The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - Softcover

Gilbert, William Schwenck; Sullivan, Arthur Seymour

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393316882 ISBN 13: 9780393316889

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997

Synopsis

From Trial by Jury to The Pirates of Penzance: the complete librettos of all fourteen Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

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.

About this title

Review:

From Thespis to The Grand Duke, here are all the words to all the operettas on which William Schenk Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan collaborated. A fixture in Anglo-American music theater and humor for well over a century, their wit retains its edge after all these years. Norton offers the libretti available in handy, totable book form and generously illustrates them with Gilbert's accomplished pen-and-ink drawings.

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0393316882
• ISBN 13: 9780393316889
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 624