"...a living tradition that remains at the heart and root of just about every musical now playing in the West End or on Broadway"
He probably doesn't have Mamma Mia in mind but, even so, "heart and root" is a big claim.
"It is built on Gilbert's genius for light rhymed verse and Sullivan's genius for melody, which combine in a fusion of text and music that has rarely been equalled, let alone surpassed"
I'd quibble with that one. G&S certainly had their influence on musicals, particularly G. Ira Gershwin, for one, was a Gilbert fan. You can hear it in his lyric to this comedy number from Of Thee I Sing:
"She's the illegitimate daughter of an illegitimate son
Of an illegitimate nephew of Napoleon...
She's contemplating suicide
Because that man, he threw aside
A lady with the blue blood of Napoleon "
Gershwin even goes for the ol' operetta trick of inverting the sentence order to make the rhyme ("Because that man, he threw aside").
But these Gilbert-esque ditties are not what Ira Gershwin is famous for. It's this:
"I got rhythm
I got music
I got my man
Who could ask for anything more?"
This is most un-Gilbert-esque and provides a very different "fusion of text and music". It's not just the casual slang ("I got") that distinguishes it. It's the irregularity of the meter in the final line that's the real tell-tale. It doesn't read well. It's not very satisfying as spoken verse. The words only work, only make sense, only really come alive when they're set to music. You couldn't easily transplant these words onto another tune or vice versa. This is the difference. As Mr. Christiansen rightly points out, Gilbert wrote "light rhymed verse". But Gershwin wrote lyrics.
I suspect the real influence of G&S on musicals is less formal. Beyond those early Broadway lyricists and into the era of the integrated musical, their light grows dimmer. You can't really hear any of their style or structure in the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein (R&H), let alone Stephen Sondheim (S&S) or Andrew Lloyd Webber (AL&W).
But there's no doubt that they set a standard. They demonstrated that musical theatre could be of smart, sophisticated, tuneful and funny. They provided a link to the Old World operetta and an alternative to the vaudevillian model of musical comedy. Maybe not the "root" of every musical then, but certainly the heart.
Not sure I quite agree on this. Ira Gershwin's reputation is generally based on "clever clever" lyrics very much in the Gilbert tradition. Sondheim even describes his "You're Going to Love Tomorrow" lyrics from "Follies" as being in the style of Ira Gershwin. Cole Porter was another Gilbert follower (there is a clear parallel again with "clever clever" lyrics) and Sondheim tells the tail of how he impressed Porter with his lyrics for "Together Wherever We Are" from "Gypsy". As Sondheim now rules the roost in terms of the style of most modern musicals, I think you can trace modern sophisticated lyrics right back to Gilbert (and to prove that Gilbert was the first of his kind, just listen to the sloppy nature of the only Savoy Opera with words by someone else - Cox and Box. It's fun but feeble!)
ReplyDeleteI trace all modern musicals and also all modern operetta back to Gilbert and Sullivan (mostly Gilbert however, as he was the architect of their canon in terms of style and professionalism in lyrical craft and stage craft). There are of course other inputs, but G&S are, like Queen Victoria and Jacques Brel, alive and well today (though not living in Belgium)
Thanks again for the comment, Thos.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that you can trace the influence of Gilbert up to and including Sondheim (and I’m fairly sure you could count in Lorenz Hart and Alan Jay Lerner along the way). Sondheim even does a G&S parody in Pacific Overtures:
“Hello, I come with letters from Her Majesty Victoria
Who, learning how you're trading now, sang "Hallelujah, Gloria!"
And sent me to convey to you her positive euphoria
As well as little gifts from Britain's various emporia”
But this is deliberate parody rather than genuine Sondheim (whatever that is). Similarly the songs of the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart and Lerner and Lowe feel quite different from G&S. There’s no doubt that an influence is there. The question is: what kind of influence?
I don’t claim an in-depth knowledge of G&S but, to my ears, it generally sounds like light verse set to music. The music tends to stick to the regular meter established by the words (tum-ti-tum-ti-tum etc.). The music acts as a kind of platform for the words, which is really where most of the interest lies – in their wit, their rhymes and general clever clever-ness. I may be doing a disservice to Mr. Sullivan but, to me, the partnership is more truthfully represented as G&s.
Broadway songs are formally different with a more equal relationship between words and music. The lyrics don’t dominate the tunes to the same extent. (This may be simply because, more often than not, the music comes first on Broadway). The best Broadway lyrics still have the wit, the rhymes and the general clever clever-ness but, crucially, they aren’t light verse. In that sense the Broadway lyricists moved away from the Gilbertian model.