Sometimes in my
zeal to denounce the prophets who purport to be able to tell us what sorts of
political developments or technologies (“disruptive” or otherwise) we are
destined to see in coming years, I go a little too far. There have, after all, been those who, from
much greater historical distances than we are accustomed to dealing with, have
proven able to predict the manner in which societal and organizational trends
seemed likely, even destined, to evolve.
I speak not of Nostradamus or Maimonides or Jeremiah or their ilk, but
rather of a pair who, through lyric and music, foretold the fundaments of
organizational trends a hundred and more years hence: Sir William Schwenk
Gilbert, and Sir Arthur Sullivan.
Gilbert and Sullivan to the masses, or G&S for short.
Gilbert and Sullivan to the masses, or G&S for short.
Over 25 years,
this pair produced a collaborative opus consisting of 14 operettas in the opera
buffa style, many of which contributed tunes and turns of phrase to
posterity. The song “Hail, hail, the
gang’s all here”, for example, is lifted directly from the chorus of “With
cat-like tread” from The Pirates of Penzance; while the term “grand
poobah” originated with the character Pooh-Bah, the Lord High Everything-Else
from The Mikado. While generally
taken as light-hearted comedy, Gilbert’s mastery of Victorian turns of phrase
and Sullivan’s glorious compositions have kept their body of work alive for
more than a century. It also probably didn’t
hurt that they’re easier for high school drama troupes to perform than, say, Das
Rheingold. And no one has ever had
to say of their masterworks, as Wilde did of Wagner, that their operas are “better
than they sound”; in my humble opinion, they are exactly as good as they
sound.
One of the
things that make Gilbert and Sullivan so timeless is their propensity for
prodding certain sectors of British society.
Reviewers often make the mistake of accusing the pair of nursing a
vendetta for the upper crust, but this is a base calumny and misinterprets
their true intent. Both were, especially
as a result of their joint work, rather well off themselves. Sullivan had little interest in society’s
foibles (other than to partake of them), while Gilbert - a much more
complicated fellow than he is usually portrayed - was more interested in
pricking the bubbles of self-importance that seemed to proliferate amid the
wealth and splendour of fin-de-siècle Victorian society. He selected his targets with great precision
and skewered them with a glorious combination of audacity and wit.
Cleaving solely to their best-known works, the objects of his barbs were as follows:
Cleaving solely to their best-known works, the objects of his barbs were as follows:
Trial
by Jury (1875)
- the judiciary
The
Sorcerer (1877)
- shady businessmen
HMS
Pinafore (1878)
- the Royal Navy
The Pirates of Penzance (1879) - the Police
Patience
(1881) - the Aesthetic movement
Iolanthe
(1882) - the House of Lords
Princess Ida (1884) - feminism and chauvinism
The Mikado (1885) - bureaucracy
Ruddigore
(1887) - the fascination with the supernatural
The Yeomen of the Guard (1888) - no one (this was Gilbert’s only non-satirical libretto)
The Gondoliers (1889) - the monarchy and republicanism
Gilbert and Sullivan produced two more collaborative
pieces - Utopia, Ltd (1893), and The Grand Duke (1895) - but the
energy had gone out of their partnership and neither work did as well as their
predecessors. Of the eleven operas
listed above, only The Yeoman of the Guard explicitly did largely away
with the satirical, comical side of their best work, and had a serious as
opposed to happy (or nonsensical) ending.
What’s interesting about the remaining ten pieces is
how reviewers tend to pigeonhole them - as I have deliberately done - into
attempts to lampoon this or that element of Victorian society. That’s taking too broad a brush to Gilbert’s
prose. In Trial, for example,
Gilbert was not lampooning “the judiciary” so much as he was describing the
hypocrisy of it. The eponymous trial of
the piece, after all, is a complaint of breach of promise by a young lady,
Angelina, jilted by her lover Edwin, and it begins with the judge’s
autobiographical piece, “When I, good friends, was called to the bar”, in which
he describes how he made his career as a barrister by wooing “a rich attorney’s
elderly, ugly daughter”. The song wraps
up with the memorable lines:
At length I became as rich as the
Gurneys; an incubus then I thought her
So I threw over that rich attorney’s
elderly, ugly daughter.
The rich attorney my character high
tried vainly to disparage -
Chorus: No!
Judge (gleefully): Yes! And now, if
you please, I’m ready to try this breach of promise of marriage!
You see, it’s not “the judiciary” that Sullivan is
mocking; it’s the corruption of the institution of the judiciary by individuals
who exploit its foibles to rise high in its ranks.
The same theme runs through all of their satirical
plays. In Pinafore, Sir Joseph
Porter, KCB, First Lord of the Admiralty, has a similar introductory song in
which he describes how he became Britain’s chief sailor by working as a clerk
in an attorney’s office, cleaning the windows, sweeping the floor, and
polishing the handle on the big front door: “I polished up the handle so
carefully / That now I am the ruler of the Queen’s Nay-Vee!” His song, like the Judge’s from Trial,
concludes with some helpful advice for would-be bureaucrats:
So landsmen all, whomever you may be
/ If you want to rise to the top of the tree
If your soul isn’t fettered to an
office stool / Be careful to be guided by this Golden Rule:
Stick close to your desks, and never
go to sea / And you all may be rulers of the Queen’s Nay-Vee!
Those who aver that Gilbert was poking fun at the RN
won’t find much evidence for their position in the play; the individual sailors
are all caricatures, exemplifying the best (and in only one case, that of the
traitorous Dick Deadeye, the worst) of the “jolly jack tar” of popular
legend. It is Sir Joseph, the bureaucrat
who knows nothing of ships and the sea, who attracts Gilbert’s especial
scorn. Porter spends most of the play
trying to cure the swabbies of their lamentable tendency toward profanity; and
it is only when the Captain, upon learning that his daughter has fallen in love
with “the low’liest tar who plies the water”, utters a thoroughly
understandable “Damn!” (euphemized as “Damme”, and pronounced “Damn-me!”, for purposes
of assuaging both Victorian sensibilities and the demands of lyrical scansion),
that Sir Joseph displays his temper and banishes the Captain to his
stateroom. Basically, Porter is a
thoroughly useless political appointee who rose to his position through
processes that had nothing to do with developing the skills necessary to his
duties, and who - absent those skills - focuses on the least important aspects
of his position. Gilbert isn’t mocking
the sailors of the RN, in short; he’s mocking, once again, the manner in which
their leaders are chosen, expressing surprise and derision in equal measure at
an organization that allows itself to be managed by people who make a virtue
out of knowing nothing about what their subordinates do.
Contempt for the artful posturings of high position is
a theme that runs through all of their work.
In Pirates, the same sort of character - the genial old duffer promoted
far beyond his capabilities - is exemplified by Major-General Stanley, who
sings the well-known song, “I am the very model of a Modern Major-General”, in
which he boasts of his mastery of every conceivable topic (“I quote in elegiacs
on the crimes of Heliogabolus / In conics, I can floor peculiarities
parabolous!”), but in the last verse laments that the only lacunae in his vast
repertoire of knowledge are in matters military:
In fact, when I know what is meant by
“mamelon” and “ravelin” / When I can tell at sight a Mauser rifle from a
javelin,
When such affairs as sorties and
surprises I’m more wary at / And when I know precisely what is meant by
commisariat;
When I can tell what progress has
been made in modern gunnery / When I know more of tactics than a novice in a
nunnery,
In short, when I’ve a smattering of
elemental strategy
(Searches for a rhyme)
You’ll say a better Major-General has
never sat-a-gee!
There he is again; the quintessential high-ranked
bureaucrat who knows all sorts of trivia but is ignorant of what he needs to
know to actually do his job.
The trend continues.
In Patience we have the Dragoons (and their three officers:
Colonel Calverly, Major Murgatroyd, and Lieutenant the Duke of Dunstable) whose
entire chorus is dedicated to describing how utterly fascinating they look in
uniform. The Colonel spends a lengthy
song (“If you want a receipt”) listing the qualities of the “remarkable persons
of history” that go into producing “that popular mystery, known to the world as
a Heavy Dragoon”), of which “The pluck of Lord Nelson on board of the Victory /
Genius of Bismarck devising a plan” are only one part; and it’s not ‘till near
the end that he includes “The genius strategic of Caesar or Hannibal / Skill of
Sir Garnett in thrashing a cannibal”.
Military qualifications are an afterthought in his recitation, no more
important than “The style of the Bishop of Soder and Mann.”
Even the protagonist (if you can call him that) of the
play, Reginald Bunthorne, the “melancholy literary man” whose affected
aesthetic transfiguration has captivated the hearts of the female chorus, is
merely playing a role; he pretends to be a poet in order to fascinate the
ladies: “This air severe / is but a mere
/ veneer; This cynic smile / is but a wile / of guile”. The only female in the cast not taken in by
his complicated elocutions is the eponymous female lead, the milkmaid Patience,
who is too simple and straightforward to understand the complexities of
Bunthorne’s voluminous prose. After one
of the exalted one’s readings, the reaction of the ladies is a typical effusion
of praise for something that none of them can understand:
Angela: How purely fragrant!
Saphir: How earnestly precious!
Patience: Well, it seems to me to be
nonsense.
Saphir: Nonsense, yes, perhaps -- but
oh, what precious nonsense!
Patience spends most of the play baffled by Bunthorne’s
nonsense, which nonsense the other ladies lap up with a smile. Bunthorne the fraud, meanwhile, spends most
of the play basking happily in the praise of his willing acolytes - at least
until a rival who makes even less sense shows up and lures them all away from
him. It is impossible to listen to their
interplay without thinking of the management consultant who commands huge sums
for drowning gullible listeners in periodic deluges of drivel, while they
applaud wildly and beg (and pay) for more.
In describing and delighting in the frailties of the
uncredentialed self-important caste, though, the preceding works all pale in
comparison to Iolanthe, which takes on the task of lampooning the House
of Lords (and whence, I might add, comes the official regimental march of the
military college professorial cadre, whose lyrics begin with the line “Bow,
bow, ye lower middle classes!”). In the
Lord Chancellor we find another individual who rose to high station through a
combination of legal studies and political preferment, who finds himself
charged with supervising “pretty young wards in chancery”, and who is therefore
conflicted because he’s “not so old, and not so plain / And quite prepared to
marry again.” The true duffers of the
piece, though, are the two Lords, Tolloller and Mountararat, who manage to go
through the play without a single thought in their heads other than what’s put
there by others, and who seem to be most contented by that arrangement:
Lord Chancellor: I feel the force of
your remarks, but I am here in two capacities, and they clash, my Lords, they
clash!
Lord Tolloller: This is what it is to have two
capacities. Let us be thankful that we
are persons of no capacity whatever.
The Lord Chancellor, having fallen enamoured of his ward Phyllis, sees no incongruity
in pleading his suit to himself, and describes in great detail how earnestly he
did so, and how sternly he demanded proof of his own bona fides.
Lord
Chancellor: Victory! Victory! Success has crowned my efforts, and I may
consider myself engaged to Phyllis! At first I wouldn’t hear of it – it was out
of the question. But I took heart. I pointed out to myself that I was no
stranger to myself; that, in point of fact, I had been personally acquainted
with myself for some years. This had its effect. I admitted that I had watched
my professional advancement with considerable interest, and I handsomely added
that I yielded to no one in admiration for my private and professional virtues.
This was a great point gained. I then endeavoured to work upon my feelings.
Conceive my joy when I distinctly perceived a tear glistening in my own eye!
Eventually, after a severe struggle with myself, I reluctantly – most
reluctantly – consented.
The Lord Chancellor virtually defines the ability of
the amoral individual to bend the rules according to his own interests, and to
argue any potentially beneficial position, no matter how inherently nonsensical
it might be. It also demonstrates how
the term “conflict of interest” can be conveniently overlooked by someone sufficiently
motivated to do so.
The Mikado
too is rife with the sort of unearned sinecures that Gilbert so loved to
twit. Ko-ko, an ex-tailor condemned to
death for flirting, obtained his post as Lord High Executioner through an act
of deductive reasoning on the part of the citizens of the town of Titipu. Commanded by the Mikado to start executing
criminals, the townsfolk reasoned that if they made a condemned criminal the
town’s executioner, he could not execute anyone else until he had first
beheaded himself. The town’s remaining
officials, refusing to serve under an ex-tailor, resigned in a body, leaving
all of their offices (and the attendant salaries) to be appropriated by
Pooh-Bah, who de facto became “First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chief Justice, Commander-in-Chief, Lord High Admiral, Master of the Buck Hounds, Groom of the Back Stairs,
Archbishop of Titipu, and Lord Mayor, both acting and elect” - in other words,
the Lord High Everything-Else. When
these august officials are informed that the Mikado intends to begin mass
executions if they don’t start beheading people, they launch a scheme to
deceive the emperor which, naturally, unravels in a spectacular fashion.
Pooh-Bah is the
Gilbertian exemplar of the underhanded bureaucrat, willing to sell anything to
anyone. Lamenting the fact that one of
his ancient lineage has become a “salaried minion” and must accept the “insult”
of regular pay, he describes in detail how far he’ll stoop to make a buck; and
immediately upon learning of Nanki-Poo’s infatuation with the delightful
Yum-Yum, he offers to sell the lad information about the object of his
affections:
POOH-BAH:
But I don’t stop at that. I go and dine with middle-class people on reasonable
terms. I dance at cheap suburban parties for a moderate fee. I accept
refreshment at any hands, however lowly. I also retail state secrets at a very
low rate. For instance, any further information about Yum-Yum would come under
the heading of a state secret.
(NANKI-POO
takes the hint and gives him money.)
POOH-BAH
(Aside): Another insult, and I think a light one.
His
self-absorption is underscored in the second act when, in the course of
recounting the (fraudulent) execution of Nanki-Poo to the Mikado, Pooh-Bah
describes the behaviour of the minstrel’s severed head in terms designed to
highlight his own immense importance:
POOH-BAH:
Now though you’d have said that head was dead / (For its owner dead was he),
It
stood on its neck with a smile well bred, / And bowed three times to me
It
was none of your impudent off-hand nods, / But as humble as could be
For
it clearly knew the deference due / To a man of pedigree!
And
it’s oh, I trow, this deathly bow / Was a touching sight to see;
Though
trunkless, yet it couldn’t forget / The deference due to me!
It takes a special
species of twisted genius to make someone else’s execution all about one’s-self.
Ruddigore gives us Dick Dauntless, “a
man-o-war’s man”, who manages to describe as heroically merciful the act of
retreat by a British revenue sloop from a more powerful French frigate. Dauntless explains that “To fight a French
fal-lal is like hitting at a gal; ‘tis a lubberly thing for to do”:
DAUNTLESS: So we up with our helm, and we scuds before
the breeze / As we gives a compassionatin’ cheer;
Froggy
answers with a shout as he sees us go about / Which was grateful of the poor
mongseer, d’ye see?
Which
was grateful of the poor mongseer!
And
I’ll wager in their joy, they did kissed each others’ cheeks / Which is what
them furriners do,
And
blessed their lucky stars we were hardy British tars / Who had pity on a poor
parly-voo, d’ye see?
Who
had pity on a poor parly-voo!
It’s not about
the facts…d’ye see? It’s about the
narrative; it’s about spinning a defeat as a victory, about describing a lack
of accomplishment as accomplishment, about turning abject failure into flawless
success with brilliant prose (and, in Dick’s case, a fancy hornpipe).
It’s a theme we
return to in The Gondoliers, which features the Duke of Plaza-Toro, a
Spanish don who made a name for himself as a myrmidon of repute, and who seems
to have figured out the key to enjoying a long and successful career as a
military leader:
In
enterprise of martial kind, when there was any fighting
He
led his regiment from behind, he found it less exciting
But
when away his regiment ran, his place was at the fore, oh!
That
celebrated, cultivated, under-rated nobleman, the Duke of Plaza-Toro!
When
to evade destruction’s hand, to hide they all proceeded,
No
soldier in that gallant band did half as well as he did!
He
lay concealed throughout the war, and so preserved his gore, oh!
That
very knowing, over-flowing, easy-going paladin, the Duke of Plaza-Toro!
(That image, BTW, is from the 1984 production of The Gondoliers by the Stratford Festival, which IMHO is the best one ever produced or recorded)
It doesn’t get
much better than that - until the two gondoliers, Marco and Giuseppe, are found
by the Don Alhambra del Bolero, the Grand Inquisitor, and informed that one of
them is the rightful King of Barataria but that no one knows which, as one of
them is the son of the old king, spirited away shortly after birth to escape
the claws of revolutionaries. The
brothers decide to take up and share the throne pending resolution of the
mystery, but (to the Grand Inquisitor’s chagrin) to reorganize the kingdom on
republican principles, in which “all departments rank equally, and everyone is
at the head of his department”, leading to a duet:
MARCO:
For everyone who feels inclined, some post we undertake to find / Congenial
with his frame of mind, and all shall equal be!
GIUSEPPE:
The Chancellor in his peruke, the Earl, the Marquis and the Duke / The groom,
the butler, and the cook, they all shall equal be!
MARCO:
The aristocrat who banks with Coutts, the aristocrat who hunts and shoots / The
aristocrat who cleans our boots, they all shall equal be!
GIUSEPPE:
The noble lord who rules the state, the noble lord who cleans the plate
MARCO:
The noble lord who scrubs the grate, they all shall equal be!
GIUSEPPE:
The Lord High Bishop orthodox, the Lord High Coachman on the box
MARCO:
The Lord High Vagabond in the stocks, they all shall equal be!
The result, of
course, is a court in which everyone is a courtier, and the only work done is
done by the two kings themselves, who (in another song) describe how they must
perform every duty from “rising early in the morning” to light the fire, to
standing sentry “at the palace private entry”, and finally serving their own
dinners before retiring to their attic “with the satisfying feeling that their
duty has been done”. When the Grand
Inquisitor visits to inspect their arrangement, he has to gently remind them
that things work a certain way for a reason, and gives them an example of what
happened to a king “in the wonder-working days of old” who “wished all men as
rich as he (and he was rich as rich could be) / So to the top of every tree,
promoted everybody”:
DON
AL.: Lord Chancellors were cheap as sprats, and Bishops in their shovel-hats /
Were plentiful as tabby cats - in point of fact, too many
Ambassadors
cropped up like hay, Prime Ministers (and such as they) / Grew like asparagus
in May, and Dukes were three-a-penny
On
every side, Field Marshalls gleamed, small bill were Lords-Lieutenant deemed /
With Admirals the oceans teemed, all ‘round his wide dominions.
And
party leaders you might meet, in twos and threes in every street / Debating
with no little heat their various opinions!
[…]
The
end is easily foretold - when every blessed thing you hold / Is made of silver
or of gold, you long for simple pewter
When
you have nothing else to wear but cloth of gold or satins rare / For cloth of
gold you cease to care; up goes the price of shoddy.
In
short whomever you may be, to this conclusion you’ll agree / When everyone is
somebody, then no-one’s anybody!
There is so much
wisdom in this one song that it’s hard to overstate the value of the lessons
Gilbert is trying to impart. One is that
picking winners and losers is a fool’s errand for a king (or, one might venture
to suggest, a President); and another is, as it was put nearly as eloquently in
“The Incredibles”, saying that “everyone’s special” is the same as saying “no-one
is”. This sort of example puts the lie
to the whole redistributionist argument so beloved of a certain class of
demagogues - for example, the hoodie-wearing ne’er-do-wells cluttering up
streets and bridges in New York and elsewhere this past week. Someone has to scrub the grate, and it doesn’t
make the job any easier if you call him an “aristocrat” while he’s doing it.
There’s a lot
more that could be said about Gilbert and Sullivan, and how their works seem as
applicable to the modern-day foibles of organizations as it was tailor-made to
prick the pomposities of Victorian England.
Their best operas are timeless, probably because a lot of the same
pomposities are on display today. The
prevalence of hypocrites who manipulate systems for their own ends; of
bureaucrats who derive their power from preferment rather than ability; of
mandarins who, blithely unconscious of inherent conflicts of interest deriving
from “two capacities”, are able to argue themselves into anything that might
benefit them; of willing dupes who recognize an argument as nonsense, but are
nonetheless happy to applaud it anyway because it’s trendy nonsense; of
self-important fools who arrogate to themselves all manner of power simply for
its own sake, and who make certain that everything, one way or another, is always
about them; of cowards who lead from behind, and yet who construct a “narrative”
diametrically opposed to factual evidence to make their actions seem heroic;
and above all, of ideologues who believe that they can change the meaning of
words by fiat, and who think that reality is whatever they say it is.
These plagues,
it seems, are timeless. Sir William and
Sir Arthur knew them, and for twenty-five years they pilloried and abominated
them in one of the most effulgent bodies of satirical work ever to grace the
English language. They are, to borrow a
Wagnerian concept, the leitmotifs of modern organization; recurrent themes
that, although they change slightly from time to time, continue to resound
throughout the score to indicate the presence or fate of a particular
character. The persistent popularity of the G&S operas today probably owes
something to the fact that the targets of their derision are still with us,
seemingly just as prevalent as they were in the closing decades of the gaslight
century. The tunes of the past echo in
the organizations of the present.
Do I have any
recommendations to offer? Sure! Anyone with a yen for more G&S should get
their hands on the film Topsy-Turvy, an absolutely brilliant period
piece about Gilbert and Sullivan’s collaboration on The Mikado that
features a truly spectacular performance by Jim Broadbent as Gilbert (and a
hilariously fey interpretation of the tenor Durward Lely by none other than
Kevin McKidd, Rome’s Lucius Vorenus.
Andy Serkis - Gollum - is in it too, but good luck picking him out).
Cheers,
//Don//
P.S. Next week:
a critical analysis of the internal logic of the 25 hours of Wagner’s Ring
Cycle operas as seen through the lens of complexity theory.
P.P.S. Just kidding. But if you want a brief (22 minute) explanation of what happens in the 25 hours of Das Ringe der Niebelungen, you should listen to Anna Russell's magnificent 1953 summary of the four operas of Wagner's masterwork.
