As head of the Vienna Hofoper, Gustav Mahler developed his credo that in Each performance an opera has to be created anew. This led to his conviction: ‘What people of the theatre call tradition is nothing more than their laziness and their slipshod work’. This notion is especially relevant for branches of musical theatre where the shadows of ‘tradition’ are especially long and hauntingly darkening, as in the so-called Gilbert and Sullivan, or Savoy operas.

W. S. Gilbert suggested in an 1891 interview that ‘the burlesque stage was in a very unclean state’ and that he and Sullivan had made up their minds ‘to do all in our power to wipe out the grosser element’. Arthur Sullivan said in 1885 that in comic opera he ‘adhered to the principles of art which I had learned in the production of more solid works, and no musician who analyses the score of those light operas will fail to find the evidence of seriousness and solidity pointed out’. Gilbert believed that some of Sullivan's music was out of place in comic opera, and this is not surprising, considering that he seems to have been more concerned about burlesque and moral standards – ‘never to let an offending word escape our characters’ – whereas his collaborator reveals a wider range of artistic ambition. From the mid-1880s onwards there are repeated statements by Gilbert to the effect that the text ‘must be played exactly as I wrote it’. There is good reason to assume that this was not only due to issues of copyright but also because Gilbert, the librettist, feared losing control of the works. Usually the performers had to be true to the melodies but not necessarily the words, so he tried to take possession of the operas again as a producer.

Not all Sullivan’s operas have overtures. Victorian audiences showed little regard for these orchestral preludes, chatting over and generally paying little attention to them. Sometimes, therefore, when time was short, Sullivan delegated the task of arranging an overture from the music of the opera to others. In some – possibly all – cases he set out his structural and thematic requirements and usually made some alterations to his assistants’ work.

For a long time, the question of authorship of several overtures remained unresolved and a number of incorrect attributions were widely accepted. Roger Harris went a good way towards producing a definitive list and my own later researches finally settled the issue in the case of the works marked ∗.

Overtures by Sullivan: The Sapphire Necklace, Cox and Box, Iolanthe, Princess Ida, The Yeomen of the Guard, The Gondoliers, Utopia Limited, The Grand Duke. The overture to Thespis is lost. Because, thematically, it seems to have been significantly independent of the opera, it is likely to have been Sullivan’s own work.

Alfred Cellier arranged the overtures to HMS Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance, and Eugene D’Albert the overture to Patience∗. Hamilton Clarke was responsible for the overtures to The Mikado, Ruddigore and The Sorcerer∗ – the last having been written for the 1884 revival to replace the ‘Graceful Dance’ from Sullivan’s Henry VIII music pressed into service for the original production.

David Rusell Hulme