The Savoyards

THE GILBERT AND SULLIVAN BOOK (443 pp.)--Leslie Baily--British Book Centre ($9).

Though either man would have perished rather than commit a symbol, it remains a suggestive fact that William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were introduced while standing in an empty English theater.

"I am very pleased to meet you, Mr. Sullivan," Gilbert went prattling off, with a mouth as long as a curate's. "My contention is that when a musician, who is master of many instruments, has a musical theme to express, he can express it as perfectly upon the simple tetrachord of Mercury (in which there are, as we all know, no diatonic intervals whatever) as upon the more elaborate disdiapason (with the familiar four tetrachords and the redundant note) which, I need not remind you, embraces in its simple consonance all the single, double and inverted chords."

Sullivan gravely asked him to repeat.

Whom jest had joined together, peevishness took 25 years to put asunder. In those 25 years, Gilbert & Sullivan filled the English theater with such rollick as it had scarcely known before. Pinafore, Patience, The Mikado, The Gondoliers and the rest were something new under the limelight: real comedy operas whose music, in its own fribble fashion, was better written than most of the "serious" stuff of its time, and whose plots and lines were among the cleverest on the contemporary stage. These were smash hits, and today, after more than half a century, they are fresh hits every time the curtain rises.

The Gilbert & Sullivan Book should therefore find an eager public, if not a wide one at $9. Yet, for the price, Author Leslie Baily has given full measure: his is both the liveliest and the most complete account ever rendered of the great collaborators, their private lives and public works.

Ransomed Poet. Gilbert was the older of the two by six years, and a personal devil of quiddity seems to have rocked his earliest cradle. At the age of two, while on a trip to Italy with his parents, he was snatched from his nurse's arms by two Neapolitan toughs, and held for a ransom of -L-25. Papa paid. As Author Baily observes, "it was a bargain."

Gilbert proved "a clever, bright boy, who was extremely lazy," and a rather unpromising young man, very tall and very skinny, who came averagely out of Kings College, London, and took a minor civil service job. Soon, to appease the boredom, he was squiggling little poems and doodles.

The humorous weeklies began to accept them; eventually they were collected as the bubbling Bab Ballads.*

"Literature," wrote Max Beerbohm, "has many a solemn masterpiece that one would without a qualm barter for that absurd and riotous one." In society, as in print, Gilbert began to establish himself as a formidable zany. When asked, for instance, if he had "seen a member of this club with one eye called Matthews," Gilbert shot back: "What's his other eye called?" He turned this compulsion for dialogue to the writing of plays, and was already the leading comic writer of the London stage when he was introduced to Sullivan.

Hobnobbing with Hanover. Sullivan had a background more conventional, yet even more surprising. Born in a Lambeth slum, the son of an ill-paid clarinet player, he had risen through the choir of the Royal Chapel to successive scholarships for study on the Continent. At 20 he startled musical England with his brilliant setting of Shakespeare's Tempest, and was acclaimed as something of a British Mozart.

That he was no Mozart, and found it out too late, was the tragedy of Arthur Sullivan's life. By his early 30s, he was known as the most famous composer and conductor in England; he had become the intimate friend of a reigning beauty (the wealthy Mrs. Ronalds of Boston and New York), and a man on familiar terms with the younger members of the royal family. But Sullivan needed money to keep up with the Hanovers, to feed & clothe his round little self in a manner befitting his station, and Gilbert showed him how to get it--at an average rate of about -L-8,000 a year.

Trouble with Immortality. Their first collaboration, Thespis, was a flop, and they might never have gone on if a young impresario named Richard D'Oyly Carte had not encouraged them to write Trial by Jury. It was a bright burlesque of the practice of law, and at the sight of a chorus of bewigged barristers cavorting about a stage and whooping, "Attorneys are we,/ And we pocket our fee,/ Singing so merrily, Trial la law!", Victorians gasped and then guffawed.

Gilbert and Sullivan were off. In 1877 they wrote The Sorcerer ("My name is John Wellington Wells,/I'm a dealer in magic and spells"), and six months later H.M.S. Pinafore was on the boards. After a slow start, the good ship flew before a gale of applause. It ran through 700 performances in London, a new record for any kind of musical, and took the U.S. by storm in dozens of pirated productions. D'Oyly Carte quickly shipped a troupe to New York and sent road companies to South America and Australia. From that day forward, the sun never set on the Savoyards.

Suddenly, in full whirl, the merry-go-round began to break down. Gilbert wrote worrying little letters to D'Oyly Carte about his "extravagances." Sullivan became convinced that he should take his genius out of the marketplace and work for the cloisters of immortality. Princess Ida, The Mikado, Yeomen of the Guard and Gondoliers were written in an atmosphere of bicker and illness. Gilbert got the gout, and Sullivan began to suffer from kidney trouble.

Good Isn't the Word. In his later years Sullivan tried hard to live up to his great expectations. He wrote grand opera and a number of oratorios, almost all forgotten now. He lives for Onward, Christian Soldiers, The Lost Chord, and chiefly for the work he despised--the stuff he did with Gilbert. He was not to be soured by his sense of shortcoming, however. The last entry in his diary, written for Oct. 15, 1900, a few days before he died at 58, reads simply: "Sorry to leave such a lovely day."

Gilbert lived on for eleven years, and all the wit that had once gone to paper ran to tongue. An actor who gave a dreadful performance was greeted with the Gilbertian accolade: "My dear fellow! Good isn't the word!" When the suffragettes chained themselves to the railings in Downing Street and cried "Votes for women!", Gilbert threatened to chain himself to the Maternity Hospital and cry "Babes for men!"

He died before this project could be carried out, at 75, of a heart attack, while swimming in a pool on his country estate. The last verse he wrote was an encore for Ko-Ko's song about those people who "never would be missed":

All people who maintain (in solemn earnest--not in joke)

That quantities of sugar plums are bad for little folk,

And those who hold the principle, unalterably fixed

That instruction with amusement should most carefully be mixed . . .

They never would be missed--they never would be missed!

*Sample, from To the Terrestrial Globe:

Roll on, thou ball, roll on! Through seas of inky air

Roll on!

It's true I have no shirts to wear; It's true my butcher's bill is due; It's true my prospects all look blue--But don't let that unsettle you!

Never you mind!

Roll on!

[It rolls on.

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