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Gilbert and Sullivan – Together
In the 1870s, Arthur Sullivan was a rising young composer whose reputation was growing steadily. At the same time, William S. Gilbert was a rising young dramatist whose plays were attracting an increasingly wider audience. They lived in the same city, they had friends in common, and each probably knew of the other’s work—we know Gilbert had heard Sullivan’s music, because he had reviewed Sullivan and Burnand’s operetta, Cox and Box, as the theater critic for Fun magazine. They had even collaborated on a Christmas entertainment, Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old. It was a successful venture in its limited way, but both men evidently considered the project a one-off.…
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W.S. Gilbert the Recycler
Today I am plundering the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive (which is moving soon to gilbertandsullivanarchive.org) to show how William S. Gilbert “recycled” some of his early literary ideas into the bases of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas we know today. Before Gilbert began writing his comic operas, he was well-known for his witty magazine articles and for a series of comically grotesque poems, collectively known as The Bab Ballads. (“Bab” was William’s childhood nickname, and was the pseudonym he used for this series of poems.) You can find them all collected in the G&S archive here. From “The Student” to “The Sorcerer” In 1865, Gilbert wrote a parody of…