ABSTRACT
A handle-turning gesture would long be preserved in D’Oyly Carte productions of HMS Pinafore to accompany the words Or perhaps I-ta-li-an’. While on the Riviera he received from Gilbert the draft of a new plot—the plot of HMS Pinafore, as it was to be named. HMS Pinafore was produced under the composer’s baton at the Opera Comique on 25 May 1878—not with a preceding piece, as in the case of The Sorcerer. The ‘baby-farming’ to which Little Buttercup confesses in HMS Pinafore as the cause of the mistake was no innocent child-minding: the placing of ‘unwanted’ infants in unskilled custody had been a source of scandal. It was not surprising that HMS Pinafore pleased its first-night audience and went on to win a favoured place in the affections of later admirers of Gilbert and Sullivan. In Davison’s long article devoted to Sullivan’s Promenade concerts, discussing the programmes in detail, there was not one word about the Pinafore selection.
