Gilbert and Sullivan

United Kingdom, 1871–1896

Victorian partnership of librettist W. S. Gilbert (1836-1911) and composer Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900). Across fourteen comic operas — H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado — they fixed the shape of English-language musical comedy: topsy-turvy plots, patter songs, and lyrics whose rhyming is the joke.

MusicRoots documents 3 artists who influenced Gilbert and Sullivan and 1 artist Gilbert and Sullivan influenced in turn. Every connection cites a published source.

Who influenced Gilbert and Sullivan?

• Jacques Offenbach — The form they worked in. Offenbach's opera bouffe is what the Savoy operas are an English answer to — the same absurdity, held back from his extravagance.
• Felix Mendelssohn — Sullivan spent 1858-61 at the Leipzig Conservatory as a Mendelssohn Scholar, trained in the Mendelssohn manner — the conservatory technique under the comedy.
• Franz Schubert — One of the styles that marked Sullivan's writing; the harmonic formulae of his early work are Schubert's and his contemporaries'.

Which artists did Gilbert and Sullivan influence?

• Cole Porter — The comic opera Porter grew up on and never really left — patter, topsy-turvy plotting, and rhyme used as the punchline.