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     In anticipation of the summer 2006 performance in Canaan
of the Pirates of Penzance, I ordered from the Belmont Public
Library a DVD recording of that operetta. At the same time,
Mozart's Idomeneo, the neo-classicism of which has fascinated
me for some years. Both discs came. The Idomeneo disc was
defective; producing neither sound nor picture. But the
Gilbert and Sullivan disc, produced by the Ambrosian Opera
Chorus with the London Symphony Orchestra was mechanically in
perfect condition, and musically, I thought superb. I looked
at and listened to the Pirates disc no fewer than three
times, impressed with the discrepancy between the
frivolousness of the story and the seriousness with which I
responded to it.  At that juncture, my feelings seemed to
reflect who I was much more than they reflected the text. The
music and the text, it seems to me, are quite disparate. I
thought I heard in the arias the same humanity that informs
the majority of Mozart's operas. Rightly or wrongly I hear in
the operetta songs, echoes of Schubert Lieder the scores of
which Sullivan is said to have recovered from Vienna.  In the
choruses I hear reminiscences of Haendel operas such as
Semele, Saul, Acis and Galatea, and in some instrumental
passages, vestiges of Purcell. This, of course, may all be
pretentious nonsense.  But I should ask myself whether that
charge of pretentious nonsense might not be apt and
applicable to the rest of what I think and write and do, and
to avoid it, I should have to lapse into silence.

     That Arthur Sullivan's ambition was to compose grand
opera, and that he was offended by the frivolousness and
levity of Gilbert's libretti is a matter of historical
record. I infer the pathos and the lyricism with which he
invests Gilbert's satire are an expression of his musical
instincts and of longings that he was unable to suppress,
that add yet another and certainly unintended and perhaps
generally overlooked facet of irony to this operetta.

     That irony was a reaction to the spirit of the times,
the ethos of an age that was mired in Darwin, Spencer,
Huxley; and age that was long on imperialism and
industrialization but short on poetry and philosophy, an age
incapable of receiving Don Giovanni or a Magic Flute, and
much too dispirited for Fidelio. In any event, the
combination of Gilbert's irony and Sullivan's elegy creates a
work that is a reflection of human nature, of the human
state, which otherwise, expressed absent all irony, with
naive simplicity, (cf. Fidelio and Zauberfloete), might have
been unachievable in that day and age.

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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
