Music

Arthur Sullivan

1842–1900 · English

Victorian Romantic; comic opera

Arthur Sullivan was the most celebrated British composer of the Victorian age, trained at the Royal Academy of Music and the Leipzig Conservatory and famous at twenty for his incidental music to The Tempest. To posterity he is half of a partnership — the fourteen comic operas written with the librettist W. S. Gilbert for Richard D'Oyly Carte — but he also produced a symphony, a cello concerto, oratorios and cantatas, hymn tunes, parlour songs and a full-length grand opera, Ivanhoe. Knighted in 1883, he spent the rest of his life uneasily divided between the Savoy and the serious music the critics kept demanding of him.

How to spot them

▸The English composer knighted in 1883, long before his librettist partner was honoured in 1907
▸Clue patterns: Leipzig, the first Mendelssohn Scholar, the Chapel Royal, the Savoy Theatre, D'Oyly Carte
▸Wrote the tune 'St Gertrude' and a parlour song about an organist who strikes one chord and can never find it again
▸Buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral on the personal command of Queen Victoria
▸His only symphony is nicknamed after the country in which it was sketched, not after any tune in it

Key works — listen

The Lost Chord (1877)

Parlour song to a poem by Adelaide Anne Procter, written at the deathbed of his brother Fred; the best-selling British song of its day

Recording: Music: Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) Lyrics: Adelaide Anne Procter (1825-1864) Singer: Reed Miller (1880-1923) · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

'St Gertrude' — the tune for Onward, Christian Soldiers (1871)

Hymn tune written for Sabine Baring-Gould's processional verses and named after Gertrude Clay-Ker-Seymer, at whose house it was composed

Recording: Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924) Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

Overture di Ballo (1870)

Concert overture in waltz rhythm written for the Birmingham Festival; his most durable purely orchestral piece

Recording: Arthur Sullivan, performed by United States Marine Band, transcribed for band by Col. John R. Bourgeois, who served as Band Director. · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

Symphony in E, the "Irish" (1866)

His only symphony, premiered at the Crystal Palace under August Manns; the nickname comes from its being sketched during a stay in Ireland

Incidental music to The Tempest (1861–62)

Begun as a student exercise in Leipzig; its Crystal Palace performance in April 1862 made the composer famous overnight at nineteen

Ivanhoe (1891)

His one grand opera, to a libretto by Julian Sturgis after Walter Scott; it opened D'Oyly Carte's Royal English Opera House and ran 155 consecutive nights

The Golden Legend (1886)

Cantata after Longfellow, written for the Leeds Festival; for a generation the most performed British choral work after Messiah

"My name is John Wellington Wells" (1877)

The family sorcerer's patter song from the first full-length comic opera of the partnership

Recording: Grantyny · CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

Key ideas

He made the English comic opera a respectable form by writing it straight — real counterpoint, real orchestration and deadpan parody of Handel, Verdi and Italian bel canto.
Word-setting was his particular gift: the rapid patter numbers stay intelligible because the music never fights the natural stress of the text.
He believed, and was constantly told, that the Savoy pieces were beneath his gifts; the pull between the theatre and the concert hall shaped his whole career.

Quick-fire facts

•Born in Lambeth, London, on 13 May 1842; his father was a military bandmaster at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.
•He became a chorister of the Chapel Royal and in 1856, aged fourteen, was the first winner of the Mendelssohn Scholarship, which took him to the Royal Academy of Music and then to the Leipzig Conservatory.
•Queen Victoria knighted him in 1883, seven years before his librettist was even considered; the press promptly told him to give up comic opera.
•He was principal of the National Training School for Music (forerunner of the Royal College of Music) from 1876 to 1881, and conducted the Leeds Festival from 1880 to 1898.
•His cello concerto of 1866 was thought lost when the publisher Chappell's warehouse burned down in 1964, and had to be reconstructed.
•In 1888 he spoke onto one of Edison's wax cylinders at a London demonstration, calling himself 'astonished and somewhat terrified' at the result — one of the earliest surviving recordings of a famous voice.
•Because American theatres pirated H.M.S. Pinafore freely, the partnership gave the official premiere of The Pirates of Penzance in New York on 31 December 1879; he crossed the Atlantic to conduct it and had to rewrite the first act from memory after leaving his sketches in London.
•He wrote 'The Absent-Minded Beggar' (1899) to Kipling's words, raising a fortune for Boer War soldiers' families.
•A lifelong gambler and racehorse owner, he suffered agonisingly from kidney stones and composed much of the Savoy music in acute pain.
•He died at his flat in Victoria Street on 22 November 1900 and, by the Queen's command, was buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral rather than in Brompton Cemetery beside his parents.
•His memorial in Victoria Embankment Gardens carries a weeping bronze muse and a line of Gilbert's: 'Is life a boon?'

Drill it — 11 cards

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Sources

The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive — Sullivan Biography
Encyclopaedia Britannica — Arthur Sullivan
Arthur Jacobs — Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician