ABSTRACT
On 5 April 1862, an event which at the time appeared a signal moment in English music occurred: the incidental music to Shakespeare's The Tempest composed by the young Arthur Sullivan, fresh back from three years study at the Leipzig Conservatory, was performed under August Manns at one of London's famous Crystal Palace Concerts. The Tempest had started off as Sullivan's graduation piece. The Tempest reveals a highly developed process of thematic metamorphosis at work across its separate numbers. This aspect of Sullivan's work had been noted by Arthur Jacobs, who called attention to the transformation of the opening motive of the Prelude into the Act III Banquet Dance, but Sullivan's procedure is in fact much more extensive than previously surmised. Sullivan's ploy of constructing his incidental music out of a network of thematic strands is revealed clearly in the play's songs, where variants of these guiding motivic threads are incorporated into what would otherwise form a conventional lyrical idiom.
