ABSTRACT
If musical director François Cellier was one Savoyard who celebrated “a certain family likeness” among Gilbert and Sullivan operas (67), another who occasionally did not was Arthur Sullivan. In 1884 his collaboration with Gilbert was jeopardized by Sullivan’s fear that their operas were too similar. He wrote Gilbert:
Sullivan particularly objected to the plot Gilbert was proposing for their next opera, seeing it as reminiscent of The Sorcerer. “Apart from my own personal feeling in the matter,” he wrote in another letter, “I am convinced that unless we do start out in an entirely fresh line, the popularity of our joint work will rapidly decline, as people will say and do say already that we are only repeating ourselves.”2 Sullivan was right: some reviewers were complaining of repetition and had done so since The Pirates of Penzance. A scathing review of the New York première in 1879 stated:
The review concluded, “It remains to be seen how the people will take two doses of the same mixture, even if it is made palatable by the addition of some new matter.”3 Back home in Britain, reviewers could be equally withering. Of Iolanthe, the critic for the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News wrote,
Sullivan had apparently taken such words to heart when in 1884 he decried the operas’ family likeness. Thanks at least in part to Carte’s efforts, Sullivan eventually found a way around his creative impasse and went on to write seven more operas with Gilbert,5 but his letters illuminate the collaborators’ dilemma: how were they to keep producing operas that used a popular and profitable formula without tiring audiences with the works’ similarity?
