The Mikado W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan Surrender to comedy! Full of bright music, lively artists and quick wit. Conductor: STEVEN WHITE Stage Director: DOROTHY DANNER Performed in English with English Supertitles

About the Composer

Arthur Sullivan  (1842-1900)
Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan was the composer who, with William Gilbert, established a distinctive British operetta style: Gilbert’s verbal ingenuity blended magnificently with Sullivan’s surefire melodiousness and resourceful musicianship; their operas were brilliantly integrated, both musically and textually.

Sullivan was the son of an Irish bandmaster whose career culminated in a professorship at the Royal Military College. By the age of 10, he had mastered all the wind instruments in his father’s band. It has been suggested that he inherited his ability for melodic invention from his mother who was of Italian descent; she apparently met his father while accompanying an organ grinder and his monkey through the streets of London.

Sullivan’s early musical promise earned him admission to the Royal Academy of Music, London; he later continued his music studies at the Leipzig Conservatory. In 1861, he became organist of St. Michaels in London, and in the following year, achieved great success and recognition with his incidental music to The Tempest. He followed with the Kenilworth cantata (1864); a ballet, L’Île enchantée; a symphony and cello concerto; the overtures, In Memoriam and Overtura di Ballo; and numerous songs. Sullivan’s first comic operas appeared in 1867: Cox and Box, and Contrabandista.

During periods when his relationship with Gilbert was strained, Sullivan wrote the opera, Haddon Hall (1892), The Chieftain (1895), The Beauty Stone (1898) and The Rose of Persia (1889). His more serious, non-Gilbert operettas are rarely heard in the contemporary repertory, but were acclaimed in their day: The Prodigal Son (1869), The Light of the World (1873), The Martyr of Antioch (1880), The Golden Legend (1886) and the “romantic opera,” Ivanhoe, composed at the urging of Queen Victoria for the opening of the Royal English Opera House in 1891. Sullivan wrote several religious choral works, and many of his hymn tunes have attained great popularity: Onward! Christian Soldiers and The Lost Chord.

In 1876 Sullivan became principal of the National Training School for Music (later the Royal College of Music), a post he held for five years. He was active as a conductor, particularly at the Leeds Festivals from 1880 to 1898, and was knighted in 1883.

W.S. Gilbert  (1836-1911)
An English playwright and humorist, Sir William Gilbert was best known for his collaboration with Sir Arthur Sullivan in producing comic operas. Gilbert was born in London, the son of a retired naval surgeon. The most notorious event of his youth was his kidnapping at the age of two by Italian brigands in Italy. He was later released by ransom. After military training, he yearned to participate in the Crimean War, but after he graduated, the war was over, and for the next 20 years his military career constituted service in the militia.

After receiving a substantial inheritance from an aunt, Gilbert indulged his early ambition to become a lawyer, but his legal career was brief and mediocre. In 1861 at the age of 25, he became a journalist, contributing dramatic criticism with a combination of humorous verse, caustic wit, satire and sarcasm, to the popular British magazine FUN, all of which were illustrated with his own cartoons and sketches, and signed “Bab.” The pieces became collectively known as The Bab Ballads (1869), and were followed by More Bab Ballads (1873). The characters in these works became the models for many of his later operas.

Gilbert’s theatrical career began in 1866 when he was recommended to write a comic Christmas piece; within only two weeks, he wrote Dulcamara, or the Little Duck and the Great Quack, a topical extravaganza clothed in the underlying farce of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore that achieved immediate commercial success, and nurtured other writing commissions.

In 1871, Gilbert met Sullivan and they began their historic collaboration, a partnership that ended in 1896 but spanned 25 years and resulted in 14 comic operas. After their collaboration ended, Gilbert continued to write librettos for other composers with moderate success: Edward German’s Fallen Fairies, or the Wicked World (1909), and his last play, The Hooligan (1911). Gilbert was knighted by Edward VII in 1907, and died of a heart attack in 1911 at the age of 74 while attempting to rescue a drowning woman from a lake on his country estate.

Gilbert possessed exceptional talents and developed an extraordinarily unique style of world-play in his writing. He excelled in writing rhymed couplets, puns, parody and farce that brilliantly satirized contemporary morality and human behavior; much of his writing possessed those unique idiosyncrasies so typical in late-Victorian humor.

Many of his contemporary targets that he parodied in his melodramas are no longer topical but still retain their satirical humor — aestheticism in Patience, women’s education in Princess Ida, the police in The Pirates of Penzance, the navy in H.M.S. Pinafore and the profit motive in Ruddigore. Nevertheless, Gilbert’s ingenious wit possessed an underlying truth and his outstanding legacy was that he provided Sir Arthur Sullivan, his musical dramatist, with a wealth of inspiration for ebullient and effervescent theatrical development.

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