There is a chance that I
have been listening to the operettas of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan as long as I
have been alive: I have vague memories of attending a production of Trial by
Jury when I was barely in kindergarten.
What I am sure of is that they are by far, hands down, my favorite
composer and lyricist in the history of music, full stop.
There is something to be
said for a British lyricist and composer that more than a century and a half
after they began their work, so many people across the globe still go to their
performances, that there are newsletters devoted to them, that they play in
almost every country in the world. They
seem to transcend classical music into pop culture in a way most music from
that era doesn’t; back in the 1980s, Sesame Street had a pair of Muppets
that were called Gilbert and Sullivan. Productions of The Pirates and
Penzance and The Mikado are still being adapted to Broadway over
more than a century; The Simpsons once had Barney sing ‘I Am The Very
Model of a Modern Major General’. If civilization survives another century or
so, I am confident Gilbert and Sullivan will still be playing somewhere.
And that is in large part
because the foundation that they build in the late nineteenth century can be found
in almost every major successful Broadway composer from the start of it as a
power to the present day. Irving Berlin,
George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Comden and Green, Stephen Sondheim,
Andrew Lloyd Weber and his collaborators – all of them owe a debt to Gilbert &
Sullivan which they can never repay even if they might have derided them. I can’t
imagine Lin-Manuel Miranda creating Hamilton without taking a leaf from the
Savoyards.
I could write about what
musical geniuses these two men were in the art that they have created. Indeed,
I probably will at some juncture. But that’s not why I was inspired to write
this piece. It’s because for all my years of listening to the wondrous lyrics
and the beautiful music of these two artists, it is not until fairly recently
that I realized that these two Great Brits who were dead before the twentieth
century began, more or less predicted, even foresaw, so much of the political
chaos that is going on today – and satirized it brilliantly in ways the great
comics of this era can only dream of.
I should mention upfront
that I have little doubt that American leftists and conservatives have either
never heard of Gilbert & Sullivan and would uniformly reject them if they
did. (British politicians, however, might get a certain irony about them)
Conservatives, though they claim to respect the classics would mock classical music
as the kind of thing that liberal elitists listen to on NPR. Leftists, while
they claim be in favor of the arts, reject the classics and would just look at
the two men as part of the British Empire and therefore part of the whole racist,
sexist package.
I imagine both men,
particularly Gilbert, would be tickled by this and amused by the irony. Because
they used some of the greatest music and lyrics to basically howl for the heads
for the entire British class system that totally embraced them. And they weren’t
exactly subtle about it, certainly not by the Victorian standard. Several
samples will make this clear.
In H.M.S. Pinafore one
of the central character is Sir Joseph Porter, who is essentially the head of
the Admiralty. His first solo ‘When I Was A Lad’ is one of the highpoints of
the operetta and is one of the clearest examples of Gilbert mocking party
politics. Porter never went to sea, starting out it in a British law firm,
barely passed the bar, became very rich and a member of Parliament. In one stanza, Gilbert makes it very clear
just what being a member of Parliament is, and what it gets you:
“I always voted at my party’s call.
And I never thought of
thinking for myself at all.”
I thought so little they
rewarded me.
By making me the ruler of
the Queens Navee”
It’s really hard not to
hear these lyrics and think of basically every major cabinet appointment made
in the 21st century.
Iolanthe, one of their true masterpieces,
is the most direct satire of British Parliament Gilbert and Sullivan ever did:
the male chorus is the House of Lords, one of the greatest roles in the entire repertoire
of G & S is the Lord Chancellor and two of the major characters are MPs. Half the songs are more or less direct
attacks on the makeup of Parliament and the ‘benefits’ of class and what
actually has to be done. I could quote any one of them and it would resonate.
(In fact, most of these songs and works can be found on YouTube in some form,
and I highly recommend to all of you that you find the time to track them down.
You will thank me for the rest of your life.) But the most direct insult at party
politics comes, perhaps not surprisingly, by a commoner.
Private Willis is a sentry
at the House of Lords and is a minor character in the sense that he only has
one song and a few lines. But what a song. In the second stanza of his song “When
All Night Long” he basically gets to the meat of so much of party politics both
in the nineteenth century and today:
“When in that house MPs
reside
If they’ve a brain and
cerebellum too,
They’ve got to leave their brains
outside,
And vote just like their
leaders tell ‘em too.”
(I have been to more than
half a dozen productions of Iolanthe in my life. I’m pretty sure this
line gets the biggest laugh of the night every time its delivered.)
Far more telling, is what
he says in the chorus because in a way, I think it speaks to the nature of everything:
“That every boy and every
girl
That’s born into the world
alive,
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little
Conservative.”
Gilbert wrote this, by the
way, in 1881. Try to remember that no matter what side your on, next time
someone brings up MTG’s quote for a national divorce.
The Mikado, the pair’s most famous
work, uses Japanese society to satirize Britain, but it’s clear there are
elements that resonate even now. In the town of Titipu, flirting has been made
a capital offense (I expect there are some feminists who wish this could be
made legal), the Lord High Executioner is a meek tailor who doesn’t want to
ever carry out his duties and the main head of government is known as Pooh-Bah,
which has entered the lexicon. Pooh-Bah has every major office in the government,
has no problem shifting his views depending on what his adviser wants to hear,
and will always take a bribe to get things done. The Emperor of Japan’s most
famous number involves letting the punishment fit the crime (and I’m actually
going to get to a version of that later on.)
And in The Gondoliers, the
two title characters (who are brothers) are essentially proletariats who find
that one of them is a king of a fictional kingdom. They decide that when they
become king they will make sure that every citizen of the country is completely
equal “They shall equal be” is in fact one of the numbers.
In the second act, they
have begun to carry out these principle to the horror of the Grand Inquisitor
Don Alhambra “That’s the Lord High Footman” he is told when he sees a servant
dancing with nobility. He gently tells
the two brothers that for all their good intentions, trying to give everybody a
title and wealth invariably leads to ruin. His song: “There Lived A King” tells
the story of a king who has an enormous heart and wants to try and make the poor
the equal of the powerful, “so to the top of every tree, promoted everybody.” This backfires:
“When every blessed thing you
hold, is made of silver or of gold,
You long for simple pewter
When you have nothing else
to wear but cloth of gold and satins rare,
For cloth of gold you cease
to care –
Up goes the price of
shoddy.”
“In short, whoever you may
be
To this conclusion, you’ll
agree
When every one is somebody
Then no one’s anybody!”
Somehow I seriously doubt
that Bernie has thought that through when he talks about the one percent.
All of these operettas
taking biting cuts at the sacred mores of British society. But in a weird way,
I think by far their worst works may tell a story about so much of how our
world today works.
Princess Ida is considered by almost
every scholar and fan of Gilbert and Sullivan by far their worst work before
they ended up having a fight that severed their partnership. (They reconciled
for two later works; I’ll get to one of them below.) I have seen it only twice
in my life, and it is honestly one I could live the rest of my life never
seeing again.
It is not just that the
plot and subject are utterly absurd, that’s true of all of their works, but you
don’t go to a Gilbert and Sullivan work for its story any more than you read
the Bible for its prose. It’s just that it’s so badly done. It seems longer
than it is, the dialogue is structured in such a way that seems like blank
verse but it seems like parody, the plot has dated far worse than any of the
others (though there are some female ideals that might actually resonate with
some women) the characters are badly drawn, and worst of all the songs are
terrible. Most G & S fans would be happy if there was no Princess Ida.
That said, it does have one
character that is among the best that they ever created and naturally, he is
given too little to do. King Gama who in his introduction has arguably the best
song in the show
“If you give me your
attention, I will tell you what I am
Each little fault of temper
and each social defect
In my erring fellow
creatures, I endeavor to correct
To all their little
weaknesses I open people’s eyes
And little plans to snub
the self-sufficient I devise
I love my fellow creatures –
I do all the good I can
Yet everybody says I’m such
a disagreeable man!
And I can’t think why!”
If you’ve heard this lyric,
half of you are thinking of Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, the other half of
Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews. Who
could have thought that in his weakest work, Gilbert basically predicted every
single person who works as a pundit for cable news, or who writes for a
partisan newsletter?
Every time I open any
article written by Daily Kos or read something from the Washington Examiner, it’s
hard not to think of this lyric. And in the third act, I think Gilbert also clearly
explained how this machine works.
In the third act, Gama has
been taken prisoner by his rival. In what is clearly a prelude to ‘the
punishment fitting the crime’, that is what his captors have done. Gama, the grouchiest and angriest man in the
world, has no been set up so that every time he says or points out something
unpleasant, his ‘tormentors’ merely meet him with kindness or ignore him. The
chorus of this song fundamentally explains why I don’t think either side is
ever going to stop their work:
“Oh, don’t the days seem
lank and long
When all goes right and
nothing goes wrong
And isn’t your life
extremely flat
With nothing whatever to
grumble at.”
In four lines, Gilbert basically explained
every aspect of the partisan world on both sides. It is the reason I am skeptical that either
side wants to ‘win’ the battles they consisting alarm us about and fundraise
for. I think this is truer for
progressives than conservatives. I think
even if they got everything they say they want – racial, gender, and LGBTQ+ equality,
every corporation cut down to nothing, all Republicans forced to wear badges identifying
their political party, all conservatives
banned from ever saying word, global
warming reversed, everybody financial equal – they would still be pushing us
for more.
Every aspect of the
political media today is built on the songs that Gama sang in Princess
Ida. Both sides are endlessly haranguing
everybody else on what they are outraged about. This is the underlying message of every
conservative tweet and every leftist post.
They will never stop doing it. Their lives are empty without something
to grumble at.
And in a funny way, I
actually think Gilbert may have pointed out the larger flaws in today’s society
in a work that most of us really don’t want to see or even listen too.
While The Gondoliers was
being written Gilbert and Sullivan, who had difficulties working together most
of their career, had a knock-down drag out quarrel and eventually stopped
communicating and working collaborating
for a while. They reconciled more out of financial need than any desire to work
together in the 1890s but the magic was gone and it showed in their last two
works. Utopia Limited and The Grand Duke, their last two operas,
are viewed by everyone as the absolute nadir of their work: the two operettas
are rarely revived and rarely recorded. I’ve never seen or even listened to The
Grand Duke; it’s reputation is so horrible that I’m loathe too ever see it.
But I did listen to an LP of it when I was growing up and in 2012, I finally
saw a revival of it.
I will not mince words; it
is as horrible as it reputation persists. Among all of their works, it
genuinely seems to be a propaganda job. The opera takes place in a small tropical
isle and the princess wants civilization so they go to the model of all the
world: England. If you thought Gilbert
and Sullivan were students of empire, Utopia would not dissuade of you
this fact. So many of the songs are about the joys of being English and everything
good about, all the characters might as well be wearing Union Jacks as costumes.
And they might as well break out into Rule Britannia every time they sing; it
would be an improve on so many of the songs.
There is a distinct laziness
to the production: the ‘Flowers of Progress’ are essentially pillars of the British
system that Gilbert spent so much time popping in his career. (There’s even a character and
callback to H.M.S Pinafore, which is laziness that you really wouldn’t expect.
)The only really interest song come when the economist decides to make Utopia a
company limited and decided to make it a business model. The song does seem to
have a mark of the old touch, particularly when everything goes wrong and the
company goes bankrupt:
“But the liquidators say,
never mind you needn’t pay.
So you start another
company tomorrow!”
It was hard not to think of
‘Too Big to Fail’ when I saw that performed.
That said, the final scene
and the dialogue that Gilbert has written is very satiric and pretty much foresees
the world today. In it a mob has risen demanding the advisors the Princess has
brought it be removed because they have done too good a job.
“Our pride and boast – the Army
and Navy
Have been reconstructed and
remodeled…
That all the neighboring
nations have disarmed..
And war’s impossible. Your
county Councilor has passed such drastic
Sanitary laws. That all the
doctors dwindle, starve and die.
The laws…have quite
extinguished crime and litigation,
The lawyers starve, and all
the jails are let as Model Lodgings for the
Working Classes”
Prosperity has doomed
Utopia. The Princess who brought them to England is baffled. What has she omitted? Then she is told Government
by party! (In the revival, they made this clearer – ‘the two party system!”
“Introduce that great and
glorious element – and all be well! No political nature will endure, because
one party will assuredly undo all that the other party has done… no social
reform will be attempted…the legislative action of the country will be at a
standstill. Then there will be sickness in plenty, endless lawsuits, crowded jails,
interminable confusion in the Army and the Navy and, in short, general and
unexampled prosperity!”
Gilbert would not have been
writing about America in the 1890s, back then the country was fundamentally
operating on a more or less bipartisan basis. Now, of course, it fits
perfectly. And it basically fits with the level of extremism that one side is
fine calling the other on. It explains
that both version of the world are completely opposite of what the other believes
to be the truth, and as long as the outrage machine decides that party loyalty
is more important than actual progress, nothing will change. They could work it
out, of course, by working together but as I demonstrated in my reference from Princess
Ida, there’s far more money to be made in complaining about nothing getting
done and each side considers it a mission statement, a sacred duty, to undo the
other’s work.
I will never need a reason
to urge anybody, if they have not already, to seek out any of the works of
Gilbert and Sullivan. Their genius transcends the era and it completely
transformed the musical world we live in today. However, I also urge you to when you enjoy the
music and lyrics listen to what the characters are saying. Art often tells us
things about the world that non-fiction cannot. That is just as true of two 19th
century Englishmen who went out of their way to puncture the norms of the
system that would eventually accept them both and even give them titles.
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