William Shepherd

We performed The Pirates of Penzance to two very appreciative audiences at the weekend. Samuel is not a big part but in the programme he gets top billing alongside the Major-General, the Pirate King, the Sergeant of Police and the Pirate Apprentice. I didn’t miss a cue…spoken or sung…so my reputation as a Journeyman Tenor is enhanced.

An early mention of The Pirates of Penzance is in a letter from Gilbert to Sullivan on 7th August 1879. ‘I have broken the neck of Act II,’ he wrote, ‘and see my way clearly to the end. I think it comes out very well. I’ve made great use of the Tarantara business in Act II. The police always sing Tarantara when they desire to work their courage to sticking-point. Through the agency of this talisman they are enabled to acquit themselves well when concealed.’

On 5th November 1879 Gilbert and Sullivan arrived in New York aboard the liner Bothnia. D’Oyly Carte came over a week later. The plan was to produce an authorized version of H.M.S. Pinafore. But in their bags were the words and music of The Pirates of Penzance and the outrageous plan of presenting it themselves in New York as the first ever premiere of an English opera in America. There were sound practical reasons for doing so.

In 1879 international copyright law was in such chaos that simultaneous production of The Pirates of Penzance in England and America seemed the only practical way to deal with the problem. So on 31st December 1879 there was to be a quiet début at the Royal Bijou Theatre in Paignton, Devon while simultaneously in New York they would have an American première. The first London production would follow 3-months later. So much for the best laid plans of mice and men.

There was a problem. Only half of The Pirates of Penzance had been written. Then there was another problem. Here is Sullivan in a letter to his mother: ‘I fear I left all my sketches of the last Act at home as I have searched everywhere for them. I would have telegraphed for them, but they could not have arrived in time. It is a great nuisance as I have to rewrite it all now, and can’t recollect every number I did.’ Whoops!

Arthur Sullivan locked himself away in his New York hotel in a desperate attempt to meet all the deadlines. He was promptly stricken with an old illness. As he dragged himself from his couch…writing all day and long into the nights…he was in considerable pain.

Sullivan’s diary records that on 17th December that ‘most of the music of Act I was shipped to England’ Then ’Went to rehearsal at theatre, 11 to 4. Came home tired, couldn’t work, dined at Betts. Very pleasant. Conducted at the theatre…’ He was conducting Pinafore in the evening, rehearsing Pirates in the day and there was still a lot of music to compose. ‘Returned to the Betts until 12. Then home. Wrote trio (2nd Act) and Ruth’s song 1st Act. Went to bed at 5.’ These are two of the most loved songs in the G&S repertoire…performed many hundreds of times every year.

Sullivan would often deliberately ‘keep the music down’ so that Gilbert’s all-important words would come over clearly. Those who deride the um-cha-um-cha accompaniments in some G & S songs fail to understand the need for such considerations. Sullivan would take the opportunity to build up the music elsewhere in an opera. Indeed the Pirates of Penzance was coming from his pen as the most operatic opera to date…and even included some burlesquing of ‘the farm-yard effects’ in Italian Grand Opera…notably in the waltz song Poor Wandering One.

This had consequences. The band went on strike. Sullivan explains. ‘We had been rehearsing the Pirates and it was but two or three days before the performance that the whole band went on strike. They explained that the music was not ordinary operetta music but more like grand opera…their method is to charge according to a scale, so much per week for entr’acte music, with an ascending scale for operetta, and so on.’

Sullivan called the band together, told them he was flattered by the compliment they had paid his music and then explained that he would bring the Covent Garden orchestra across to New York and pending their arrival carry on rehearsing by ‘playing the pianoforte himself…with his friend Mr Alfred Cellier at the harmonium’. He then did an article for the New York Herald. The band backed down. Sometimes it is a useful thing to be up to your eyes in absurd plots. They have their uses in real life. Nonetheless a Composer’s Lot is not a Happy One…Happy One!

Kate Phillips’ husband died of cancer ten days ago at the age of 62 after surviving a musket ball in Aden and an all-night card-game in Hamburg with John Lennon. When I first arrived in Sweden in 1966 TT was a sports journalist with a daily column in Svenska Dagbladet…and an old orienteering buddy of my future father-in-law Erik Lundell. Nowadays Swedes know TT as a Press Agency. What few of them know is that it is probably the most reliable press agency around since the CIA took to spreading disinformation by way of most of the others.

Then in 1988 I met another TT. AppleMac Aficionados can now be told that TT3 moonlighted as the anarchic Charles Murray in magazines like MacUser and Computer Shopper. TT3 was Kate’s husband and the only time we met was in The George in Rye when his Books of Erotica were big hits in Kazakhstan. As they were printed in the Cyrillic alphabet he claimed to have no idea if what he had written was what the Kazakhs were reading. But as it was his name on the title page and his bank account that received the royalties he was far from unhappy about his situation.

This third TT to pass fleetingly across my karas was Tony Tyler…former Features Editor at New Musical Express in its Real Journalism days in the 1970s. TT3 gave Rock Music a political agenda. Three decades later this lives on in the spectacle of Bono and Sir Bob Geldorf travelling the globe to hobnob with political and corporate elites in a vain…but worthy…attempt to make the case for a Clean Slate…and touch the rich and powerful for a bob or two.

TT3 was born in Bristol and raised in Liverpool where he attended Liverpool College before stowing away to Hamburg on a merchant navy vessel and hanging out with soon-to-be-famous Liverpool bands like the Beatles. Stowing away is no mean achievement at six foot five. More people meet their future life partners in the workplace than anywhere else…though friends and internet dating are catching up fast. Kate and Tony fell in love at NME. In 1975 TT3 collaborated with his NME colleague Roy Carr to write The Beatles: an Illustrated Record and a year later came out with The Tolkien Companion. The two books graced the New York Times best-seller lists at the same time.

There are twelve Beatles Studio Albums. But in some ways the most interesting is Number Thirteen which was released today. Titled Love it was produced by Sir George and Giles Martin. From the harmonies of Because…love is all, love is you…through to the sigh of the French horn at the close of Goodnight it cites and samples well over a hundred Beatles songs. The result is a long and winding fugue of juxtapositions, layerings, self-references and assorted magic tricks that may very well rank as the best compilation album ever made and a Christmas Number One.

As the Beatles swapped the baseball stadium for the recording studio they started Intertextual Songwriting…John Lennon singing ‘I told you about Strawberry Fields’ in Glass Onion for instance and Paul McCartney chanting ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah’ in the fade-out to All You Need Is Love. Love takes this template and imagines a sort of Fabscape in which a good part of the Beatles back catalogue speaks across the years, albums and perceived differences of style and temperament within the band. The open guitar chord from A Hard Day’s Night for instance morphs into the atonal orchestral crescendo of A Day In The Life and on via a locomotive drum intro into Get Back.

The project started with the transfer of the entire 250-item Beatles Songbook onto a single digital drive. Love needed some form of emotional narrative so while Ringo Starr lobbied for Octopus’s Garden Olivia Harrison, Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney came up with other ideas. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the whole project is that the final product has the enthusiastic support of these four living Beatles Players. George Martin’s legendary diplomatic charm must have been crucial. Giles Martin remarked that his father had sought permission for every fresh surprise. ‘I thought they were going to go mad about meddling with the holy grail. But they didn’t. They loved it!’

The album is the soundtrack to a new show by Cirque du Soleil which opened in Las Vegas a few months ago. Critics flown in from the Fab Four’s homeland came out in goosebumps at the show’s blissful union of new sights and old sounds. The spectacle is apparently too unwieldy to tour so it seems that the closest we will come to Love the Musical is Love The Music.