Michael Ainger

My mother used to play the Mikado and the Pirates of Penzance for my sister and me when we were little, and my parents took us to productions in NYC from time to time as well. I've loved the movie, Topsy Turvey, about the making of the Mikado and always wondered how accurate it was. So, at long last, a biography of these two men, and a close description of their partnership, was a quite welcomed reading experience for me.

The narrative moves smoothly back and forth between the two lives during their childhoods and their formative years as artists, and this works well for the purpose. Not too much time is spent on either's childhood (a feature in a biography which, I don't know about you, but I always appreciate). We see, in particular, Sullivan's early progress as a musician and a prodigy. Once the two come together to begin producing their brilliant comic operas, things really heat up.

In Ainger's Preface to his book, he makes note of the fact that he had had access while writing to a large trove of letters that previous biographers had not. This might seem like an advantage for him, and I guess it was, but in the reading it turns into what I deem to be the book's major flaw. The problem is that Ainger leans on the contents of these letters too thoroughly. Add to this the fact that Gilbert, in particular, was difficult and quarrelsome. He was the "very model" of a Victorian gentleman, and was quick to sniff out what he saw as questions about his "honor" and suspicious about the actions and motives of people he was doing business with. The letters detail his quarrels, sometimes with Sullivan, often with Richard d'Oyle Carte, the theater manager the team worked with for years, and then with d'Oyle Carte's widow, Helen, who took over operations after d'Oyle Carte's death. Through production after production, Gilbert wrangles over casting, finances, production values and timing, and the reader is taken through letter after letter in exhaustive detail. By the fifth or eighth time, it might have been enough to tell us, "Gilbert and d'Oyle Carte at this point had their normal argument about casting" and left it at that.

Sullivan comes across as an affable genius, a bon vivant whose kidney ailments and "candle at both ends" lifestyle unfortunately brought his to a relatively early death at 58. Gilbert, despite being quick off the mark to a quarrel, is also seen as kindly and considerate to his friends and a good and thoughtful husband. Gilbert and Sullivan's admiration and respect for each other is shown to be very solid, and their working process mostly smooth unless some particular impediment appeared. Often Sullivan was dragged in on one side or the other in Gilbert's issues with d'Oyle Carte, loath as he was to involve himself in such things. But those arguments notwithstanding, Ainger describes the three of them as a triumvirate, for d'Oyle Carte worked extremely hard, and at significant financial risk, for years to set up an independant theater company to champion and produce Gilbert and Sullivan's works. The fact that Gilbert could never see his way clear to recognizing d'Oyle Carte as an equal member of the team was the source of much of the friction, in fact.

We do get to see some depth in Sullivan's emotional life, due probably that he left a diary that Ainger had access to. But Gilbert's "inner life" we see must basically guess at here, mostly through his actions. We don't get to know why he became so quarrelsome, so quick to get his back up. We read his affection for his wife through the fact that they were basically inseparable thoughout Gilbert's life. The actual nature of their relationship otherwise is left out. It would seem there must be some sort of observational material from friends or family that could have filled in this blank at least a little. The reader's foreknowledge of the operas themselves is pretty much taken for granted, as is knowledge of life in England during the Victorian era.

I see I've already gone on at length, so I will close by saying that, as a Gilbert and Sullivan fan, I did find this biography interesting in the long run, it's not the book I'd recommend for people just coming to the subject.… (mais)