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     My preoccupation with the Pirates of Penzance continues.
I am aware of the hazard of trying to say something serious
about tomfoolery.  It makes the seriousness of the criticism
look foolish.  It makes the critic look like a fool, as if
foolishness were catching. Nonetheless I will take the risk.

     I am enchanted by the melodiousness of some of
Sullivan's lyrics.  I hear in his music echoes of Schumann,
Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, Haendel and Purcell.  The duet
"Did ever maiden wake" with the accompanying chorus, exhibits
a virtuosity reminiscent of Bach's solos with choral
accompaniment.  I learn from even a cursory review that
Sullivan very much wanted to write monumental music in grand
opera style, and that he chafed at the triviality and
flightiness of Gilbert's libretti.  His ability, his need to
to express emotion in melody was not to be concealed.  "I am
a pirate king," sounds like Schumann to me. "Oh, is there not
one maiden breast," reminds me of Schubert; "Poor wandering
one," of Beethoven's songs.  Such specific linkages are, of
course, very much open to challenge.  Nonetheless, the style
of the music fluctuates from the triviality of the Major
General's catalogue aria (I am the very model of a modern
Major General) to the papier-mache grandeur of "Poor
wandering one". Most of the arias are parodies, - and by and
large, very good parodies of grander works that epitomize
human experience.  It is the need for such expression which,
in my estimation, accounts for the greatness of this music.

     In certain of the pieces, the irony overwhelms the
pathos and trivializes the music.  The Major General's
catalogue aria, (The comparison with Leporello's catalogue
aria demonstrates the difference between Sullivan and Mozart)
and the Policemen's chorus are two examples that come to
mind.  If there were nothing to the operetta other than such
exhibitions of elaborate and contrived triviality, the music
would not be worth listening to, at least not for me.  But
there are numerous choruses and songs where the pathos
(feeling) of the music outstrips and overshadows the irony
and satire of the text.

     The opera succeeds because of the contrapuntal
relationship between the apparently trivial and the
ostentatiously pathetic.  The hermeneutic tasks for the
listener is to penetrate to the reality of both.

     Significantly both the music and the text are pointers
to a reality to which they cannot attain directly: The music
is ironic, in that it points to Haendel and Purcell, to
Schumann, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart and even Bach, unable
to approach them on account of being tethered to popular
triviality.  The music points to societies which could accept
a naive, direct, non-ironic, appeal to and expression of
emotion.  The text avails itself of irony and satire to
impugn the psychological, social and political realities of
the day, explicit challenges to which would not have been
politically correct, to put it mildly: the sexual repression,
the military bombast, the essential goodness of evildoers,
and the villainy of the apparently virtuous, the folly and
meaninglessness of a legalistic concept of duty.  And in
pointing to those otherwise inaccessible realities, the music
and the text become complementary, and lose their
contrapuntal relationship.  Complementary in different ways,
they are both ironic; and the irony of each makes its appeal
to the listener's ideals, in contrast to his sense of reality.
The irony of the text is its appeal to ideals of duty, love,
loyalty; the incongruities of which are demonstrated by the
plot.  The irony of the music is its appeal to ideals of
beauty, musical harmony, melody, rhythm, which like ideals of
sentiment and behavior cannot be sustained.  With the
concluding extravagant dance of the Major General's daughters
with the pirate-peers the operetta returns from fantasy-land
to the real world.

     That things are seldom as they seem, is an epigram
applicable also to this operetta.  The libretto gives an
account of human behavior which the culture could not
countenance in any other way: The violence and tragedy of
piracy and burglary, the silliness and hypocrisy of (legal)
duty as defined by contract, by rule and regulation.  The
issue of moral duty as distinct from legal duty.

     Finally the operetta says something about the society by
which it was welcomed; a society that was entertained by it,
in part, or largely, because it pointed to a truth to which the
society of the Victorian era seemed to have no other access.

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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
