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William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) and Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842-1900) collaborated for a quarter of a century, and their collaboration yielded 14 comic operas.

The London-born Gilbert’s father was an eccentric sometimes naval surgeon and a writer of portentous quasi-Dickensian novels. Gilbert trained in the military; and had a brief, entirely unsuccessful legal career. In 1861, while on the staff of the magazine Fun, he became famous as the author of Bab Ballads, amusing but often bitter and cynical poems, published in that magazine and collected in 1869. He could establish himself as a popular dramatist with Dulcamara (1866) and other very successful plays.

William Gilbert

Arthur Sullivan

The London-born Sullivan’s father was a military bandmaster (at the Royal Military College) and teacher. At age 8, Sullivan composed his own anthem. By the age of 10, Sullivan could play all of the wind instruments in his father’s band. He was a Chapel Royal chorister, and the first holder of the Mendelssohn scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music which entitled him to study at the Leipzig Conservatory. At age 20, he composed the incidental music to Shakespeare's Tempest, which made him famous. He was the great white hope of England’s musical establishment and quickly came to be regarded as the leading composer of his day. He was also a professor of composition at the Royal Adamy opf Music in 1855, and it is said that his most beautiful music was composed while he was in great pain from kidney stones.

Gilbert and Sullivan were first introduced to each other around 1870. Their first opera collaboration, Thespis (1871) was a forgettable flop, and is now largely lost to history. But when impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte (1844-1901) presented their next piece, Trial by Jury, in 1875, it was clear that he had backed a winning partnership. There followed The Sorcerer (1877), HMS Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Patience (1881), Iolanthe (1882), Princess Ida (1884), The Mikado (1885), Ruddigore (1887), The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), and The Gondoliers (1889). Their last two comedic operas, Utopia Limited (1893) and The Grand Duke (1896) were unsuccessful, although The Grand Duke contains some musical gems.

The Mikado was brainstormed when Gilbert's wife took him to a Japanese exhibition in London, and the artist received stereotypical inspiration from the Orient.

Most of Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1870s shows were performed at the dilapidated Opera Comique Theatre. To better capitalize on their successes, D'Oyly Carte built them their own theatre in 1881: the Savoy Theatre, which was the first public building in the world to be lit by electricity.

Gilbert and Sullivan were practical masters of their art. They created their works to the strengths and limitations of their ensemble of actors; and both were responsible for producing the shows. Gilbert was a pioneer of what is now called "directing"–a vocation that didn’t really exist before this late Victorian period– and Sullivan rehearsed his actors and musicians diligently. But Sullivan’s more serious music never earned him anything like the money he made from the comic operas, so his extravagant lifestyle always brought him back to the Savoy. His desire to write grand opera was only fulfilled once, with Ivanhoe (1891), which was fairly successful yet has rarely been revived. The collaboration came to a close with The Grand Duke (1896). Gilbert would continue his writing (for the stage and screen) for another 15 years.

Gilbert’s marriage to Lucy "Kitty" Blois Turner, the daughter of an Indian Army Officer, produced no children. Gilbert was knighted by King Edward VII in 1907.

Sullivan never married, although his relationship with the American Mrs. Fanny Ronalds (separated from her husband) lasted for years. Sullivan was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1883. Suffering from a chronic kidney complaint, Sullivan died of heart failure in 1900. Gilbert, the more robust of the two, lived until 1911 when he too suffered heart failure and drowned, while rescuing a young lady in his own lake.

Since their copyright expired, Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas have been revived regularly, both by opera companies and on the commercial stage, and of the many productions of The Mikado, Jonathan Miller’s version has been extremely successful on both sides of the Atlantic. Today, the D’Oyly Carte Company continues to perform; and the Savoy Theatre remains operational, after having been rebuilt following a 1991 fire.