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Reviewed by:
  • The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan edited by David Eden and Meinhard Saremba, and The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado by Josephine Lee
  • Adrienne Munich (bio)
The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan, edited by David Eden and Meinhard Saremba; pp. xiii + 274. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, £48.00, £17.99 paper, $97.00, $30.00 paper.
The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, by Josephine Lee; pp. xxiv + 248. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, $75.00, $25.00 paper.

As a volume in the Cambridge Companions to Music series, The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan foregrounds Arthur Sullivan’s music and places it in the context of theatrical and musical history. This is good and long needed. Those who know about music but not that much about Sullivan and those who want to know more about what Sullivan’s music brought to the partnership and to the Savoy operas will finally receive some tutelage. Like most collections, it is a motley selection of pleasures, but it will enlighten those of us who can interpret the lyrics but cannot hear how the music operates. Some of the essays rightly point out that most operas are known more by the composer than by the librettist. To focus on music enables a more wide-ranging appreciation of Sullivan and of W. S. Gilbert’s contribution, and the editors appear well qualified to assemble a fine group of essays. Serious and enlightening they are. Many of them point out that Sullivan’s music brings a depth of humanity lacking in Gilbert’s misanthropic cynicism. Separating Sullivan from his partner, Meinhard Saremba provides musical context and evaluation of Sullivan’s contribution, not only to his collaboration with Gilbert but to English music: “It is because of Sullivan’s artistic ambitions that the style of his music is among the most refined in all comic opera of the late nineteenth [End Page 524] century. … Sullivan added human credibility to Gilbert’s librettos, and it is because of his music that the operas survive. … Sullivan’s comédie humaine is based on nineteenth-century optimism, his attitude closer to that of Dickens and Trollope than to Hardy’s pessimism or Gilbert’s misanthropy” (62–63).

The volume’s division into three parts, “Background,” “Focus,” and “Reception,” is not particularly useful, and the reader can comfortably ignore it. Most of the essays focus on music and music history to contextualize Sullivan’s music. An exception is Horst Dölvers’s “The Librettos in Context,” whose title does not mention what context: it turns out to be the oral tradition of fable, actually out of context in this volume. Mike Leigh, the film director, offers an intimate understanding of his attraction to The Mikado (1885) in his terrific film, Topsy-Turvy (1999). The essay includes his scene by scene notes. Ian Bradley surveys the astonishing range of amateur productions. The take-away from this Cambridge volume? Pay attention to Sullivan and his music. True, his training was conservative, but he brought intelligence, wit, and greater expressiveness to English comic opera. You will be able to explain what seems like Saremba’s excessive claim that Sullivan’s music ensured the survival of the Savoy operas.

After seriously absorbing Josephine Lee’s book, however, you might wish that The Mikado had been confined to the dustbin of history as a racist, yellowface embarrassment. Lee has assembled a huge range of material, and it is a wonder that she manages to formulate a coherent presentation from the masses of her evidence. She not only considers a vast, though selective, range of productions, but also illuminates the ways in which interpretations of Gilbert and Sullivan’s work have perpetuated its racism by focusing exclusively on the comedy masking it. She tells us (if we didn’t already know) that comedy is serious. Absorbing her humorless argument I felt not only bad about loving The Mikado but defensive. She believes that the opera’s success in part rests on its “pointed exclusion of coolie laborers” (43). What did she expect? A Social Realist Mikado? Actually...

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