Most people know something from The Pirates of Penzance or The Mikado. Gilbert and Sullivan fans know a canon of thirteen extant operettas. Gilbert and Sullivan super-fans know of the cut songs[1] and perhaps even the few surviving pieces of music from Thespis. Extreme Gilbert and Sullivan nerds might even know The Martyr of Antioch[2]. But what if I were to tell you that there were three songs by Gilbert and Sullivan, which were published and have remained available to the public since their creation, yet which most people, even the most ardent Gilbert and Sullivan fans, have likely never heard? These three songs were written independently of any opera, and published in 1874 and 1875, around the time of the creation of Trial by Jury, but well before anyone had any indication that Gilbert and Sullivan would embark on a decades-long dozen-opera partnership that would change the face of English musical theatre.

In the Victorian era, one major source of income for musical composers was the sale of popular songs and drawing-room ballads. As the Victorian middle class expanded and gained in both expendable income and leisure time, a market appeared for songs designed especially for amateur musicians to perform in their own homes. Improvements to printing technology provided the means to create the quantities of sheet music necessary to fulfill this demand. Meanwhile the Copyright Act of 1842 extended the term of copyright, and clarified the distinction between publication and performance rights for musical and dramatic works, making publishing a more viable source of income for composers.

In 1867, music publishers Boosey & Co. established the London Ballad Concerts, a series of performances designed to promote the songs published by the firm. Rival publishers Chappell & Co. established their own series, the St. James’s Hall Ballad Concerts, in response. All of which is to say, at the time that Arthur Sullivan was beginning to establish his career as a composer, the publication of songs was one of the major avenues he pursued.  Sullivan composed many songs in the course of his career, the bulk of them prior to the premiere of The Sorcerer in 1877, following which he turned more and more of his attention to the stage.

Drawing-room ballads, being marketed to amateur musicians, were generally for solo voice and piano, and written with a moderate vocal range and simple accompaniment. The texts for these ballads had to comply with Victorian middle-class moral sensibilities. The subjects were usually sentimental, and, by modern standards, quite staid. Sometimes composers would set existing poems by well-known authors, such as Sullivan’s settings of texts by Shakespeare and Shelley. Other times, texts would be written with the express purpose of being set as ballads.

Songs from operas would sometimes be published independently as standalone songs, which is how the music for the song “Little Maid of Arcadee” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Thespis survives. Though most of the rest of the score was lost, that song was published – although some of the lyrics were altered to better suit drawing-room sensibilities. On two occasions, songs from Sullivan’s operas were outfitted with entirely new lyrics to be published as standalones. “Hushed is the Bacon” from Cox and Box was given a new lyric as “Birds in the Night” by Lionel H. Lewin, and Lady Jane’s aria “Silvered is the Raven Hair” from Patience was published as “In the Twilight of Our Love” with new lyrics by Hugh Conway.

This is the context in which Gilbert and Sullivan, in 1874 and 1875, teamed up to write three songs, independent of any opera: “The Distant Shore,” “The Love That Loves Me Not,” and “Sweethearts.” Chappel also published waltz arrangements by Charles D'Albert of “The Distant Shore” and “Sweethearts” in 1875, dance arrangements of popular songs and opera excerpts also being a prolific genre of music published for the middle-class home at the time.

These three songs are in many ways typical of Victorian drawing-room ballads. The lyrics are strikingly uncharacteristic of Gilbert, who expertly camouflages himself in the sentimental and humorless drawing-room milieu. Out of the better-known Gilbert and Sullivan collaborations, the songs bear some resemblance to numbers from The Sorcerer, in which composer and librettist alike deliberately parodied English parlor music.

Of the three songs, “Sweethearts” is perhaps the most historically interesting, being based on Gilbert’s play of the same name, which had premiered in November of 1874. Gilbert had premiered six plays in 1874, of which Sweethearts was the last and most commercially successful, running 132 performances. The song, created as a tie-in, tells the story of the play, and was published as both a solo and a duet.

Sullivan’s musical settings show greater musical sophistication than the average drawing-room ballad of the time, introducing a level of harmonic and structural complexity generally absent from these simple, strophic songs. Rev. H.R. Haweis wrote in his 1871 treatise Music and Morals: “The typical English ballad – we do not speak of really fine old tunes, or the good work of Mr. Sullivan, and a few other true English musicians – can hardly be called a musical composition.”

Although Sullivan is best known today for his stage works, by the early 1870s, he had not written very many of those, and, in any event, before the advent of recording technology, to become acquainted with a piece of music, one had to either attend a live performance, or acquire the sheet music and play it for themselves. And so at this stage in Sullivan’s career, your average English music lover would likely have been more familiar with these drawing-room ballads than any of Sullivan’s large scale stage or orchestral works.

We are excited to be presenting for you this program of Sullivan songs – three with text by Gilbert, three without – and offer a comic opera audience a glimpse of this other side of the composer’s career.

— Natan Zamansky