H.M.S. Pinafore

Flamenco Español

Cinderella

Aida

Pearl Fishers

Swan Lake

Barber of Seville

Gilbert & Sullivan

Often referred to by their initials, G&S, William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan have left an indelible mark on the world of theater. This remarkable pairing created some of the greatest hits in operetta that are still regularly performed around the world; The Mikado, H.M.S. Pinafore, and The Pirates of Penzance, to name a few.

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert was born on November 18, 1836 in London, England to a retired naval surgeon and his wife. He went spent much of his youth touring Europe with his family, returning to London in 1849. William began his education at the Great Ealing School and went on to King's College. He entered into the legal profession although he had little success there. He did gain a thorough understanding of legal quirks that he later used in his biting satire.

William eventually left his legal career to pursue writing. In 1869, his first piece for the Gallery of Illustration was produced and met with some success. He wrote a total of six musical plays for the Gallery. Gilbert was also gaining some practical experience in stage direction. He started to direct his own plays that opened doors to him creatively. His first contact with Sullivan came as a collaborative Christmas play, Thespis, in 1871. That same year was a tremendous success for Gilbert; seven of his plays had their premieres, and he was writing constantly in many different genres including farces, fairy comedies, novel adaptations, etc. Eventually, Gilbert and Sullivan were drawn together again by the influential impresario, Richard D'Oyly Carte. D'Oyly Carte suggested Gilbert take his libretto for Trial by Jury to Arthur Sullivan. It was an immediate hit.

Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan was born on May 13, 1842, also in London, to the royal bandmaster and his wife. By the age of 8, Arthur could play most of the instruments in the band. After he finished his studies at a private school, Arthur received an appointment at the Chapel Royal. He then received the Mendelssohn scholarship and attended the Royal Academy of Music until 1858. Arthur left England to study at the Leipzig conservatory. Leipzig had a profound impact on the young composer. When he returned to England in 1862, he composed an orchestral suite to William Shakespeare's The Tempest. After that premiere, Arthur found himself being hailed as the new hope of serious English music.

In 1866, the premiere of Arthur's Symphony in E flat was a tremendous success. The next several years produced orchestral overtures, concertos, oratorios and several Christian hymns, including Onward, Christian Soldiers. He also held several positions in London including organist, conductor and the principal of the National Training School. In 1867, Arthur composed a one-act musical Cox and Box and a full-length musical work, The Contrabandista.

In 1871, Sullivan was introduced to Gilbert through singer Fred Clay. Thespis was the outcome of that initial meeting, but it wasn't until 1875 and the meeting with D'Oyly Carte that launched this successful pairing. Trial by Jury was an immediate success and led to further collaborations as well as the formation of the D'Oyly Carte comic opera company in 1876. In 1877, the G&S team created The Sorcerer, followed by H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), the latter running for almost two years to full houses. In 1879, a copyright dispute brought G&S to America along with their Pinafore and Pirates of Penzance, which were huge hits in New York.

In 1884, a most famous feud took place; Sullivan refused to write anything more for D'Oyly Carte's Savoy Theater. He left for a five-week tour of Europe; upon his return, both D'Oyly Carte and Gilbert tried to persuade him to continue his collaborations. Gilbert, initially insisting on a plot with a magic pill, finally came up with plot when a Japanese sword hanging on the wall of his study crashed to the floor, catching his attention. He came up with the plot that would become The Mikado and Sullivan agreed to compose the music.

After The Gondoliers, Gilbert and Sullivan had another parting of the ways over some of the expenses the Savoy Theater was incurring. D'Oyly Carte purchased an extremely expensive carpet for the theater; Gilbert felt it was an unnecessary extravagance. Gilbert and D'Oyly Carte had words and ultimately Sullivan ended up siding with D'Oyly Carte.

After this split, both Gilbert and Sullivan explored other areas but neither was as successful individually as they had been togeher. They twice attempted reuniting and collaborating, but both experiments failed to capture the audience that previous G&S works had. Sullivan went on to write an opera, Ivanhoe, and several operettas. Gilbert completed several plays including The Fortune Hunter (1897) and The Hooligan (1911).

Sullivan's health went into decline at the turn of the century, and he became addicted to morphine to relieve his pain. Sir Arthur Sullivan died on November 22, 1900 in London. Neither of his closest friends, Gilbert and D'Oyly Carte, was with him when he died. Gilbert was out of town and read about Sullivan's death in a newspaper, and D'Oyly Carte was in poor health. A few months later, D'Oyly Carte passed away. Gilbert lived until 1911 when a swimming accident took his life. 

Sergei Prokofiev

Sergei Prokofiev was born on April 27, 1891 in Sontsovka, Ukraine.  He showed precocious talent as a pianist and composer and had lessons from Glier from 1902. In 1904 he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov and Tcherepnin were among his teachers; Tcherepnin and Myaskovsky, who gave him valuable support, encouraged his interest in Skryabin, Debussy and Strauss. He had made his début as a pianist in 1908, quickly creating something of a sensation as an enfant terrible, unintelligible and ultra-modern - an image he was happy to cultivate. His intemperateness in his early piano pieces, and later in such works as the extravagantly Romantic Piano Concerto no.1 and the ominous no.2, attracted attention. Then in 1914 he left the conservatory and travelled to London, where he heard Stravinsky's works and gained a commission from Dyagilev: the resulting score was, however, rejected (the music was used to make the Scythian Suite); a second attempt, Chout, was not staged until 1921.

Meanwhile his gifts had exploded in several different directions. In 1917 he finished an opera on Dostoyevsky's Gambler, a violently involved study of obsession far removed from the fantasy of his nearly contemporary Chicago opera The Love for Three Oranges, written in 1919 and performed in 1921. Nor does either of these scores have much to do with his 'Classical' Symphony, selfconsciously 18th-century in manner, and again quite distinct from his lyrical Violin Concerto no.1, written at the same period and in the same key. There were also piano sonatas based on old notebooks alongside the more adventurous Visions fugitives, all dating from 1915-19. Towards the end of this rich period, in 1918, he left for the USA; then from 1920 France became his base. His productivity slowed while he worked at his opera The Fiery Angel, an intense, symbolist fable of good and evil (it had no complete performance until after his death, and he used much of its music in Symphony no.3). After this he brought the harsh, heavy and mechanistic elements in his music to a climax in Symphony no.2 and in the ballet Le pas d'acier, while his next ballet, L'enfant prodigue, is in a much gentler style: the barbaric and the lyrical were still alternatives in his music and not fused until the 1930s, when he began a process of reconciliation with the Soviet Union.

The renewed relationship was at first tentative on both sides. Romeo and Juliet, the full-length ballet commissioned for the Bol'shoy, had its premiere at Brno in 1938, and only later became a staple of the Soviet repertory: its themes of aggression and romantic love provided, as also did the Eisenstein film Alexander Nevsky, a receptacle for Prokofiev's divergent impulses. Meanwhile his own impulse to remain a Westerner was gradually eroded and in 1936 he settled in Moscow, where initially his concern was with the relatively modest genres of song, incidental music, patriotic cantata and children's entertainment (Peter and the Wolf, 1936). He had, indeed, arrived at a peculiarly unfortunate time, when the drive towards socialist realism was at its most intense; and his first work of a more ambitious sort, the opera Semyon Kotko was not liked.

With the outbreak of war, however, he perhaps found the motivation to respond to the required patriotism: implicitly in a cycle of three piano sonatas (nos.6-8) and Symphony no.5, more openly in his operatic setting of scenes from Tolstoy's War and Peace, which again offered opportunities for the two extremes of his musical genius to be expressed. He also worked at a new full-length ballet, Cinderella. In 1946 he retired to the country and though he went on composing, the works of his last years have been regarded as a quiet coda to his output. Even his death was outshone by that of Stalin on the same day.

 Guiseppe Verdi

Born in 1813 in the Italian village of Le Roncole near Busseto, Giuseppe Verdi spent his early years studying the organ. By the age of seven, he had become an organist at San Michele Arcangelo. It was there that the young Verdi was an altar boy and, according to myth, his mother saved him from the French in 1814. In 1823, Verdi moved to Busseto and attended the music school run by Antonio Provesi. By the age of 13, he was an assistant conductor of the Busseto orchestra. After finishing the school, Verdi applied for admission to the Milan Conservatory. He was rejected for admission, although one of the examiners suggested that he "forget about the Conservatory and choose a maestro in the city." Verdi studied composition in Milan with Vincenzo Lavigna, a composer and the maestro at La Scala. Verdi bounced back and forth between Milan and Busseto until he was named maestro of the Busseto Philharmonic in March 1836.

By May 1836, he had married childhood sweetheart, Margherita Barezzi, his greatest benefactor's daughter. He returned to Milan several years later, this time with a young family.

Verdi's first opera, Oberto, was brought to the stage at La Scala in November 1839 and ran for multiple performances. The noted Ricordi firm published Oberto and, based upon his initial operatic effort, Verdi won a contract for three additional operas. He began work on his next opera, Un Giorno di Regno, but was interrupted when, one by one, the Verdis fell ill. A little over the course of a year, Verdi lost his son, his daughter, and his beloved wife to illness. Unfortunately, Un Giorno was a complete failure.

Verdi vowed never to compose another comedy and developed a fatalistic belief in inescapable destiny. Even so, the director at La Scala kept faith with Verdi, who later declared that with his next work, Nabucco, "my musical career really began." At dress rehearsals for Nabucco in the La Scala theater, carpenters making repairs to the house gradually stopped hammering and, seating themselves on scaffolding and ladders, listened with rapt attention to what the composer considered a lackluster chorus rendering of "Va, pensiero." At the close of the number, the workers pounded the woodwork with cries of "Bravo, bravo, viva il maestro!" The opening of Nabucco was a triumph. Verdi was famous, commanding a higher fee than any other composer of his time.

I Lombardi followed Nabucco and won an unprecedented victory over Austrian censors. Verdi's triumph in retaining the libretto and melodic themes the censors had hoped to ban as "religious" in nature forged the composer's lifelong reputation as an ideological hero of the Italian people. This would be the first of his many battles with censors for artistic freedom.

Over the next seven years, the composer penned ten additional operas of varied success, gradually making the transition between two distinct eras of Verdi composition. Initially captive of the "bel canto" style and heir to Donizetti's artistic throne, Verdi continually experimented to produce his own operatic genre in which melodic drama and identifiable musical essence of character took center stage as an equal to vocal purity and elegance.

It was an inspired stroke of boldness about which Verdi commented in explaining the innovative core of his work, Il Trovatore, "I think (if I'm not mistaken) that I have done well; but at any rate I have done it in the way that I felt it." In saying so, he defined his own creative hallmark. Although a musical genius, Verdi composed spontaneously from the heart. A brilliantly schooled musician, he placed emotional sensibility above intellect in all that he wrote. In the process, he created the remarkable marriage of dramatic characterization and vocal power, an indelible artistic signature.

The creation of an operatic tour de force based upon his ingenious artistic formulation assured Verdi's immortality, beginning in 1851 with Rigoletto, followed soon after by Il Trovatore, La Traviata, and ultimately in 1871, by Aida. Even without the masterpieces that followed - Simon Boccanegra, Un Ballo in Maschera, La Forza del Destino, and Don Carlos or his great Requiem Mass - the Maestro could have afforded to rest on his musical achievements and stand unchallenged as the premier operatic composer of any age. In fact, with the success of Aida, Verdi seemed to have abandoned composing altogether, producing no new works for fifteen years.

Fortunately for posterity, an electrifying libretto, Otello, created by poet Arrigo Boito, brought the composer out of his self-imposed retirement. The opening of Otello in February of 1887 attracted an international audience to Milan for a dramatic event which ended only after the citizenry had showered Verdi with gifts and applause throughout twenty curtain calls and towed his carriage to the hotel. Public festivities continued until dawn.

In 1893, with the premiere of Falstaff, Verdi and his adoring audience repeated the entire sequence of events at La Scala - all in honor of a comedy he had vowed as a young man never to write. The maestro finally retreated to his country home in Sant' Agata with his second wife, singer Giuseppina Strepponi. They spent several peaceful years in retirement until her death in 1897. His wife's death left Verdi in a state of unbearable grief. He immediately fled Sant' Agata for the Grand Hotel in Milan and, after four unhappy years, Verdi died in 1901, the victim of a massive stroke. Verdi's death left all Italy in mourning. He still is revered throughout the music world as the greatest of operatic composers and, more particularly, in Italy as a patriotic hero and champion of human rights.

Georges Bizet

Georges Bizet was born at 28 rue de la Tour d'Auvergne in the 9th arrondissement of Paris in 1838. He was registered with the legal name Alexandre César Léopold Bizet, but he was baptised on 16 March 1840 with the first name Georges, and he was was always known thereafter as Georges Bizet. His father was an amateur singer and composer, and his mother was the sister of the famous singing teacher François Delsarte. He entered the Paris Conservatory of Music in 1848, a fortnight before his tenth birthday.

His first symphony, the Symphony in C Major, was written in 1855, when he was still only sixteen, evidently as a student assignment. It seems that Bizet completely forgot about it himself, and it was not discovered again until 1935, in the archives of the Conservatory library. Upon its first performance (February 26, 1935), it was immediately hailed as a junior masterwork and a welcome addition to the early Romantic period repertoire. A delightful work (and a prodigious one, from a seventeen-year-old boy), the symphony is noteworthy for bearing an amazing stylistic resemblance to the music of Franz Schubert, whose work was virtually unknown in Paris at that time (with the possible exception of a few of his songs).

At the Conservatoire Bizet studied under Fromental Halévy, whose daughter Geneviève he married in 1869. Halévy died in 1864, leaving his last opera Noé unfinished. Bizet completed it, but it was not performed until 1885, ten years after Bizet's own death.

In 1857, a setting of the one-act operetta Le docteur Miracle won him a share in a prize offered by Jacques Offenbach. He also won the music composition scholarship of the Prix de Rome, the conditions of which required him to study in Rome for three years. There, his talent developed as he wrote such works as the opera Don Procopio (1858-59). There he also composed his only major sacred work, Te Deum (1858), which he submitted to the Prix Rodrigues competition, a contest for Prix de Rome winners only. Bizet failed to win the Prix, and the Te Deum score remained unpublished until 1971. He made two attempts to write another symphony in 1859, but destroyed the manuscripts in December of that year. Apart from this period in Rome, Bizet lived in the Paris area all his life.

His mother died shortly after his return to Paris. He composed the opera Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers) for the Theatre Lyrique in 1863, which was an initial failure. He followed it with La jolie fille de Perth (premiered also in the Theatre Lyrique, in 1867), a symphony titled Roma (1868), and Jeux d'enfants (Children's games) for piano duet (1871).

The popular L'Arlésienne  was originally produced as incidental music for a play by Alphonse Daudet, first performed on 1 October 1872. Bizet himself derived a suite from the music (first performed 10 November 1872), and Ernest Guiraud later arranged a second suite; both these suites contain considerable rewriting of the original score.

That year (22 May 1872) also saw the production of the romantic opera Djamileh, which is often seen as a precursor to Carmen. His overture Patrie was written in 1873 (it had no connection with Victorien Sardou's play Patrie!).

Carmen (1875) is Bizet's best-known work and is based on a novella of the same title written in 1846 by Prosper Mérimée. Bizet composed the title role for a mezzo-soprano. Carmen was not initially well-received but praise for it eventually came from well-known contemporaries including Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saëns and Peter Illych Tchaikovsky. Johannes Brahms attended over twenty performances of it, and considered it the greatest opera produced in Europe since the Franco-Prussian war. The views of these composers proved to be prophetic, as Carmen has since become one of the most popular works in the entire operatic repertoire. However, Bizet did not live to see its success. He died from a heart attack at the age of 36 in Bougival (Yvelines), about 10 miles west of Paris. His death occurred on his sixth wedding anniversary, only a few months after Carmen's first performances. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

 Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

If Puccini was the Master of Verismo and Verdi the King of Italian opera, then Tchaikovsky was the Champion of Paradox. A musical genius and a national hero, Tchaikovsky struggled with his many personal demons, including his homosexuality, his intense emotionality, and his headstrong impetuousness. On his other side, Tchaikovsky was well known for his candor and modesty, his acceptance of criticism and his workmanship. Unfortunately, he was never able to reconcile these two sides and this ultimately led to his very unhappy and tortured life.

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 at Votkinsk, in the government of Vyatka, Russia. He was close to his family - his father (a mine inspector), his mother, four brothers, and a sister. At the age of five, he began to study piano, soon revealing his amazing gifts. It wasn't until he was 21, however, that he began to study music seriously.

In 1863, Tchaikovsky entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory and undertook some private training. The young Tchaikovsky was a master at improvisation, but so unschooled he was unaware of such simple musical tenets as the possibility of modulating to different keys.

Tchaikovsky frequently attended the opera and fell in love with the music of Mozart. His diligence became apparent when his composition teacher, Anton Rubinstein, assigned variations as homework. Tchaikovsky sat up all night and prepared 200.

In 1866, Tchaikovsky moved permanently to Moscow where he accepted a teaching position in a new conservatory established by Anton Rubinstein's brother, Nicholas. It was there that his First Symphony was created, receiving a warm reception by Moscow audiences in 1868. It was also there that Tchaikovsky had his first nervous breakdown, due to the stress of composing the First Symphony. Interestingly, Tchaikovsky had asked his former teacher, Anton Rubinstein, to premiere the work in St. Petersburg, a request that was ultimately denied.

Other works followed with less success, including Tchaikovsky's first opera, The Voyevoda, in 1869, later re-worked into The Oprichnik in 1874. By then Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony had begun winning acclaim, as had his First Piano Concerto. Following these compositions were his Third Symphony and Swan Lake, the tone poem Francesca da Rimini in 1875, and the Rococo Variations for cello and orchestra in 1876. Near the end of 1876 Tchaikovsky was contacted by a wealthy admirer, Nadejda Fillaretovna von Meck, who gave him several commissions and became his sponsor for the next 12 years.

Throughout this period, Tchaikovsky continued to struggle with his homosexuality. Although Tchaikovsky had a brief affair with opera singer Desiree Artot, he was clearly inclined to deny his own nature. In a letter to his brother, Tchaikovsky wrote, "I am aware that my inclinations are the greatest and most unconquerable obstacle to happiness; I must fight my nature with all of my strength. I shall do everything possible to marry this year."

Indeed, he did marry a young woman, Antonina Ivanovana Milyukoff, on July 6, 1877. However, within a month, he discovered they were incompatible and spent the next few months running away from his new wife. He also made a failed attempt at suicide by walking into the Moska River in the hopes of contracting pneumonia. It was at this point, in the late 1870s, that he wrote some of his greatest works, the opera Eugene Onegin, the Violin Concerto, and the Fourth Symphony.

Based on Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse, Eugene Onegin (1878) tells the story of a girl fascinated by a man who ultimately rejects her and his later remorse. That same year, Tchaikovsky also wrote the Violin Concerto. He wrote Manfred in 1885; the Fifth Symphony in 1888; another successful opera, Pique Dame (The Queen of Spades) in 1890; and the Casse-Noisette (Nutcracker) ballet in 1891. These successes made Tchaikovsky famous throughout the world. He temporarily conquered his stage fright and, in 1888, made an international conducting tour. In 1891, Tchaikovsky came to New York and conducted his own works at the ceremonies of the opening of Carnegie Hall.

By 1890, the inevitable break with Madame von Meck had occurred and, while Peter gained his financial independence, he felt his loss on a more personal than professional level. Madame von Meck, in addition to an income of 6,000 roubles, had provided Tchaikovsky an outlet to air his opinions, beliefs, hopes, and dreams. There has been no particular reason recorded as to why the break between them occurred.

In 1893, Tchaikovsky completed the Pathetique Symphony (No. 6) and conducted it at St. Petersburg to a rather apathetic response. Unfortunately, Peter would not live to see its ultimate success. By most accounts, Tchaikovsky drank an unsterilized glass of water, contracted cholera, and died on November 6, 1893. In recent years, some have proffered another theory: that Tchaikovsky was forced to take arsenic to preserve his school's honor when his homosexuality was to become public.  However Tchaikovsky died, 8,000 mourners attended his funeral as he was buried at St. Petersburg's Alexander Nevsky Monastery. 

Gioacchino Rossini

Gioacchino Rossini was born in Pesaro, Italy on February 29, 1792.  Both his parents were musicians, his father a horn player, his mother a singer; he learnt the horn and singing and as a boy sang in at least one opera in Bologna, where the family lived. He studied there and began his operatic career when, at 18, he wrote a one-act comedy for Venice. Further commissions followed, from Bologna, Ferrara, Venice again and Milan, where La pietra del paragone was a success at La Scala in 1812. This was one of seven operas written in 16 months, all but one of them comic.

This level of activity continued in the ensuing years. His first operas to win international acclaim come from 1813, written for different Venetian theatres: the serious Tancredi and the farcically comic L'italiana in Algeri, the one showing a fusion of lyrical expression and dramatic needs, with its crystalline melodies, arresting harmonic inflections and colourful orchestral writing, the other moving easily between the sentimental, the patriotic, the absurd and the sheer lunatic. Two operas for Milan were less successful. But in 1815 Rossini went to Naples as musical and artistic director of the Teatro San Carlo, which led to a concentration on serious opera. But he was allowed to compose for other theatres, and from this time date two of his supreme comedies, written for Rome, Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola. The former, with its elegant melodies, its exhilarating rhythms and its superb ensemble writing, has claims to be considered the greatest of all Italian comic operas, eternally fresh in its wit and its inventiveness. It dates from 1816; initially it was a failure, but it quickly became the most loved of his comic works, admired alike by Beethoven and Verdi. The next year saw La Cenerentola, a charmingly sentimental tale in which the heroine moves from a touching folksy ditty as the scullery maid to brilliant coloratura apt to a royal maiden.

Rossini's most important operas in the period that followed were for Naples. The third act of his Otello (1816), with its strong unitary structure, marks his maturity as a musical dramatist. The Neapolitan operas, even though much dependant on solo singing of a highly florid kind (to the extent that numbers could be, and have been, interchanged), show an enormous expansion of musical means, with more and longer ensembles and the chorus an active participant; the accompanied recitative is more dramatic and the orchestra is given greater prominence. Rossini also abandoned traditional overtures, probably in order to involve his audiences in the drama from the outset. In Naples the leading soprano was Isabella Colbran, mistress of the impresario, Barbaia. She transferred her allegiance to Rossini, who in 1822 married her; they were not long happy together.

Among the masterpieces from this period are Maometto II (1820) and, written for Venice at the end of his time in Naples, Semiramide (1823). Barbaia gave a Viennese season in 1822; Rossini and his wife returned to Bologna, then in 1823 left for London and Paris where he took on the directorship of the Théâtre-Italien, composing for that theatre and the Opéra. Some of his Paris works are adaptations (Le siège de Corinthe and Moïse et Pharaon); the opéra comique Le Comte Ory is part-new, Guillaume Tell wholly. This last, widely regarded as his chef d'oeuvre, and very long, is a rich tapestry of his most inspired music, with elaborate orchestration, many ensembles, spectacular ballets and processions in the French tradition, opulent orchestral writing and showing a new harmonic boldness.

And then, silence. At 37, he retired from opera composition. He left Paris in 1837 to live in Italy, but suffered prolonged and painful illness there (mainly in Bologna, where he advised at the Liceo Musicale, and in Florence). Isabella died in 1845 and the next year he married Olympe Pélissier, with whom he had lived for 15 years and who tended him through his ill-health. He composed hardly at all during this period (the Stabat mater belongs to his Paris years); but he went back to Paris in 1855, and his health and humour returned, with his urge to compose, and he wrote a quantity of pieces for piano and voices, with wit and refinement that he called Péchés de vieillesse ('Sins of Old Age') including the graceful and economical Petite messe solennelle (1863). He died, universally honoured, in 1868.