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Victorian values

Today there are still many critics who despise ‘Victorian values’. Yet these are mainly the very people who, when judging Sullivan, adopt something redolent of Victorian ‘highbrow’ musical morality: writing great comic opera, instead of oratorios and symphonies, is not really a very nice thing to do. For them, Sullivan’s association with Gilbert was, and remains, ‘Sir Arthur Sullivan’s Crime’.

These voices had made themselves heard during the composer’s lifetime, of course. Probably the most famous example was Stanford’s review of The golden legend: after The tempest and Kenilworth ‘Sir Arthur Sullivan turned his attention principally to a class of composition which [...] was of a standard of art distinctly below the level of his abilities.’ But now: ‘The Golden Legend of Longfellow [...] has inspired our fellow-countryman to write a work which, for earnestness of purpose and refinement of expression, realises all the promises held out so temptingly by his early cantatas’.

It never occurred to Stanford that the phrase ‘for earnestness of purpose and refinement of expression’ might, one hundred years later, be applied to, say, Iolanthe; but he was rejoicing: the prodigal son had seen the error of his ways: ‘Suddenly the situation changes. The Golden Legend is produced and raises Sullivan’s reputation at a stroke to the point which it might reasonably have been expected to have reached, if the intervening years had been spent upon the most earnest and serious development of the promise of his earlier work. It restores him to his legitimate position as one of the leaders of the English school.’ Then the finger wagged, as Stanford enunciated as wrong-headed a musical judgement as any Hanslick ever penned of Wagner: ‘The composer of the Golden Legend must now give posterity the chance of enjoying the fruits of his genius, and stay his hand from works which [...] must of their very nature and surroundings be ephemeral, and pass away with the fashion that gave them birth.’ He concluded with a significant, and stinging, coda: ‘It is natural, nay more, it is right, that in the Paradise of Music, as in other Paradises, there should be more rejoicing over Sullivan’s great and legitimate success, than over the works of the ninety and nine just composers who have remained uninfluenced (perhaps because untempted) by considerations of profit and popularity.’ From this we learn that, if a composer is to succeed he must be ‘earnest’ (which, if it is taken to mean ‘sincere’, is true, even though it will not guarantee artistic greatness, despite being a sine qua non), and that popularity, i.e. having your music actually liked by a high proportion of people, is somehow dubious, whilst the notion of its success earning you money is artistically impermissible.

Upon closer examination, it can be seen from Stanford’s review that the words ‘It restores him to his legitimate position as one of the leaders of the English school’ are of hidden significance: translated, they mean that Parry and Stanford had consciously inaugurated what they believed was an English Musical Renaissance, and that Sullivan could be admitted into it – but only on their terms.

The issue of the English Musical Renaissance is of vital importance in the history of Sullivan’s ongoing reputation as a composer, for it has nearly always been the case that those critics who believed in ‘the Renaissance’ vilified Sullivan, whilst those who considered it to be little more than a myth did not.

The notion that English music had undergone a rebirth from c.1880 onwards was, initially, largely the work of one man: JA Fuller Maitland. His book English Music in the nineteenth century (London, 1902) is subdivided thus: ‘Book I: Before the Renaissance (1801–1850); Book II: The Renaissance (1851–1900)’. Parry and Stanford are shown here as the saviours of English music. Sullivan, though, is not worthy to enter the temple of high art because ‘the taste of the average man was what he sought to meet.’ Fuller Maitland, admittedly writing in 1902, notably assigns less than one page to Elgar, and his final verdict on Sullivan is that ‘He took no part whatever in the work of the renaissance.’ As will be seen, this last statement is true, but in reaching it Fuller Maitland introduces an element of venom into his prose which mars his own reliability as a critic. There is almost no length to which he will not go to denigrate every aspect of Sullivan’s art. At one point he writes: ‘That the man who wrote the concerted pieces of The Mikado should have brought himself to be acknowledged as the composer of such songs as ‘Will he come?’, ‘Let me dream again’, or another in which the complaint that ‘the gravy’s cold’ seems to be iterated [...] and reiterated [...] is hardly credible.’

‘The gravy’s cold’? Sullivan enthusiasts may well ask ‘Where did Sir Arthur set those words?’ The answer is simple: he didn’t. What he did write was this excerpt from ‘My dearest heart’, a drawing-room ballad written in 1876, and, ironically, one of his finest songs (see example below). As for being ‘iterated and reiterated’, the words occur only once. Not all of Sullivan’s songs are drawing-room ballads, neither are all of them art-songs; but ‘My dearest heart’ demonstrates that those two genres are not mutually exclusive.

From Sullivan: ‘My dearest heart’

It was because of criticism of this kind that Elgar dubbed Fuller Maitland’s notorious obituary of Sullivan ‘the shady side of musical criticism [...] that foul unforgettable episode’. Foul or not, for quite some years the ‘arbiters of taste’ continued in a similar fashion, most notably Ernest Walker, who, in his History of music in England (London, 1907) concluded: ‘After all Sullivan is merely the idle singer of an empty evening [...] a mere popularity-hunting trifler’.

Yet there had been one shrewd observer who had seen through the quasi-moralistic snobbery all along, and had arrived at something of a just estimation of Sullivan within his own lifetime. This, of course, was Bernard Shaw. Acting as The Perfect Wagnerite, Shaw believed that Wagner’s was indeed The Music of the Future. This, in turn, meant that the Brahms-based music of Parry and Stanford (‘the Professors’) could not, of itself, engender a renaissance of any kind. The future of British music, Shaw had concluded by about 1900, lay in the hands of Edward Elgar. He did not quite make the judgement which has become clear only with the passage of time: that Elgar was Sullivan’s natural successor; none the less, he admired Sullivan, if only because he had dared to defy convention and pomposity, and to write comic opera: ‘Professor Villiers Stanford [...] could [...] follow the example of Sir Arthur Sullivan and fertilize [his] wasting talent by condescending to do as Mozart did – or as near as [he] can get to it.’ Or again: ‘When all our musicians are brought to their last account, will Sullivan dissemble the score of the Pirates with a blush and call on the mountains to cover him, whilst Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry table the Revenge, Prometheus Unbound, and Judith with pride?’

Extract from ‘See how the fates: Sullivan reassessed’, by Nigel Burton.