The D'Oyly Carte Opera: The Gondoliers, 2CD

The Gondoliers was the last great success of the Gilbert & Sullivan Partnership. Written in a spirit of bitter artistic estrangement, it carries every indication of having been created – as one first night reviewer observed – ‘con amore’. Yet the peace and goodwill amounted to no more than a lull before the tempestuous ‘carpet quarrel’: a Sovoy drama played in open court to anything but public approval.

Sullivan’s attitude towards the composition of operettas was decidedly ambivalent. These works, upon which he lavished so much of his creative genius, were central to his output throughout his career, as well as being the main source of his material prosperity. Yet he often felt the works written with Gilbert restricted his musical scope and other, loftier musical forms more worthy of his attention. He did warm, however, to the ‘very human’ libretto of The Yeomen of the Guard which seemed to open up possibilities in new and more conducive directions.

The undoubtedly romantic rather than comic ambience, and distinct veer towards Grand Opera, mark Yeomen as a work quite different from it’s predecessors. Yet for Sullivan it did not go far enough. He explained to Gilbert how he ‘wanted to do some dramatic work on a larger musical scale’ in which ‘the music must occupy a more important place’, and that he ‘wanted a voice in the musical construction of the libretto’. Whilst Gilbert appreciated the composer’s desire to ‘write big work’ his own view was that public response to Yeomen had not been such as to encourage production of something ‘more earnest still’. Hostility followed and the prospect for reconciliation seemed gloomy indeed. Gilbert had rationally maintained, however, that Sullivan could satisfy his ambitions for large scale operatic work by writing a grand opera for the audiences which wanted that, without having to abandon the lighter form of operetta favoured by the patrons of The Savoy. Eventually the opportunity to write and grand opera on the subject of Ivanhoe for production in a theatre built by Richard D’Oyly Carte, the Royal English Opera House (now the Palace Theatre), brought Sullivan to this realization also. Making his peace with Gilbert, Sullivan expressed a particular liking for the Venetian subject he knew the librettist had been considering. Just over seven months later, on 7th December 1889, The Gondoliers opened at the Savoy Theatre.

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