Gilbert and Sullivan - Operas - Legacy and Assessment

Legacy and Assessment

Gilbert died in 1911, and Richard's son, Rupert D'Oyly Carte, took over the opera company upon his step-mother's death in 1913. His daughter, Bridget, inherited the company upon his death in 1948. The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company toured nearly year-round, except for its many London seasons and foreign tours, performing exclusively the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, until it closed in 1982. During the 20th century, the company gave well over 35,000 performances.

In 1922, Sir Henry Wood explained the enduring success of the collaboration as follows:

Sullivan has never had an equal for brightness and drollery, for humour without coarseness and without vulgarity, and for charm and grace. His orchestration is delightful: he wrote with full understanding of every orchestral voice. Above all, his music is perfectly appropriate to the words of which it is the setting.... He found the right, the only cadences to fit Gilbert's happy and original rhythms, and to match Gilbert's fun or to throw Gilbert's frequent irony, pointed although not savage, into relief. Sullivan's music is much more than the accompaniment of Gilbert's libretti, just as Gilbert's libretti are far more than words to Sullivan's music. We have two masters who are playing a concerto. Neither is subordinate to the other; each gives what is original, but the two, while neither predominates, are in perfect correspondence. This rare harmony of words and music is what makes these operas entirely unique. They are the work not of a musician and his librettist nor of a poet and one who sets his words to music, but of two geniuses.

In 1957, a review in The Times gave this rationale for "the continued vitality of the Savoy operas":

"hey were never really contemporary in their idiom.... Gilbert and Sullivan's, from the first moment was obviously not the audience's world, an artificial world, with a neatly controlled and shapely precision which has not gone out of fashion – because it was never in fashion in the sense of using the fleeting conventions and ways of thought of contemporary human society.... For this, each partner has his share of credit. The neat articulation of incredibilities in Gilbert's plots is perfectly matched by his language.... His dialogue, with its primly mocking formality, satisfies both the ear and the intelligence. His verses show an unequalled and very delicate gift for creating a comic effect by the contrast between poetic form and prosaic thought and wording.... How deliciously prick the bubble of sentiment.... equal importance... Gilbert's lyrics almost invariably take on extra point and sparkle when set to Sullivan's music.... Sullivan's tunes, in these operas, also exist in a make-believe world of their own.... a delicate wit, whose airs have a precision, a neatness, a grace, and a flowing melody.... The two men together remain endlessly and incomparably delightful.... Light, and even trifling, though may seem upon grave consideration, they yet have the shapeliness and elegance that can make a trifle into a work of art".

Because of the unusual success of the operas, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company were able, from the start, to license the works to other professional companies, such as the J. C. Williamson Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company, and to amateur troupes. For almost a century, until the British copyrights expired at the end of 1961, and even afterwards, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company influenced productions of the operas worldwide, creating a "performing tradition" for most of the operas that is still referred to today by many directors, both amateur and professional. Indeed, Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte had an important influence on amateur theatre. Cellier and Bridgeman wrote in 1914 that, prior to the creation of the Savoy operas, amateur actors were treated with contempt by professionals. After the formation of amateur Gilbert and Sullivan companies in the 1880s licensed to perform the operas, professionals recognised that the amateur performing groups "support the culture of music and the drama. They are now accepted as useful training schools for the legitimate stage, and from the volunteer ranks have sprung many present-day favourites." Cellier and Bridgeman attributed the rise in quality and reputation of the amateur groups largely to "the popularity of, and infectious craze for performing, the Gilbert and Sullivan operas". The National Operatic and Dramatic Association (NODA) was founded in 1899. It reported, in 1914, that nearly 200 British troupes were performing Gilbert and Sullivan that year, constituting most of the amateur companies in the country (this figure included only the societies that were members of NODA). The association further reported that almost 1,000 performances of the Savoy operas had been given in Britain that year, many of them to benefit charities. Cellier and Bridgeman noted that strong amateur groups were performing the operas in places as far away as New Zealand. In the U.S., and elsewhere where British copyrights on the operas were not enforced, both professional and amateur companies performed the works throughout the 20th century – the Internet Broadway Database counts about 150 productions on Broadway alone from 1900 to 1960. The Savoy Company, an amateur group formed in 1901 in Philadelphia, continues to perform today.

Recordings of excerpts from the Gilbert and Sullivan operas began to be released in 1906. In 1917, the Gramophone Company (also known as HMV) produced the first album of a complete musical score of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, The Mikado, followed by recordings of eight more of the operas. Electrical recordings of the complete musical scores of most of the operas were then issued by the Gramophone Company and Victor Talking Machine Company beginning in the late 1920s. These recordings were supervised by Rupert D'Oyly Carte. The original D'Oyly Carte Opera Company continued to produce well-regarded recordings until 1979, helping to keep the operas popular through the decades. Many of these recordings have been reissued on CD. After the copyrights on the operas expired, other professional companies were free to perform and record the operas. Many performing companies arose to produce the works, such as Gilbert and Sullivan for All in Britain and the Light Opera of Manhattan and Light Opera Works in the U.S., and existing companies, such as English National Opera and Australian Opera added Gilbert and Sullivan to their repertories. These companies also released popular audio and video recordings of the operas. In 1980, a Broadway and West End production of Pirates produced by Joseph Papp brought new audiences to Gilbert and Sullivan, and between 1988 and 2003, the revived D'Oyly Carte Opera Company revived the operas on tour and on the West End, also recording seven of the operas. A set of eleven of the operas (omitting the last two) was produced in 1982 for television, ten of which are available on VHS and DVD.

Today, numerous professional repertory companies, small opera companies, amateur societies, churches, schools and universities continue to produce the works. The most popular G&S works also continue to be performed from time to time by major opera companies, and professional recordings of the operas, and albums of songs from the operas, continue to be released. Since 1994, a three-week long International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival has been held every August in Buxton, England, with some twenty performances of the operas given in the opera house, and several dozen related "fringe" events given in smaller venues. The Festival sells both professional and amateur videos of its most popular productions. In connection with the 2009 festival, a contemporary critic wrote, "The appeal of G&S’s special blend of charm, silliness and gentle satire seems immune to fashion." There continue to be hundreds of amateur companies performing the Gilbert and Sullivan works worldwide.