Ah, Fame! Impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte was so enthused that he built a theatre, the Savoy, exclusively for the presentation of G-and-S operettas. Several companies of players traveled throughout the English-speaking world, and every performance was a sell-out. The works were easily translated into other languages; the plots were simple, the tunes hummable, and the patter-songs lent themselves readily to other tongues. On one signal date there were 148 Gilbert and Sullivan operettas being performed simultaneously (aside from time differences) in fourteen languages in theatres all around the world.
The money rolled in, augmenting the personal fortunes of the two cultural swindlers, but none of it trickled down to the actual fabricators of this immensely popular frothy pabulum, Seymour and Schwenk, who continued their daily efforts to make ends meet. Daily the results of their endeavors were siphoned off by G and S.
Ruddigore, Yeomen of the Guard, and The Gondoliers followed The Mikado, but by 1889 the two so-called gentlemen, now both wealthy and portly, had wearied of the years-long talent-embezzlement, and decided to desist. Gilbert turned his efforts to the construction of children's mechanical toys, most notably the Erector Set. Sullivan wrote "The Lost Chord" and the dirgelike music to Sabine Baring-Gould's hymn "Onward Hebrew Soldiers" (-Marching as to war/With the Star of David/Going on before, etc.), although Ms Baring-Gould, under strong pressure from the Church of England, was induced to revise the title and lyrics of the latter work.
Will Schwenk and Artie Seymour died in Obscurity, a small industrial town in the Midlands, never having discovered nor even suspected the thefts of their labors over that fifteen-year period.
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Author's Note: For the musical-knowledge-deprived, Sir William Schwenk Gilbert and Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan were in fact the actual lyricist and composer, respectively, of the named operettas.
by David Koblick
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