Happy Birthday to Anglo-Irish composer SIR ARTHUR SULLIVAN (1842-1900)!
Many — including yours truly — consider Sullivan the greatest English composer of all time. Fight me!
His brilliance was nonpareil. Not only was he a fine opera composer (his Ivanhoe is a woefully underrated and underperformed masterpiece), he was also a magnificent hymn writer (Onward, Christian Soldiers!) parlor songs (The Lost Chord) music for plays (The Tempest, Macbeth, et al.) and ballets (Victoria and Merrie England). But he is most famous for his brilliant music for the operettas he wrote in collaboration with the equally brilliant W.S. Gilbert.
It takes true genius to write funny music, and the only other person I can think of that comes close to Sullivan in this regard is Carl Stalling, who wrote the soundtracks for the Looney Tunes cartoons.
From the zany Marx Brothers courtroom silliness of Trial by Jury to the high seas shenanigans of H.M.S Pinafore and Pirates of Penzance to the spot-on parody of Oscar Wilde in Patience, it was one masterpiece after another for this duo.
It’s hard for me to choose a favorite, but The Mikado just always seems to hit. Did the Victorian audiences appreciate the postmodern absurdity of the Japanese noblemen singing “The Japanese equivalent for hear, hear hear!”? What a hoot Mikado is from beginning to end. The 1999 movie Topsy-Turvy was about the first production of Mikado, and captured the Victorian milieu so well. Three Little Maids, brief though it is, was a highlight of the film, just as it is of The Mikado …
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