The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan

Gilbert’s verses for Sullivan’s music are the most fastidiously turned and inventively rhymed in all lyric comedy. As the Savoy Operas enter their second century on a swell of renewed popularity, Gilbert’s reputation as the supreme wordsmith of light opera remains secure. Complete and authentic, these are the librettos on which modern performances and recordings are based. Scattered among the songs are over seventy of the amusing, quirky pictures Gilbert drew to illustrate them. A chronology prepared for this edition sketches the authors’ lives and careers. This is a book that no lover of Gilbert and Sullivan, musical comedy, or indeed the English theater will want to be without.

Author Biography

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, KBE, was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator, best known for his fourteen comic operas produced in collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan, of which the most famous include H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mikado. Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan, MVO, was an English composer, of Irish and Italian descent, best known for his operatic collaborations with librettist Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, including such continually popular works as H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mikado. Sullivan’s artistic output included 23 operas, 13 major orchestral works, eight choral works and oratorios, two ballets, incidental music to several plays, and numerous hymns and other church pieces, songs, parlour ballads, part songs, carols, and piano and chamber pieces.