ABSTRACT
Towards the end of Act 1 of The Sorcerer, William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's first full-length comic opera, the sorcerer John Wellington Wells summons up his demonic assistants to cast a spell over a philtre. Sullivan would have become familiar with Weber's music while studying at the Leipzig Conservatorium; for instance, one of his fellow English students, John Barnett, played Weber's Piano Concerto in C major in a graduation concert. The most obvious stage parallel between the Incantation scene and the Wolfsschlucht scene is Caspar's counting of the magic bullets that he casts, and Wells's counting of the three phials that he pours into the tea-pot. The Sorcerer, Gilbert and Sullivan's third collaboration, was first performed on 17 November 1877 at the Opera Comique Theatre in Wych Street, which links Drury Lane to the Strand. Arthur Jacobs, in his biography of Sullivan, claims that the Incantation scene "evokes" Weber's Der Freischutz.
