We skived off the other day. Very naughty indeed, but the lovely Rosie Brooks had procured us tickets for a dress rehearsal of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado, by the English National Opera at the Coliseum.

It was sublime. A superb presentation of Jonathan Miller’s version, very black and white, very Beatonesque, there were moments of drama, slapstick and terror — as seen from our box I found the headless dancers grotesquely frightening.

But what I keep forgetting is what a genius tunesmith Arthur Sullivan was. He wrote the music with some reluctance, feeling that his time with Gilbert was drawing to a close and preferring to concentrate on serious music. What are there — 24 songs in The Mikado? And every one of them is a classic. You will know at least a dozen of them, or more. I should say there were only two or three I couldn’t hum along to. One or two are exquisitely beautiful, bringing tears to my eyes.

It’s hard to think of anyone with such talent. Paul McCartney turned out a pretty tune, but he hasn’t got the variety of melody, pace and rhythm that Sullivan could call upon. Such fluency and ease led to him being dismissed by serious critics, whose approbation he craved, and also led to great fortune and huge popular acclaim, which was less sought after.

Groucho pianist Rod Melvin was of a similar mind. He pointed out that composers today rely on one or perhaps two big tunes to hold up an entire musical. Compared to a Sullivan melody taken at random, hardly any of them would stand up. There is no Sullivan of the twenty-first century.

And don’t forget Gilbert, the lyricist nonpareil.
“Is it weakness of intellect, birdie?” I cried,
“Or a rather tough worm in your little inside?

That reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) story of the gushing woman who met Burt Bacharach. “Oh! I’ve always wanted to meet the man who wrote ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’!”

Mr & Mrs Hal David were standing nearby. Mrs David piped up “Well he didn’t. He wrote ‘Deedle-eedle-deedle-de!”

Are we running out of tunes? I guess there’s only so much we can make of 12 notes.

This post is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.