ABSTRACT
Despite attaining considerable success at its 1891 premiere, Sullivan's one grand opera, the Walter Scott-based Ivanhoe, fell from musicological grace even more quickly than The Golden Legend. Investigating English opera and the composer's stated aesthetic concerns more closely reveals a conscious desire to opt out of the modern temporal sense found in contemporaneous continental European narratives of musical progress and build a composite, pageant-like vision of English history, therefore inevitably constructing a sense of national identity. Nicholas Temperley, in a considered and well-argued reply to Winton Dean's criticism of Sullivan's opera, highlights certain unspoken assumptions concerning an opera's underlying musical-dramatic temporal strategy that critics in the twentieth century have been accustomed to demand. Michael Beckerman, speaking of Sullivan's light opera Haddon Hall from the following year, has identified a characteristic use of time and musical-dramatic temporality in Sullivan's operatic music that he designates 'iconic', which differs from conventionally understood dramatic writing.
