W.S. Gilbert the Poet

One of the many reasons for cursing the Arts Council of Great Britain (now the Arts Council of England) is its decision in 1982 to cut off its grant to the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, thus causing it to close. The company needed a grant, not because its shows could not fill theatres (they could always do that) but because touring up and down the country as they did was very expensive. Had they sat on their bottoms in Sloane Square, like the avant-gardistes of the Royal Court, they could have continued to swallow money without worrying at all about gate receipts. Do you hear my teeth gnashing? They gnash.

That was the end of more than a hundred years of unbroken tradition, and effectively the end of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas played the way Gilbert wanted them played. When I saw The Mikado in Edinburgh in the late 1950s I saw something very like the first production in London in 1885 when George Grossmith was the Lord High Executioner. Of course that, in a nutshell, is why the Arts Council got rid of D’Oyly Carte. Think, if you can bear to, of words like contemporary and relevant and phrases like cutting edge. But just imagine of you could see Hamlet at the new Globe Theatre, not “cutting edge”—which means done with a popular television actor in the title role—but more or less the way Burbage performed it. How much money would you pay for that? A lot of money. Even to see how Kean did it in the 1820s. A lot of money.

I saw a youngish Peter Pratt in a packed Edinburgh King’s Theatre (a very big theatre indeed) performing a role he had learned from Martyn Green, who had learned it from Sir Henry Lytton (they knighted Savoyards in those days) who had taken over the part of Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd from George Grossmith himself and soon played all of Grossmith’s roles. This was while Gilbert was still directing, so Lytton knew exactly what Gilbert had in mind, indeed exactly what Gilbert, a most demanding man, demanded. And the Mikado I saw was Donald Adams, who had learned his business from Darrell Fancourt, who played the Mikado both on the definitive 1951 recording which I possess and on the 1936 recording which all of you can possess for nothing, and, yes, I’ll be coming to that.

Of course none of this would matter if Gilbert and Sullivan didn’t matter, and according to the Arts Council they don’t. Middle-class, middle England—of course they don’t matter. But I say Gilbert and Sullivan severally were possessed of considerable talent and together what they had was genius. I want to talk about Gilbert because I am not really qualified to talk about Sullivan, and because Gilbert was a master of the sort of verse I like to write myself. But little stout Sullivan will keep on coming in beside big, bear-like Gilbert. Siamese twins they are indeed, just as Hesketh Pearson suggested in his 1935 biography, though he was too busy trashing the Victorians, as people tended to do in 1935, to get everything right.

Gilbert was a poet. He would not have said so; it does not seem he cared for poetry much. He certainly thought Shakespeare wasn’t all he was cracked up to be. Gilbert referred to himself as a dramatist and wrote an enormous number of plays, indeed that is what he got his knighthood for. But I say he was a poet, and, if Tennyson is the king of Victorian poets, Gilbert is one of half a dozen pretenders to the throne.

William Schwenk Gilbert was born near the Strand in 1836. His father, also William, was a retired naval surgeon, another irascible man, who once threatened to horsewhip the editor of the Saturday Review on account of an unfavourable notice. For Gilbert the elder wrote plays along with much else, and the first play of Gilbert fils may have been written in collaboration with Gilbert pere. Our William had three younger sisters and he doubtless ruled them like a Turk. At school he punched heads and produced his own plays.

Gilbert patriotically offered himself to the military at the time of the Crimean War but the war ended before he could be blown apart by Russian cannon. He was a clerk in an office for four years, which he hated as heartily as P.G. Wodehouse hated his bank. A timely inheritance of £400 allowed him to study for the bar and he practised for four years, earning in total £75. No man could live on that, and he began to write and to draw for the weekly papers, in particular Fun (a new rival for Punch) for whom he composed and illustrated the Bab Ballads (Bab was a family nickname), which would have earned him a small place among the Victorian writers of humorous verse if Sullivan had never existed. Many of the plots and subplots of the operettas started as Bab ballads. Though hardly a lazy man, Gilbert, like Shakespeare, didn’t really care for concocting plots, and when he had got one he liked to make it work for him.

Gilbert and Sullivan’s first successful collaboration was the one-act opera Trial by Jury. Carte liked Gilbert’s libretto (actually written for someone else) and suggested he try it on Sullivan, with whom he had already collaborated. Gilbert shrugged, trudged through heavily falling snow to Sullivan’s place and read his libretto in a flustered and furious tone. Sullivan fell about laughing and set the whole thing to music in a fortnight. In March 1875 it was produced at the Royalty Theatre with Sullivan’s brother in the main part and ran for 300 performances at three different theatres.

Trial by Jury was a hit. So were all the subsequent operettas (some big hits, some little hits, but all making lots of money). The last of all, The Grand Duke, was produced in 1896 to modified rapture. Twelve operettas in twenty-one years made both Gilbert and Sullivan filthy rich, Gilbert richer because of Sullivan’s propensity for mistresses, gambling and the South of France. Of course Carte was richest of all, but then that was to be expected.

As everybody knows, Gilbert and Sullivan quarrelled on many occasions. Sullivan felt, and his friends all encouraged him in this belief, that he stooped to conquer, and that grand opera was what he should be writing. He chafed because Gilbert took the lead and wrote the libretti and then Sullivan added the tunes. That was not the way most composers worked. But it has to be said that most composers did not make the money that Sullivan needed to keep him in the style to which he was accustomed.

Gilbert not only wrote the libretti, he produced each operetta minutely, working out all the moves on a model stage and teaching his cast exactly how they should say and sing everything. He wouldn’t stand for ad libs either. George Grossmith introduced a pratfall. Gilbert insisted he take it out. “But they laugh, Mr Gilbert.” “So they would if you sat on a pork pie. Take it out.”

Gilbert was undoubtedly a martinet who insisted on getting his own way, but it has to be said he was generally right, and popular with his cast, much more popular than Sullivan. One might liken him to a successful football manager. He might be, and indeed he was, acerbic, but he kept on winning.

Grossmith and Rutland Barrington, who took the bass-baritone roles, grew famous and successful, though neither of them could sing much. “I should have thought you required a fine man with a fine voice,” said Grossmith, reading for the part of John Wellington Wells in The Sorcerer, the second collaboration. “No, that is just what we don’t want,” replied Gilbert. And, asked why he had taken the risk of casting Barrington, not a singer, for a singing part, Gilbert answered, “He’s a staid, stolid swine, and that’s what I want.” What he did not want were opera singers. Nellie Melba, certainly a young Melba, was sent away with a flea in her ear, and he particularly hated tenors. “They can never act and they are more trouble than all the others put together.” It ought to be said here that Gilbert had no ear for music.

The Grossmith and Barrington roles dominate, right through the operas up to The Yeoman of the Guard, in 1888, which had no part for Barrington, who wished to strike out for himself—singularly unsuccessfully, it has to be said. By The Gondoliers, their last big success, though a chastened Barrington was back, Grossmith had decided to go, and Gilbert, who preferred not to have ready-made stars, cast it for ensemble playing.

Gilbert thought these two works among the best things he had done, and Sullivan, rejoicing there was no “topsy-turvydom”, produced some of his finest music. But I think Gilbert’s days of genius were done. “Topsy-turvydom” was his very essence and Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, Patience and The Mikado remain for me the heights of his art.

What was his art? He created a kind of musical theatre never seen before and never seen again. When we think of operetta we think of Ruritanian kingdoms, waltzes, thigh-slapping tenors (those tenors) and plots of pantomime imbecility. When we think of Gilbert and Sullivan, though the waltzes are there all right—Sullivan could write a waltz with the best of them—we think of puns and patter songs, the patter songs that Grossmith could enunciate at great speed and which the great Savoyards who followed him, Lytton, Green, Pratt and Reed, managed so beautifully in the same way, and which “stars” brought in from other disciplines could rarely manage at all. The first is that song of John Wellington Wells in The Sorcerer:

My name is John Wellington Wells,

I’m a dealer in magic and spells,

     In blessings and curses

     And ever-filled purses,

In prophecies, witches and knells.

This is the first though not the last time that Gilbert uses the limerick for his verse. But it metamorphoses into other forms, all done at breakneck speed. Sullivan sang it through for George Grossmith. “You can do that?” Grossmith thought that he could. “Very well, if you can do that, you can do the rest.”

There is at least one patter song in every opera, often two or three. They are all good, but the twin peaks are the Major General’s song in The Pirates of Penzance, and the Lord Chancellor’s nightmare in Iolanthe. Here are samples of each.

I know our mythic history, King Arthur’s and Sir Caradoc’s,

I answer hard acrostics, I’ve a pretty taste for paradox,

I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus,

In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous.

This lyric has spawned a whole anthology of imitations, “I am the very model of a modern homosexual/politician/Labour minister” and Tom Lehrer’s famous listing of the elements (not badly sung I must say). Now the Nightmare Song:

For you dream you are crossing the Channel, and tossing about in a steamer from Harwich,

Which is something between a large bathing machine and a very small second-class carriage,

And you’re giving a treat, penny ice and cold meat, to a party of friends and relations,

They’re a ravenous horde—and they all came on board at Sloane Square and South Kensington                Stations.

If you think that is difficult to do, you are quite right. Only one contemporary “real” poet gets near him, and that is Browning in “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”:

As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,

Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:

What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

Eliot’s Cats are good, but Gilbert is better, more skilful, and if you think that such things are not “real” poetry—which Eliot presumably did not, because he kept his Cats away from his poems—well, then, so much the worse for real poetry. Actually this is a paraphrase of something Eliot himself said about Kipling.

What else can Gilbert do? He can do this. Gianetta, Marco the Gondolier’s wife, sings:

Then one of us will be a Queen,
     And sit on a golden throne,
          With a crown instead
          Of a hat on her head,
     And diamonds all her own!
With a beautiful robe of gold and green,
     I’ve always understood;
          I wonder whether
          She would wear a feather?
     I rather think she should!

Later on in the same song she dreams of

        … endless stocks

     Of beautiful frocks

And as much as she wants to eat!

Isn’t this just spot on! Gilbert liked women very much, possibly more than his wife quite approved of. He liked them if they were young and pretty, but he did not idealise them as Dickens did. Gianetta would be a gold digger if there were gold to dig.

But what if they were old and ugly? Well, it has to be admitted that Gilbert, like Dickens and many other Victorians, was not kind. But then Sullivan comes to the rescue. This, from Patience, as well wrought as an Elizabethan lyric, is a little hard-edged on the page:

Silvered is the raven hair,

     Spreading is the parting straight.

Mottled the complexion fair.

     Halting is the youthful gait,

Hollow is the laughter free,

     Spectacled the limpid eye—

Little will be left of me

     In the coming by and by.

But Sullivan’s music supplies the pathos that turns it into something touching and universal. In The Mikado, Katisha, daughter-in-law elect and archetypal fearsome old bag, sings a duet with Ko-Ko so jolly and rollicking we just know their marriage will work out. He begins and she answers:

     There’s a fascination frantic

     In a ruin that’s romantic;

Do you think you are sufficiently decayed?

     To the matter that you mention

     I have given some attention,

And I think I am sufficiently decayed.

If you want to hear the operettas, the D’Oyly Carte made recordings in the late forties and fifties and these are the ones you want. You get Fancourt and Green and the Australian Richard Watson, or sometimes Peter Pratt, Donald Adams and Kenneth Sandford, who were the ones I saw in the late 1950s and seem to me nearly as good. The rest of the cast are fine too. There’s a critic who has it in for Leonard Osborn, the tenor, but ignore him. Osborn is fine, as are the various women.

But you can get many of the operas free. Yes, I thought you would like that. What you do is Google “Internet Archive”, select “Audio”, type “Gilbert and Sullivan” into the search box, press “Go”, and you will have access to most of the operas in recordings of the 1920s and 1930s, many conducted by Flash Harry himself, Sir Malcolm Sargent as he was to be. Martyn Green and Darrell Fancourt are there, at the other ends of their careers, as it were, and in some of the performances you can hear Sir Henry Lytton, who doesn’t exactly sing (not at his age) but does a Rex Harrison, and his Duke of Plaza-Toro could scarcely be bettered. Don’t forget, Lytton worked under Gilbert himself, whom he admired only just this side of idolatry. In Pinafore and Iolanthe you get Bertha Lewis, reputed to be the finest contralto ever to sing for the D’Oyly Carte and who died in a car crash (Lytton’s car) at the early age of forty-three.

Sullivan and Carte did not long survive the break-up of the partnership, but Gilbert lived another twenty years, good years on the whole, though he added arthritis to his gout and it cannot be said he bore these afflictions without complaint. Still, like Shakespeare, he liked being a country gentleman and, deciding on not much evidence that he was descended from the Elizabethan seafaring adventurer Sir Humphrey Gilbert, had a model of Sir Humphrey’s ship placed on his roof, being distinctly unamused when guests affected to take it for HMS Pinafore.

He also became a very active justice of the peace. Though he may never have been much of a barrister he was one hell of a judge. Men in trouble for debt sometimes found their fine paid, but anyone up before him for cruelty to children or animals was well advised to quake in their boots. Gilbert, childless, was a sucker for children and said once, with evident sincerity, that he would not willingly tread on a beetle. The Greens among you will rejoice to hear that motorists received the rough edge of his tongue and a ten-pound fine, until, that is, he bought an American steam car and began knocking pedestrians into hedges on his own account.

The tale of his death is well known and Gavin Ewart has immortalised it in verse. Returning by train from one of his clubs where he had dined far too well, he found the two young girls he had invited for a bathing party already in his pond. One of them seemed in difficulties and was calling for help. Gilbert dived in and (possibly) saved her life. But the exertion killed him then and there. He had once said he would like to die on a summer’s day in his own garden. He did, and he was seventy-seven.

There are two good biographers. Hesketh Pearson is entertaining and opinionated. Jane Stedman is exhaustive, sometimes perhaps even exhausting. What you really need is The Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan by Ian Bradley, a first-class honours Oxford man who combines school teaching with writing (must be a private school then). The first edition is in two paperback volumes, the second edition, which contains Utopia Limited and The Grand Duke, is in one, which is rather unwieldy.

If you haven’t seen the film Topsy-Turvy, then do so. It is a masterpiece. There is an earlier film (The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan) with Robert Morley, that excellent comic actor, who, I cannot help thinking, is no more William Schwenk Gilbert than he was Oscar Wilde.

More of John Whitworth’s poetry will be appearing in forthcoming issues of Quadrant. He reviewed Robert Conquest’s recent book of poems, Penultimata, in the October issue.