Sullivan’s Musical Humor
[amazon text=Amazon&cat=local&last=5&wishlist_type=Similar]Fans of Gilbert and Sullivan immediately get Gilbert’s sense of humor and wordplay. He was famous for his wit.
But when it came to the music, Sullivan was every bit as elegant a humorist. Throughout his collaboration with Gilbert, Sullivan added touches of musical humor to their operas – references which Victorian audiences might have picked up on quicker than we do today.
It’s not that recognizing musical references is some kind of lost art; it just depends on how familiar we are with the music that’s being quoted. Today, we understand allusions to recent songs and musical styles.
For instance, many of us would catch the reference to Elvis Presley’s singing style that was added to this song by the reluctant pirate Frederick in the 1983 movie version of The Pirates of Penzance:
(blurry, but the sound is good, and there are subtitles)
Of course, that Elvis-y warble wasn’t original to the piece! But today it can bring a smile to the faces to moviegoers because we get the reference.
In Gilbert and Sullivan’s day, most of the theater-going public would recognize the musical styles of the composers that Sullivan referred to, and they would have enjoyed his musical quotations and allusions. Here are a few examples:
Trial by Jury
Trial by Jury, a “dramatic cantata” about a jilted bride who sues her faithless lover for breach of promise, takes place entirely in a courtroom.
Near the beginning of the proceedings, the extremely un-heroic Judge gets a hero’s introduction – which Sullivan wrote as a sarcastic musical reference to George Friedrich Handel. Here is a video of that introduction, followed by the Judge’s hilarious song introducing himself.
Compare that opening march to Handel’s march from Scipione:
Also in Trial by Jury, near the end, the five main characters sing a quintet, A nice dilemma. Here is an example of the song:
In a discussion of Trial by Jury that is preserved at the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, David Lyle, Musical Director of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society in Edinburgh, noted that this quintet “ was intended to be a very tongue in cheek sendup of so many interminable Romantic, Italian opera ensembles, where all action grinds to a halt whilst the entire cast chews the cud for a few minutes and squeezes the last drop of mileage out of about three words. (I also think it’s a highly successful sendup, too.)”
Compare the quintet above with the following song from Bellini’s romantic Italian opera, La Somnambula, in which the heroine basically says, “wow my heart is really beating fast”:
The Sorcerer
The Sorcerer, the first full-length comic opera that the duo produced, was about what happens when a well-intentioned young nobleman hires a sorcerer to put a love potion into the village teapot at his engagement party, so that everyone will experience the delights of being in love. Predictably, all the villagers fall in love with the wrong person. Hijinks ensue, but everything ends happily enough.
In the scene where the sorcerer enchants the teapot, Sullivan subtly echoes Weber’s unearthly music from Der Freischutz (often translated as “The Marksman,” this was the first German romantic opera, based on a folk tale about a huntsman who competes in a marksmanship contest using a rifle with magic bullets).
(This is from a G&S Youth Festival, but they do a great job, I think)
The spooky elements can be heard in the overture from Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber, here performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by von Karajan:
Iolanthe
In Iolanthe, in which the Fairy Queen and her attendant fairies take over the House of Peers in order to reunite two sets of separated lovers, the audiences would have immediately “gotten” the references to Wagner’s Brunnhilde and the Valkyrie.
Visually, the connection was reinforced by the Fairy Queen’s original costume design (see the original Fairy Queen, Alice Barnett, in her chain mail, left).
Musically, the fairies of Iolanthe sing “willawoo”, which is close to the Valkyrie’s cry of “hojotoho!”
(This is just a recording of the song, without images — but it’s the best version I could find)
The Metropolitan Opera’s version of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries is wonderful. The set appears to represent currents of air that are being ridden by the Valkyrie. The warrior goddesses are pretty awesome ladies.
The Mikado
Another on of Sullivan’s musical “winks” to the audiences appears in the Mikado’s song, My Object All Sublime, in which he talks about ways to make the punishment fit the crime. In the line about music-hall performers having to listen to “Bach, interwoven with Spohr and Beethoven” you can hear a short Spohr-like clarinet passage weaving right through those words!
Here is Timothy Spall singing the song in the 1999 movie, Topsy Turvy:
Compare that clarinet flourish to Spohr’s clarinet in Das Heimliche Lied:
I hope you enjoyed that little musical tour! Since I am not a musical expert, I’ve had to match up the references I’ve read about with the most likely original sources.