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London Wednesday 13th May 2009
Have you ever heard of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas? For me, the names faintly rang a bell, but as I recalled I had never seen or heard even one song from any play written by the said two gentlemen. Not before last weekend, that is.
Between 1871 and 1896, Sir William Schwenck Gilbert and Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan created in collaboration a set of comic operettas; Gilbert wrote the libretti and Sullivan composed the music. As I understand, the knowledge of these operettas – or at least of the main ones – is a basic ingredient in British musical education.
It was last weekend that the traditional Gilbert&Sullivan Marathon took place, hosted by the Imperial College Musical Society. The purpose of the event was to perform all the G&S operettas (or at least the surviving ones) one after another without breaks. The event began at 11 o'clock on Saturday and ended a little before six on Sunday evening. The plays were performed in their entirety, accompanied by an orchestra augmented with piano, and the continuity suffered only from breaks reserved for eating.
I read about this event in the end of January in the mailing list of the College's wind band. For some reason however, I forgot about the matter and didn't come back to it until just a few weeks before the show. I asked the organisers if they would have need for my skills, and it turned out they were a little short on pianists. They allocated me straight away for three operettas, the music of which I started hunting down from several libraries. (I found out that the sheet music for many of the plays was available on the internet, but I didn't feel like printing out music files over a hundred pages long in the computer lab.)
I went occasionally to the College's music centre to rehearse on their grand pianos, but I was not able even to go through all the songs before the "opening night". However, I had got the impression that rehearsing was not essential. At the venue, I noticed that the event was very informal: the actors read their lines from scripts, the band musicians switched to the chorus and back again between shows, some even went to conduct. The whole orchestra sight-read everything, the chorus had had exactly one rehearsal in which they went through a couple of songs from a couple of plays. I had my clarinet with me which I played when I was not sitting behind the (electric) piano. (Some of the songs had been written for the A-clarinet instead of the B-flat-clarinet, so I had to do some transposing, but occasionally I also got to borrow my neighbour's A-clarinet and let her get some practise in that noble art.)
Many of the singers, whom I took to be regulars in the Musical Theatre Society, were really talented &ndash not only in singing but also in acting. I would say I got a fairly decent picture of those operettas I took part in, although there was virtually no staging and the costume design was limited to priest collars and wigs. Apparently the plot goes generally like this: the girl has been betrothed in birth to a prince (or the son of the Japanese emperor), who has had to go to exile as a child and doesn't know who he is, and has moreover fallen in love with someone else and, because of some misunderstanding, in danger of becoming executed. Add some witches, ghosts, priests, sailors and dukes, a handful of sharp criticism of the British society and theatre culture plus a collection of particularly rapid pattering songs, and there you will have a genuine G&S operetta, ready for public exhibition.
Being part of the Marathon was one of the most fun things I have done in a long time. Afterwards I feel bad not having reacted sooner, and thus not having been able to rehearse any part or sign up for conducting any numbers. Well, according to tradition, there will a marathon every five years, so perhaps I will still gain a chance of doing the things I missed this time. (Still, I wouldn't like to give up the piano parts completely either.)
For some inexplicable excuse I did not stay till the end of the Marathon. Maybe my enthusiasm abated as all my piano playing had took part during the first day. During the night, the orchestra and the chorus decreased to the minimum. Between five and six in the morning there were people sleeping on the chairs and floors while we performed Princess Ida; I tried sight-reading the chorus parts. I left the scene at seven-ish in a slightly melancholy mood, while new performers were just arriving (and others were returning). In the tube I saw people sleeping, and in the clanking sound of the rails I heard singing, the words of which I just couldn't make out. The rising sun hurt my eyes as I walked towards a bus stop in Holborn, my home tube line being suspended for repairing works that morning. When I finally got home, I went straight to bed: I had been up for twenty-four hours. I doubt, however, that there was any better way to have spent those hours.