recognize in people we know, or if we’re honest, ourselves.  Pooh-Bah (Mikado) is haughty and exclusive individual who must mortify his pride continually.  Jack Point (Yeoman) is a professional fool who is cynically aware that he is much brighter than his employers.  Rose Maybud (Ruddigore) uses her book of etiquette as her moral compass.  From the mouth of disfigured Dick Deadeye (Pinafore), the noblest sentiments sound like the black utterances of a depraved imagination but he is the only sailor on the Pinafore who understands what’s going on.  The Fairy Queen (Iolanthe) runs her band of fairies with an iron fist but she is actually romantic and a big softie.  Then there is my favorite, Reginald Bunthorne (Patience), the phony aesthetic poet whose medievalism’s affectation is born of a morbid love of admiration.

   

The Satire.  The G&S operas are complex social satires brimming with the foibles, ironies, and contradictions of life.  Many writers make the point that Gilbert was satirizing Victorian life and mores.  These same writers are always surprised that Americans seem to get it, too.  That's because Gilbert’s satire is so universal.  We all recognize and understand the themes and the moral lessons underlying his airy persiflage.  Pinafore explodes the British class system in favor of, of all things, competence.  Iolanthe chooses death to ensure her son’s happiness.  Jack Point and Bunthorne are left alone at the ends of their respective operas, which we sense they deserve.  Marco and Guiseppi Palmieri (Gondoliers) have to share their throne, a predicament shared by anyone whose achievements are the result of teamwork (as Gilbert and Sullivan were no doubt acutely aware.)  Today, Gilbert & Sullivan productions are often marketed as frilly nonsense.  Don’t you believe it.

Question of the Day: What is your favorite Gilbert & Sullivan Opera?  Why?