Trivia / Gilbert and Sullivan

• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Almost all of the music to Thespis, the duo's first collaboration, is believed lost. Only fragments reused in other works remain.
  • The libretto to Gilbert's collaboration with Frederic Clay, Happy Arcadia, survives, but the music is believed to be entirely lost.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Sullivan would have preferred to be famous for his serious music, like The Golden Legend, a cantata based on a poetic work of the same name by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; The Martyr of Antioch, an oratorio about the martyrdom of St. Margaret of Antioch; and Ivanhoe, a grand opera based on the Walter Scott novel of the same name; rather than the comic operas he wrote with Gilbert.
• Referenced by...: Isaac Asimov's "Runaround": The proximity to selenium has disturbed Speedy's sensitive computer brain, causing him to speak whimsically, such as quoting from several Gilbert and Sullivan plays.
• Trope Maker: Billed as comic operas in their day, their shows' heavy use of dialogue, and the equal importance they gave to lyrics and music, blurred the line between opera and theatre. Today, we consider them some of the earliest examples of the modern musical.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Gilbert was fascinated with the satirical possibilities of a story about a magic lozenge that turns Hypocrites into whatever they have pretended to be. He suggested the story to Sullivan several different times over the years, and Sullivan rejected it every time, finding it too similar to The Sorcerer and lacking any human interest. Finally, after their partnership temporarily broke up in 1890, Gilbert gave the idea to another composer and produced it as the now-forgotten The Mountebanks.
  • After the success of their most serious collaboration, The Yeomen of the Guard, Sullivan suggested to Gilbert that they should write a true opera next. Gilbert declined, saying that would be too far away from what the public expected of them, and that writing a serious opera libretto would not play to his strengths: "The librettist of a grand opera is always swamped in the composer." Gilbert suggested that they should do another comic opera, which became The Gondoliers, and recommended another writer, Julian Sturgis, for Sullivan's first grand opera, which became 1891's Ivanhoe.

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