ABSTRACT
The rift, which had hitherto turned on Arthur Sullivan’s statement that he would write no more of the Savoy type of pieces, then shifted to the composer’s rejection of the particular plot Gilbert proposed to him. By half past midnight on 2 May 1884, Sullivan had made up his mind to reject the plot. Neither ‘won’ the quarrel, but Sullivan started from a weak position and ended in one. His ambition to write a ‘grand opera’ found an unexpected stimulus. After many years of attending other and richer people’s country-house parties, Sullivan was in a position to invite his own friends similarly—not, of course, on the grand scale of a country landowner. ‘No fixed political principles’ was perhaps a better label for Sullivan than for the demonstrators whose aspirations he so amiably dismissed. In working on a Japanese subject, Gilbert and Sullivan knew that they were tapping a vein of acknowledged public interest.
