I first got to know the Savoy Operas as scripts to be read by borrowing the two-volume Oxford University World's Classics edition (1962-3) from the school library. I devoured them in print more or less in tandem with my listening to the music on cassettes and seeing local amateur productions in Bingley and elsewhere. I have very fond memories of this edition of the libretti, which I haven't read in about twenty-five years. (What a shocking number to have to set down! I think of myself as a young man setting out in life still.)
Well, about a week ago I bought a copy of the two-volume set very cheaply on Ebay, and yesterday the books arrived (see left). The libretti themselves are set out beautifully clearly, and in versions meticulously edited by Bridget D'Oyly Carte. But Volume One also contains an Introduction by Lord David Cecil which, reading it today, I can only call an exercise in literary condescension. After some praise of Gilbert's vein of nonsense and of the operas as satires (or rather, as "skits"), he continues almost by apologising for Oxford having published the libretti as World's Classics at all:
"[The present edition] gives us only one half of the composite author. The less important half too; for Sullivan has lasted better than Gilbert. His tunes are still playedeverywhere while few people read Gilbert's words. This is not wholly Gilbert's fault; there are a hundred people who enjoy a pleasant tune for one who likes verbal wit. But it is also true that Sullivan in his own line was an artist of the first order.... Gilbert does not maintain the same level. On the contrary, unhelped by the charm of Sullivan's tunes, the libretti show up as very unequal. The prose dialogue in particular is often stilted and facetious: Gilbert was one of those who suffered under the delusion that to say a simple thing in long words is to make it laughable. Further, his touch on fantasy is uncertain.... he is liable to degenerate into a mechanical whimsicality.... Along with imaginative weakness goes insensitiveness of taste, especially apparent when he aspires to be graceful and gallant: [quotation from "Take a pair of sparkling eyes] There is a genteel vulgarity about this which is distressing.... Gilbert was... a middle-class Victorian with the characterstic defects of his type. Though prudish, he was not refined. Indeed, his prudery emphasises his lack of refinement...." (pages xii-xiii)
Later, he condemns the libretto of The Yeomen of the Guard as "a muddled failure," on the grounds that "plot and style are at odds with one another throughout the piece." However, he adds, "If The Yeomen of the Guard is Gilbert's worst libretto, it is Sullivan's best score. 'Is Life a Boon?' and 'The Merryman and his Maid' breathe a delicate pathos he touches nowhere else. Here Sullivan supplied Gilbert's deficiencies. He did so elsewhere, too. For, unlike Gilbert, he was a man of imagination and could therefore convey by his tunes the fantasy and feeling that the genre demanded but which were lacking in Gilbert's words. It is Sullivan's music that makes the fairies in Iolanthe fairy-like and the ghosts in Ruddigore eerie and Jack Point's love story poignant." (pages xvi-xvii)
It would be easy here to make the mistake of getting into the whole worthless "Who was better, Gilbert or Sullivan?" routine. The simple fact is that each was, as Gilbert acknowledged, a master in his own sphere, and they met as equals. Lord David Cecil, Eton and Oxford educated though he was, and Professor of English Literature though he also was later on, has written an infuriatingly flabby and vague Introduction which puts down the writer he ought to be celebrating, and ascribes to the music (of which he knew nothing) the long-lasting qualities that he does not wish to find in the words. It is absurd to state, airily or glibly, that Gilbert lacked imagination, when that is one of his overriding qualities. One might argue that Gilbert had too much imagination, in that he wanted his Fairies to contradict the lazy cliche of "fairy-like" behaviour, and he wanted his ghosts to be ordinary and un-ghost-like; what Sullivan's music does is to create magnificent realisations of what fairy music or ghost music ought to sound like according to the conventions. The fault of many of Gilbert's non-Sullivan works is that he hurried ahead into his own peculiar realm and he left his slower audiences behind him.
Lord David Cecil's Introduction to the Savoy Operas is an excellent example of the kind of attitude that has held back our appreciation of Gilbert's works for so long. Whenever Gilbert is given a word of praise, there is always an implicit "but" at the end of the sentence. All writers, all artists are imperfect. If you want, you can find a "but" to say about any great genius. But in Gilbert's case, the "but" must always be expressed (and it always the same two or three hoary old "buts" which get trotted out every time). It is some years since I resolved to emphasise Gilbert's qualities rather than his defects, for sheer propaganda reasons. If you want to attack him, well and good; but why should I hand you the ammunition?
What makes me most angry, looking back at this Introduction, is that Oxford and Lord David Cecil thought it a good way to introduce readers to this magnificent and ground-breaking edition of Gilbert's most polished works.
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