SULLIVAN AND GILBERT?

Press, 1 February 1930, Page 15

SULLIVAN AND GILBERT?

SOME REVIVAL I REFLECTIONS.

(SPECIALLY WRITTEN FOB THE FItESS.) [Br Cyrano.] On his return from a trip to England the other day, Mr Justice Reed remarket! that, judging by the way amusements of all kinds were patronised, there appeared to be plenty of mimev in the English cities. "In London 1 tried to get seats to see a revival of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, onlv to find that every seat in the house had been booked for months ahead " This is indicative of something else that is interesting besides the amount of spare money about. It show 3 that Gilbert and Sullivan is still a "winner." Mr Haddon Squire, in a letter from London to the "Christian Science Monitor," draws attention to "the surprising fact that a scries of venerable light operas is now suc-essfully (l.>fving not onlv time and fashion, but the* competition of talkies, revues, and all other examples of its own species, past or present. The box-office of the Savov Theatre must be one of the most'contented in London." lam surprised that Mr Squire should be surprised. The periodical revivals of Gilbert and Sullivan in London are always successful. The wonder is that they are not more frequent. One would think that it would be profitable to bring the number one D'Oyly Carte company, which apparently plays regularly in the provinces year after year, to London every autumn. A visitor to London, and'especially a colonial, should be able to see 'these operas just as he should b* sure of seeing Shakespeare. Thanks to the Old Vic. he can se> Shakespeare. Some day the proposed National Theatre may take this task off the devoted hands of Miss Bayllss, but I hope that when this ideal is realised Gilbert and Sullivan will not dm overlooked. A National Theatre should be a national theatre in every sense of the word. Let the "highbrows" blaspheme, but let us have produced in th«s National Theatre those operas that are the glory of English humour and English music. In the meantime, Loudon is enjoying the revival; the critics are watching the productions with an eagle eye for departures from tradition; and the old question, which of the two partners is the more important, is being discussed again. There is no English body of stage work in which the tradition is so | rigid as in these operas. Until 1961 ap- i parently this will continue; after that,! with the running out of the copyright, ! there may come the deluge. In America ; a comedian —and an Englishman, too— ! had to turn Ko-Ko into the likeness | of a vaudeville gymnast. We, or our i sons and grandsons, may see the like in England thirty years hence. This is where the x.ational Theatre would come in. Entrepreneurs of no taste or conscience might turn H.M.S. Pinafore into an airship, or interpolate in "The Mikado" something equivalent to the disgustingly lachrymose "Sonny Boy," but the National Theatre would preserve the tradition. My own opinion about the individual merits of the immortal pair is that Gilbert has lost some ground and Sul- j livan has gained some. Mr Squire j deals out praise and censure to both. Gilbert's wit, he says, has been found out. The formula is as obvious as that behind Wilde's paradoxes. The retort to that is that you have first to find the formula. Gilbert found it and no one else has been able to use it. Mr Squire cites Gilbert's treatment of old maids, about which Mr Humbert Wolfe had something savage to say the other day in his book on English satire. I must say that it annoys me. The other night as" I was reading, someone in the next room started singing Lady Jane's solo at the beginning of the second act of "Patience." I had a feeling of absolute disgust —"still more corpulent grow I"—and I thought that much as I loved "Patience" I could' hardly sit through that item in the theatre. In this respect, however, Gilbert was only a man of his time. Look at the comic papers' treatment of the old maid; look at "Punch." But Mr Squire concedes that there was something big in Gilbert's humour. If, he says, Gilbert conforms a little too strictly to the Bergson dictum that the secret of the comic is "something mechanical encrusted upon the living," one has only to glance at current musical comedy or revue to see something mechanical encrusted upon nothing reallv related to life at all. That is just it. The words of the best musical comedy or revue are vastly inferior to Gilbert's words, and there are enough tunes in any one of Sullivan's scores to make the fortunes of half a dozen librettos. It is astonishing how well the most of Gilbert wears. "Princess Ida" is still delightful in an England that has admitted women to the vote, an England where so many women throng the universities that the men have become jealous. In his notice of "Princess Ida" in the "Observer," Mr Ivor Brown draws attention not only to the rich quality of the humour in the song of Gama's three sons, but to its bearing on present events. "The three specimeiits of tinned chivalry, monstrouslv helmed, beavered, cuirassed, and greaved, have, as they disembarrass themselves of their hard-ware suits, the song of the evening in the Handelian hymn of disarmament, which ought j surely now to become an international j anthem." This helmet, I suppose. Was meant to ward off blows. It's very hot, And weighs a lot, A? manv a guardsman knows, So off that helmet goes. This tight-fitting cuinss Is but a useless mass. It's made of steel, And weighs a deal. A man is but an ass Who fights in a cuirasa, So off goes that cuirass. Is this not appropriate to the Conference now sitting in London 1 Much of Gilbert, however, does "date," and it is partly this that accounts for the rise in Sullivan s reputation Mr Squire may say of Sullivan: "We encounter in his scores empty diatonic spaces, echoing, as it were, with the thin ghostlv , music of Victorian drawing-rooms. The pep and punch which laid our uncles and aunts flat in obeisance have weakened. We listen now rather with the aftitude of reading history, and for some of us, to whom these tunes are among our earliest musical recollections, it i< extremely difficult to listen critically. One feels almost disrespectful —as if one scrutinised cherished family portraits from the purely aesthetic standpoint." No doubt this is how he strikes some people. Music, however, does not "date" as verse does. The Colonel's song about the Dragoons in "Patience" now requires annotation, but not so Sullivan's delightful patter music. Besides, Sullivan does not suffer to the extent fhat In did from the absurd prejudices against lighter forms of music Not nearlv so many are sorry new that lie left off writing "Lost Chords" to

compose comic operas. It is sig" 11 " cant that increased interest i 3 being taken in Pureell, the English composer whom he most closely resembles. There is, however, a more famous composer with whom he has much in common. Mr A. H. Godwin, in his excellent book on the operas, refers to the comparison between Sullivan and Offenbach as stupid. It would be miicjj nearer the truth to compare him wit" Schubert. Mr Squire makes the same comparison. Sullivan has qualities, hj" says, for which time increases our at-foi-.tion and respect, and the qualities found in Schubert. "No English composer has possessed in a greater degree the Selmbertian qualities of spontaneity, of profusion of melody, or rhythmical vitality and ingenuity, ot cheerfulness, of the power of hearing words sing themselves into song—u would be easv to lengthen the list ot gifts in common. And like Schubert, Sullivan is the democratic composer who appeals to the musically cultured and uncultured alike." Perhaps that does not endear him to the musically superior person. At any rate, one has only to go to "Lilac Time" to see the affinity. Mr Godwin thinks Sullivan the more important partner of the two. Mr Squire heads his article "Or Sullivan and Gilbert"? and I have taken my own heading from his. But after dealing with both men, Mr Squire says that the secret of the Savoy operas is exposed with the attempt to place either Gilbert or Sullivan first. Words and music should be considered together, not apart. The collaborators were not a mixture; they were a chemical combination. Certainly they will continue to be referred to as Gilbert and Sullivan to the end of time. ir we could only live another five hundred vears we might be surprised to And how many more pretentious works of art they had outlived.