ABSTRACT
HMS Pinafore, written in 1878 by William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan (composer), was the first theatrical score the author ever heard. The fascinating team’s turbulent relationship has perhaps been overdramatized over the years. They were first commissioned to create an 1871 Christmas burlesque entitled Thespis, most of its music now almost certainly lost – although its chorus “Climbing Over Rocky Mountain” was miraculously preserved when, in an emergency, Sullivan inserted it into the score of the immortal Pirates of Penzance in 1879 with only a minor word change. Pinafore’s importance in the history of musical theatre can’t be underestimated. For HMS Pinafore was the ship that launched a thousand faces – or rather, a thousand face masks of comedy and tragedy on the figureheads of the armada of stage musicals soon to follow in its wake and someone get the author out of this metaphor before the author type again.
