Background
Sullivan had been associated with the prestigious triennial Leeds Music Festival, both as conductor and composer, since 1880, when his choral work The Martyr of Antioch had its premiere at Leeds Town Hall. By 1886, Sullivan was serving as the Leeds Festival's musical director for the third time, and the Festival Committee had commissioned him to compose a new choral work. In January 1886, having settled on his subject, but having tried and failed to arrange a libretto himself, he asked Joseph Bennett to prepare the libretto based on Longfellow's epic poem The Golden Legend.
Only weeks before Sullivan began composing The Golden Legend in the spring of 1886, Franz Liszt visited London. Sullivan had met Liszt many years earlier in Leipzig, when Sullivan was a student there, and he now escorted the older composer to functions given in his honour. During this visit, Liszt's music was heard in London, including his sacred cantata, The Legend of St Elisabeth. Liszt had, in 1874, set the prologue of The Golden Legend as Die Glocken des Strassburger Münsters, and some commentators assert that the influence of Liszt, and particularly of these two works, is discernible in Sullivan's cantata.
With The Mikado drawing large audiences in London and New York, Sullivan began composing The Golden Legend in Yorktown, Camberley, England, on 24 April 1886, and rehearsals began on 10 September 1886. Like Sullivan's other Leeds Festival pieces, such as The Martyr of Antioch, the work was presented on a grand scale, with 325 voices and 120 orchestra players. In addition to the usual orchestra instruments, Sullivan augmented the woodwind section with piccolos, cor anglais, bass clarinet and contrabassoon, cornets in addition to trumpets, and included prominent parts for bells, harp and organ. The premiere took place on Saturday 16 October 1886 and the success with audiences and critics alike was immediate.
Read more about this topic: The Golden Legend (cantata)
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