Sir Arthur Sullivan(1842–1900)

Arthur Seymour Sullivan was born at 8 Bolwell Terrace in Lambeth, south London, on the thirteenth of May 1842, second son of Thomas Sullivan, an Irish-born bandmaster of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, and Mary Coghlan. He was raised at Sandhurst on the Royal Military College parade-ground (his father conducted the College Band; the boy learned every instrument of the military band by ten), was admitted to the Chapel Royal as a chorister at twelve in 1854, and at fourteen took the first Mendelssohn Scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in 1856, on the strength of which he studied at the Royal Academy 1856 to 1858 and at the Leipzig Conservatory under Moritz Hauptmann, Ferdinand David and Carl Reinecke 1858 to 1861.

He returned to London in April 1861 in his nineteenth year and through the 1860s built a reputation as one of the leading younger English composers of the post-Mendelssohn generation. He composed the Tempest incidental music for the 1862 Crystal Palace production (the first English orchestral piece to take the European Continental orchestration register), the Symphony in E ('Irish', 1866), the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (1866), the oratorios The Prodigal Son (1869) and The Light of the World (1873), and the famous concert ballad The Lost Chord (1877). He held the professorship of composition at the Royal Academy of Music 1866 to 1869 and at the National Training School for Music from 1876 to 1881.

His central single working partnership was with the librettist W. S. Gilbert. The two had collaborated on the one-act burlesque Thespis at the Gaiety in December 1871 to limited success; the formative collaboration began with the one-act Trial by Jury at the Royalty Theatre in March 1875, which Gilbert and Sullivan wrote on Richard D'Oyly Carte's commission in three weeks. Trial by Jury ran for three hundred performances and established the model: Gilbert's witty, intricate, satirical English-language libretto and Sullivan's elegant, melodically inventive, formally-controlled music. D'Oyly Carte built the partnership into the Comedy Opera Company in 1877 and produced HMS Pinafore (May 1878, ran 571 performances), The Pirates of Penzance (December 1879), Patience (1881), Iolanthe (1882), Princess Ida (1884), The Mikado (March 1885, ran 672 performances, the most-performed Sullivan score), Ruddigore (1887), The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), The Gondoliers (1889), Utopia, Limited (1893) and The Grand Duke (1896).

The Mikado of March 1885, with the central tenor song A Wand'ring Minstrel, I and the patter trio Three Little Maids from School, was the worldwide-popular hit of the partnership; over a hundred and seventy parallel American productions opened within a year on the failure of the international copyright registration. The Mikado has been continuously in performance since 1885 and is by every modern measure the most-performed single comic opera in the English-language repertoire. Sullivan also wrote outside the partnership the grand opera Ivanhoe (1891, on a Walter Scott libretto, ran an unprecedented 155 consecutive nights at D'Oyly Carte's purpose-built Royal English Opera House), the incidental music for Henry Irving's Macbeth (1888) and King Arthur (1895), the Te Deum for the relief of Mafeking (1900), and the hymn-tune St Gertrude that became the standard setting of Onward, Christian Soldiers across the English-speaking world.

He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1883 in his forty-second year (the first English-born composer ever to be knighted), was made a Member of the Royal Victorian Order in 1897, served as President of the Royal College of Music from 1885 to 1900, and died at his Queen's Mansions flat at Victoria Street, London, on the twenty-second of November 1900 in his fifty-ninth year. He was given the great funeral procession to St Paul's Cathedral on the twenty-seventh of November 1900 attended by the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII), the Lord Mayor of London, the entire D'Oyly Carte Company, and a public crowd of over fifty thousand on the route. He was buried in the crypt of St Paul's. The fourteen Savoy Operas of the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership have been continuously performed in English-speaking theatres for one hundred and fifty years. The Sullivan name in modern English-language music carries the weight of the Savoy Operas.