Surviving Music
Only three musical passages from Thespis are known to survive: the ballad "Little maid of Arcadee", the chorus "Climbing over rocky mountain", and the ballet music. The fate of Sullivan's score has long been a subject for speculation. In 1978, Isaac Asimov wrote a time travel story, "Fair Exchange?", which focused on a character travelling back to 1871 to rescue the score to Thespis before Sullivan could destroy it. But Sullivan is not known to have destroyed it, and the ballet, at least, was still available to be reused in 1897.
Read more about this topic: Thespis (opera)
Famous quotes containing the words surviving and/or music:
“Never have anything to do with the near surviving representatives of anyone whose name appears in the death column of the Times as having “passed away.””
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)