Parodistic And Satirical

In his American Operetta (New York, 1981), Gerald Bordman makes a statement that on first reading strikes one as outrageous and irresponsible. He says that, in the world of the English-speaking theater, H.M.S. Pinafore may well be "the most important musical ever written." That would be studied!

William Schwenk Gilbert was a young lawyer with a gift for cartooning and light verse who, in 1866, had been drawn into London musical theater as a librettist. Three years later he collaborated with Frederic Clay on Ages Ago and was introduced to Arthur Sullivan by the composer during a rehearsal. Sullivan had been a musical prodigy nurtured on Schubert (his own favorite) and Mendelssohn, the English composer-laureate-manque of the period, and who had lofty ambitions. In 1871, in a shotgun marriage arranged by producer John Hollingshead, they joined forces to write Thespis. Owing to the production, it was a disaster, and the music has since disappeared for the most part.

In 1875 they were brought together again by Richard D'Oyly Carte for Gilbert's Trial by Jury, which Sullivan set as a real comic opera without dialogue. It was a success but only a curtain-raiser that would not suffice for an evening's entertainment. Carte, however, sensed a brilliant future for the team and gave them carte-blanche, in terms of the production of their next effort. This was The Sorcerer, whose book had originated in an earlier Gilbertian spoof of Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore. While working on the score, Sullivan was badly shaken by the death of his brother, and had a hard time applying himself to his work. The Sorcerer did well enough, but was not sufficiently hot to encore the Great Fire of London. By now, however, the partnership was an established fact and had produced the makings of a company, and so it forged ahead with

H.M.S. Pinafore.

Sullivan, who was for his day very much the swinger, had to be rounded up from the casinos on the Rivera, but went to work with as much of a will as he ever summoned up for these things. Pinafore opened on May 25, 1878, during a protracted and unusual heat wave. The notices were admiring, but audiences were relatively sparse, and it seemed increasingly likely that it would have to close down. Then one night Sullivan put some selections on a "pops" program he was conducting at Covent Garden. The audience, England, and the Anglo-Saxon world went bananas in that order.

The first American production took place in Boston that November, and San Francisco, Philadelphia, and eventually New York saw others within the next two months. These were all piracies-rather rough-hewn approximations with catch-as-catch-can orchestrations. Then a group of Bostonians decided to do it right (however illegally), and carefully put together a top-flight company that would later be known as The Bostonians. They wowed their own city and then New York, and ended up taking the Pinafore on a cross-country triumphal cruise.

By that time the nation, especially New York City, was Pinafore-mad. By mid-year it had been seen in a dozen Manhattan theaters. One troupe was all-Black, another all children, and spoofs and parodies sprang up everywhere. Cheated of their royalties, the partners sent a touring company of their own across the Atlantic, and premiered their next offering, The Pirates of Penzance, in New York to insure that no such shenanigans would occur again.

It was the second Boston version of Pinafore that opened eyes to what the operetta signified. It was parodistic and satirical to be sure, from its title on down. Englishmen who knew their governors, recognized in Sir Joseph Porter, who became First Lord of the Admiralty by assiduously polishing up the office brass and never going to sea, their current First Lord, William Henry Smith, a non-naval publisher-turned-politician, forever after called "Pinafore Smith:"

One did not have to be British to recognize the satire of military regulations or of the paradox of the Victorian systems of unbridgeable class levels and patronizing etiquette. But Bordman quotes an anonymous and astute Boston reviewer who saw that, instead of being a revue or a vaudeville, the work not only mocked the conventions of "real" opera but observed them: a coherent story (however outrageously nonsensical), consistent characters (however incredible), and music that was a part of the drama. The operetta, says Mr. Bordman, not only set the tone for Anglo-American popular musical theater for the next quarter century, but laid the groundwork for the American musical as we now know it.

Review of Gilbert and Sullivan HMS Pinafore pg 59

In his American Operetta (New York, 1981), Gerald Bordman makes a statement that on first reading strikes one as outrageous and irresponsible. He says that, in the world of the English-speaking theater, H.M.S. Pinafore may well be "the most important musical ever written." That would be studied!

William Schwenk Gilbert was a young lawyer with a gift for cartooning and light verse who, in 1866, had been drawn into London musical theater as a librettist. Three years later he collaborated with Frederic Clay on Ages Ago and was introduced to Arthur Sullivan by the composer during a rehearsal. Sullivan had been a musical prodigy nurtured on Schubert (his own favorite) and Mendelssohn, the English composer-laureate-manque of the period, and who had lofty ambitions. In 1871, in a shotgun marriage arranged by producer John Hollingshead, they joined forces to write Thespis. Owing to the production, it was a disaster, and the music has since disappeared for the most part.

In 1875 they were brought together again by Richard D'Oyly Carte for Gilbert's Trial by Jury, which Sullivan set as a real comic opera without dialogue. It was a success but only a curtain-raiser that would not suffice for an evening's entertainment. Carte, however, sensed a brilliant future for the team and gave them carte-blanche, in terms of the production of their next effort. This was The Sorcerer, whose book had originated in an earlier Gilbertian spoof of Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore. While working on the score, Sullivan was badly shaken by the death of his brother, and had a hard time applying himself to his work. The Sorcerer did well enough, but was not sufficiently hot to encore the Great Fire of London. By now, however, the partnership was an established fact and had produced the makings of a company, and so it forged ahead with

H.M.S. Pinafore.

Sullivan, who was for his day very much the swinger, had to be rounded up from the casinos on the Rivera, but went to work with as much of a will as he ever summoned up for these things. Pinafore opened on May 25, 1878, during a protracted and unusual heat wave. The notices were admiring, but audiences were relatively sparse, and it seemed increasingly likely that it would have to close down. Then one night Sullivan put some selections on a "pops" program he was conducting at Covent Garden. The audience, England, and the Anglo-Saxon world went bananas in that order.

The first American production took place in Boston that November, and San Francisco, Philadelphia, and eventually New York saw others within the next two months. These were all piracies-rather rough-hewn approximations with catch-as-catch-can orchestrations. Then a group of Bostonians decided to do it right (however illegally), and carefully put together a top-flight company that would later be known as The Bostonians. They wowed their own city and then New York, and ended up taking the Pinafore on a cross-country triumphal cruise.

By that time the nation, especially New York City, was Pinafore-mad. By mid-year it had been seen in a dozen Manhattan theaters. One troupe was all-Black, another all children, and spoofs and parodies sprang up everywhere. Cheated of their royalties, the partners sent a touring company of their own across the Atlantic, and premiered their next offering, The Pirates of Penzance, in New York to insure that no such shenanigans would occur again.

It was the second Boston version of Pinafore that opened eyes to what the operetta signified. It was parodistic and satirical to be sure, from its title on down. Englishmen who knew their governors, recognized in Sir Joseph Porter, who became First Lord of the Admiralty by assiduously polishing up the office brass and never going to sea, their current First Lord, William Henry Smith, a non-naval publisher-turned-politician, forever after called "Pinafore Smith:"

One did not have to be British to recognize the satire of military regulations or of the paradox of the Victorian systems of unbridgeable class levels and patronizing etiquette. But Bordman quotes an anonymous and astute Boston reviewer who saw that, instead of being a revue or a vaudeville, the work not only mocked the conventions of "real" opera but observed them: a coherent story (however outrageously nonsensical), consistent characters (however incredible), and music that was a part of the drama. The operetta, says Mr. Bordman, not only set the tone for Anglo-American popular musical theater for the next quarter century, but laid the groundwork for the American musical as we now know it.

Review of Gilbert and Sullivan HMS Pinafore pg 59