Gilbert and Sullivan

I have to say right away that I totally loved the movie Topsy Turvy. I’m sure a great deal of liberties were taken but I still found the movie really entertaining. I have always been a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan but I’m not incredibly familiar with many of their operas. I understand the style and I know the Gilbert and Sullivan Classics, “Poor Wandering One,” “A Simple Sailor Lowly Born,” and the basic plot lines of the operettas, but I never really gave them much thought. I enjoy the music and I think the stories are quite humorous, but it wasn’t until watching Topsy Turvy that I really had a moment in which I realized how similar a lot of their operettas are to one another.

I felt like I could take one aria or chorus from all of their operettas and fashion a new opera, and if everyone just disregarded the words, everything would fit together just fine. Perhaps naively, I’m thinking of them as a type of Lerner and Lowe, Rogers and Hammerstein duo. And this duo supplies the audience with a plethora of typical characters with each character having typical character songs about typical character problems. I really don’t mean this to be belittling towards these composers or librettists at all, I am a fan of their works, but I think they definitely had a formula in place that worked for them. However, in regard to Gilbert and Sullivan it’s not difficult to see why Sir Arthur Sullivan began to grow weary of these reoccurring themes and librettos. I have not listened to Ivanhoe but I would be really interested in discovering what a grand opera by Sullivan sounds like. Does it retain that classic Gilbert and Sullivan sound, is there a new sort of maturity and seriousness to the opera?

This question is particularly interesting to me because it was Sullivan, at least in the movie, who complained that Gilbert’s librettos were holding him back creatively. I wonder if going with a new librettist for Ivanhoe allowed Sullivan to blossom artistically. If not, then poor Gilbert, Sullivan’s lack of compositional creativity was really not Gilbert's fault at all. Maybe I’ll have a chance to listen to at least some of Ivanhoe tonight and tomorrow and can include my thoughts in my next and final blog.