ABSTRACT
Arthur Sullivan was Victorian Britain's most celebrated and popular composer, whose music still to this day reaches a wider audience than that of any of his contemporaries. His work, above all the series of comic operas written in collaboration with W. S. Gilbert, forms an unwavering presence in English-speaking culture across the globe. Sullivan in fact holds a strong claim to be the most loved and widely performed British composer in history. He was, moreover, one of the most gifted musicians that this or any country has produced. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in Victorian music, with much valuable research undertaken into matters of social history, cultural life and biography. But even within this burgeoning field of nineteenth-century British music studies there is still a conspicuous lack of research into Sullivan, and nowhere is this lacuna more serious than with regard to his actual music.
