Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician

A Victorian Musician

Arthur Jacobs

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138609488
• eBook ISBN: 9780429872259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Published in 1992. This is a revised, enlarged edition of a book which on its original appearance in 1984 was hailed as a landmark in the study of Victorian musical life. It presents the figure of Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1990) not only as the celebrated co-creator of light operas with W.S Gilbert, but as a composer of all kinds of music from symphony and concerto to ballads such as 'The Lost Chord' and hymns such as 'Onward, Christian Soldiers'. A prominent public life, with a knighthood in 1883, is contrasted with an unconventional private life involving a liaison of almost thirty years with an American living in London, Mary Frances Ronalds.

The author's access to Sullivan's diary held by Yale University and to letters and other documents at the Pierpont Morgan library in New York gives this book both a unique authority and a deep human understanding. A new chapter updates research to the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth, 1992, and incorporates music examples.

1 Beginnings

Two hundred men bearing shoulder-high posters – and wearing top-hats, a necessary badge of respectable occupation – marched about the streets of London to proclaim the birth of the Illustrated London News.¹ The first issue of the new weekly publication offered an unprecedented 32 illustrations in 16 pages, and was priced at sixpence, or 2½p in modern currency. On the Friday of that week, 13 May 1842, Arthur Sullivan was born in Lambeth, South London.

The new journalism was one of the features of dramatic social change between the beginning and end of the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), within which fell the whole of Arthur Sullivan’s life (1842-1900). The circulation of the Illustrated London News, initially 26,000, had doubled by the end of the year, and by 1863 exceeded 300,000. The illustrations, hand-drawn and produced from wood-engravings, depicted incidents or personalities in the news. Increasingly, the newspaper artist copied from photographs, which could not be reproduced directly until after 1860. By means of such illustrations the Crimean War of 1854-6 was to acquire a more vivid public image than any previous event of suffering and conflict. In like manner the illustrated press made familiar not only the characters and scenes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s theatrical works but also the lineaments of the creators themselves. The bluff, burly Gilbert and the suave, smaller Sullivan lived in faithful image and fantastic caricature.

In the pages of the Illustrated London News in 1850 Joseph Paxton published his plans for a gigantic glass-walled exhibition building – this in order to appeal directly to public enthusiasm, over the heads of a procrastinating official committee. It was in Punch that Douglas Jerrold gave the building its inspired name: the Crystal Palace. The first Crystal Palace, in Hyde Park, housed the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (invariably known just as ‘the Great Exhibition’) in 1851; the greatly enlarged second Crystal Palace, making use of materials from the first, was erected in London’s south-east outskirts at Sydenham. Finished in 1854, it would shortly house Britain’s first long-lasting series of popular-priced orchestral concerts, where Arthur Sullivan-long before his collaboration with Gilbert – would romantically find fame overnight.

Improved technical processes in manufacturing and engineering, so proudly on display at the Great Exhibition, benefited music directly. Factory-made brass instruments made possible the working-class brass bands as well as the newly precise symphony orchestra. The annual output of pianos rose from about 23,000 in 1850 to 25,000 in 1870 and about 50,000 in 1890. ² In 1871, in a book called Music and Morals, the Rev. H. R. Haweis guessed that there were about 400,000 pianos in the British Isles and about one million pianists. The spreading railway network (1,331 miles of track in 1840, rising to 17,935 miles by 1880) enabled leading performers to leave London for a rehearsal and concert the same day in a provincial city.³

In 1841, the year before Arthur Sullivan’s birth, the first census of the United Kingdom revealed a population which was under 27 million and mainly agricultural. By 1901 the population was over 41 million and mainly industrial. It was, especially after Forster’s Education Act of 1870 took effect, a better educated population and also one with an increased purchasing-power for things of leisure: real wages increased during the second half of the century by more than 80 per cent. For the most depressed of all, the poor of the urban slums, things grew no better: though cholera had been conquered, Charles Booth’s famous surveys revealed that in 1889 over 30 per cent of London’s population,⁴ about ι, 800,000 people, lived in the direst and filthiest poverty. But at least from the 1870s the class of tradesmen, shop-assistants and clerks was able to take some share of civilized entertainment from the museum to the music-hall. The ‘steady-and-stolid-y, jolly-Bank-Holiday, everyday young man’ from Patience was in a literal sense the creation of the Bank Holiday Act, 1871; and, as Saturday afternoons as well as Sundays became free of labour, la semaine anglaise brought itself to the notice of Continental visitors.

It was indeed into an expanding world of entertainment that Arthur Sullivan grew up. Through its purchasing-power and its strongly defined patterns of leisure, the middle class took the lead, and the nation joined in. The jaunty tunes of HMS Pinafore and Iolanthe captured a public which also responded to the sentimental appeal of The Lost Chord, said to have sold an average of 20,000 copies annually for 25 years.⁵ From such ballads and facile piano pieces to the grandest occasions of opera and concert, the Victorian press catered strongly for its readers’ musical interests. Chorley of the Athenaeum, Davison of The Times, Joseph Bennett of the new, more popularly slanted Daily Telegraph – all these were music critics of strong opinion and considerable influence. With each of them, and later with Hermann Klein of the Sunday Times, Arthur Sullivan was to develop a personal relationship.

In its infancy during that summer of 1842, the Illustrated London News grasped its opportunities. Its fourth weekly number apologized for its inattention hitherto to ‘music and theatricals’ and began to make immediate amends. A German opera company had just given London its first hearing of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. At a concert to raise funds for sufferers from a fire which had devastated Hamburg, the visiting Mendelssohn played a piano duet with Ignaz Moscheles – who, carrying from Beethoven’s Vienna a reputation as pianist, composer, and conductor, was now a prominent and resident figure in London’s musical life. In the issue of 11 June, the longest of the paper’s articles on any topic, musical or other, was a report on ‘the singing-classes at Exeter Hall’,⁶ at which the admiring spectators included the Queen Dowager (Queen Adelaide, widow of William IV) and other members of ‘the Court and haut ton’.

These classes, directed by John Hullah, pursued the ideal proposed in the phrase Singing for the Million – the title of a textbook by another popularizer, Joseph Mainzer. Hullah demonstrated to school-teachers, who would pass it on to their pupils, his method of learning to sing at sight, with physical actions as an aid to memory. The counting of beats by a repeated ‘crotch, crotch, crotch, crotch’ reminded the Illustrated London News reporter of the noises of a duck-pond, but the demonstrations were a much-approved public wonder in an age when self-help and education were so highly esteemed. In July 1842 there were said to be 50,000 Hullah pupils, and singing in schools began to be recognized as ‘an important means of forming an industrious, bright, loyal and religious people’. The phrase is that of Dr James Kay (later Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth), secretary of the Privy Council’s committee on education.

British social stability is encapsulated in Kay’s words. The throngs of Parisian labourers in their bleu de travail whom Mainzer had assembled for his singing-classes alarmed the French authorities: for fear of insurrection the enterprise was banned in 1839. The British ruling class, however, was strong enough to contain and repress the radical Chartist movement (1839-48), and revolutionary impulse was weakened by social reform and rising prosperity. National cohesion was encouraged by the moral, disciplinary verses favoured in British school songs as in many larger choral works. Within that morality, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were to gain recognition as licensed jesters.

During Sullivan’s lifetime the provision of concerts increased dramatically. Whereas London’s population between 1848 and 1898 increased only twofold (to a total exceeding four million), newspaper advertisements suggest a fivefold rise in the provision of orchestral and choral-orchestral concerts. Add the miscellaneous concerts (including ‘ballad concerts’ at which publishers profitably pushed their wares through the medium of celebrated singers) and the increase is even more remarkable. By 1886, when The Mikado was enjoying its record-breaking run, the magazine Truth implied that the London musical scene was not merely full, but congested:

Arrangements are being made for 14 Popular, 20 Crystal Palace, 16 Henschel, 13 Richter, 14 Ballad, 6 Sacred Harmonic, 6 Novello’s Choir, 6 Albert Hall, 6 Sarasate, 7 Ambrose Austin, 6 Philharmonic, 3 Strolling Players, 2 Bach Choir, 2 London Musical Society, and a large number of other concerts.⁷

Moreover, the new halls were bigger. St James’s Hall, with a capacity of 2,127, had opened in 1858; the Albert Hall (about 7,000) in 1871; Queen’s Hall (2,500) in 1893. In Sullivan’s early years the Philharmonic Society – the most prestigious of London promoters, though confining its concerts to about eight each year -was performing in the Hanover Square Rooms, seating only about 850; it moved to St James’s Hall in 1869 and to Queen’s Hall in 1894.

Good music became not only more plentiful, but cheaper. From the 1840s, promenade concerts – at which, in those days, the audience did promenade attracted large audiences, the programmes often mingling popular dance-arrangements and solo items with overtures and symphonic works, and often employing a military band as well as an orchestra. The great exponent was the French conductor Jullien – a showman who would seize a violin or piccolo at the climax of a dance-arrangement of military or naval airs, but would don a pair of white kid gloves to conduct a Beethoven symphony. At the end of his career, the Musical World in July 1859 recalled that it was he who ‘taught the crowd that they can hear, for a shilling or half-a-crown [5p., 12½p.], several times during the winter season, performances quite as good as those for which the Philharmonic directors charge one guinea [£1.05]’.

Jullien’s main appearances, however, were in summer, the ‘monster concerts’ at the Surrey Gardens being among his special attractions. Even at such a place of popular, suburban entertainment he could mount a ‘classical’ programme with financial success. An all-Mozart concert in June 1857 included the Piano Concerto in C minor (Arabella Goddard as soloist) and the ‘Jupiter’ symphony. The symphony ‘was executed without curtailment’, noted The Times – whose critic, James W. Davison, happened to be Arabella Goddard’s husband. The review went on:

Who, after this, can venture to question the artistic taste of Southwark, Camberwell, Kennington, Lambeth, and Walworth, where the influence of M. Jullien seems to be quite as good as that which he has exercised for so many years in the cis-pontine regions? And who will dare assert that a metropolis is not musical, when Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn are so much and so continually in request?

The terms cis-pontine and trans-pontine, indicating the ‘near’ and ‘far’ side of the bridges across the Thames, were often invoked to differentiate the taste of the fashionable and wealthy from that of meaner folk. (Thirty years later, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore would be disparaged as redolent of ‘transpontine melodrama’.) The raising of musical taste was a process characterized in Davison’s posthumous memoirs as ‘the democratization of good concerts’. The implication of political homogeneity should not be missed.

The vortex of London’s expanding musical life attracted the musical celebrities of Europe. During Sullivan’s boyhood not only Mendelssohn and Moscheles came, but also Chopin, Verdi, Wagner, Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Liszt. No home-grown talent could compare with that; nor could any native conductor rival, for sheer capability, the Neapolitan who achieved British naturalization and knighthood as Sir Michael Costa (1808-84). Into Costa’s hands fell not only the Royal Italian Opera at Covent Garden but the Philharmonic Society (he was its first ‘permanent’ conductor, from 1846 to 1854), the Birmingham Festival, the Leeds Festival, and the Sacred Harmonic Society, London’s leading amateur choir, staunch proponents of Handel. Were British composers and conductors never to draw abreast? What was called the ‘native talent question’ – the phrase is yet again from Davison’s memoirs – was constantly under discussion, with no case more prominent than Sullivan’s.

Lambeth, his birthplace, was a populous London borough on the south (Surrey) side of the Thames, with more than 100,000 inhabitants.⁸ Since the Reform Act of 1832 it had sent two members to Parliament. It would maintain a strong local identity even when absorbed in 1888 into the new administrative County of London. A short walk from the Sullivans’ house stood Lambeth Palace, the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury – one of about 50 ‘places which a stranger in London must see’, according to Peter Pellingham’s two-volume Handbook for London of 1849. Lambeth Bridge being as yet unbuilt, the Archbishop’s palace was connected with the other side of the river by a horse-ferry. (The present Horseferry Road recalls it.) On the north bank, where the Tate Gallery is now located, stood the menacing six-pentagon structure of the Millbank Penitentiary.

The house was in Bolwell Street, numbered as 8 Bolwell Terrace (no longer standing). Civil registration of births having come into force six years previously, the son of Thomas and Mary Clementina Sullivan was registered on 24 June 1842 with the one forename, Arthur. At his baptism on 31 July in the nearby parish church of St Mary – the building was pulled down in 1851 and replaced – a second forename, Seymour, was added. It was the middle name also of one of his mother’s cousins. At the age of 31, apparently irritated by jokes at the sequence of his three initials, Arthur Seymour Sullivan was to drop the middle name from both his correspondence and the title-pages of his compositions.

He was fortunate in his mother. Mary Clementina (born at Marlow, Bucks, on 2 November 1811) combined energy and forethought with a charm that was to win the affection of both the eminent and the humble in her son’s future circle. She was to guide and encourage him, to be secretary, companion, and confidante, to ‘air his linen, dry his tears’, as the line was to go in The Sorcerer. From the beginning, she preserved his letters – and more than his letters. The tiny garment labelled as ‘Arthur Sullivan’s first shirt’, with a note in his mother’s hand bearing the date of his birth, rests in the Gilbert and Sullivan collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. If she ever did the same for her elder son Frederic (born 25 December 1837), the results have not come down to us. There were no other children.

Mary Clementina (her nickname was variously spelt Clemma or Clema)⁹ herself compiled a family tree – of her own side only, not her husband’s. The information in it is incorporated into what follows and also into the family tree on pp. 452-3 of this book. Her maiden name was Coghlan, her father James Coghlan being Irish. (It seems unlikely, since there is no mention of it in family correspondence, that they were related to the Irish actor Charles Coghlan, active in the London theatre at this period.) Her mother, born Mary Louisa Margaret Righy, was a daughter of Joseph Righy – born in Nice, which under the Italian name of Nizza was then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Joseph Righy, having settled in England, died in 1824 at Camberley in Surrey.

‘Righy’ was apparently a French or English re-spelling of the Italian name ‘Righi’: Arthur Sullivan described his mother as descending from ‘an old Italian family’. Another daughter of Joseph’s, Maria Victoria Righy (Arthur Sullivan’s great-aunt), married Edward...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments (1983)
• Sources and references
• 1 Beginnings
• 2 Mentors
• 3 Leipzig and London
• 4 In Demand
• 5 In search of Schubert
• 6 Love and Operetta
• 7 From Tennyson to Gilbert
• 8 A Partnership and a Patron
• 9 Broadening
• 10 Fanny
• 11 A College and an Aquarium
• 12 Collaborators
• 13 ‘Pinafore’ and Piracy
• 14 Transatlantic
• 15 ‘We select an Englishman’
• 16 The Martyr and the Dairymaid
• 17 Diarist and Traveller
• 18 Loss
• 19 With Electric Light
• 20 Conflict
• 21 At the Centre
• 22 To California
• 23 Triple Assignment
• 24 In Others’ Eyes
• 25 ‘I am not Strong’
• 26 The Furthest Point
• 27 ‘Monarchs of all they Savoy’
• 28 Transitions translations
• 29 On the Carpet
• 30 ‘English Grand Opera’
• 31 Return to the Savoy
• 32 Satire
• 33 The End of the Partnership
• 34 Jubilee
• 35 Valedictions
• 36 Legacy
• 37 1842-1992
• Notes on the Text
• Arthur Sullivan’s Family Tree
• The Supposed Jewish Connection
• Arthur Sullivan: List of works
• Bibliography
• Index