Скачать или смотреть "The Emerald Isle" & "Cox and Box" THE GILBERT AND SULLIVAN PIANO OVERTURES PROJECT

The Shows

“The Emerald Isle”
Sullivan was very much dying as he began work on “The Emerald Isle” in 1900 from book and lyrics by Basil Hood and almost all the music finished by Edward German. I think it’s not impossible that this is the one post in the series that nobody here has heard the music from.
He didn’t write the overture so that’s not what you’re hearing here. In his notes he mentions having ‘sketched’ (tunes) and ‘framed’ (started work on how the song would be laid out in the show) some songs and ‘harmonizing’ only two songs so far (a piano vocal score version that fleshes out the work). One of them was the opening number so that’s what this is. The lyrics are awful and so this is just the music. Essentially it’s a vocal line with a little orchestral response leading to an extended dance section at the end. The opening phrase is instrumental and I bang into the vocal line early on to give you an idea of the sung tune. The song continues into a lot of recitative so I’ve given it a repeat of the dance section and a refrain of the opening theme before that happens and bring it to a little close.

Sullivan always had a weak constitution which he didn’t help with the social life he craved and a taste for drink, not in a chronic manner-he just wasn’t built strongly enough for it-and eventually his health simply caved in. A combination of kidney disease, neuralgia and a throat infection did him in and he wasted away at home at the very end. He died in 1900 before he got any further with it but I’ve dated it 1901 because that’s when the show opened.

He’d written some incidental music for a couple of things but this was the first time he wrote a musical.

“Cox and Box”
-was a very short curtain-raiser (like the eventual “Trial By Jury” something meant to go first followed by a short comic opera) that he was asked to write for a private performance as a benefit for the widow and children of a popular cartoonist for PUNCH magazine-this happened in 1866 when Sullivan was 24 and four years before he and Gilbert met. (Gilbert was also a popular cartoonist under the name ‘Bab’ for FUN magazine.) Based on a 1847 trifle one-act play called (wait for it…) ‘Box and Cox’ it was first performed that night with Sullivan at the piano and without an overture.

The next year in 1867 another private benefit performance was given at the Adelphi Theatre at which point there was an orchestra conducted by Artie but no overture yet. And later that year it was performed for the general public in Manchester and it is here that the overture was added. There’s no information on the overture but I cannot imagine that anyone but Sullivan had any hand in it. It’s very short and he would have been able to toss this thing off in a couple of days easy. This is why I date this piece as 1867 even though the show first happened the previous year.

It's notable as far as Sullivan’s very young celebrity as a scarily gifted prodigy and England’s great hope for their next Great Serious Composer that even at 24 his name ‘Mr. Arthur Sullivan’ was the largest.

Even though the book and lyrics were by a comic writer, F.C.Burnand and not Gilbert, it has the single funniest last line of any of Sullivan’s theatre works. It was retained verbatim from the original 1847 play because it’s too good not to.

BOX: You’ll excuse the apparent insanity of the remark, but the more I gaze on your features, the more I’m convinced that you’re my long lost brother.

COX: The very observation I was going to make to you!

BOX: Tell me-in mercy tell me-have you such a thing as a strawberry mark on your left arm?

COX: No!

BOX: Then-it is he!