Discography of Sir Arthur Sullivan:
Incidental Music

The Tempest, incidental music (1861)
The Merchant of Venice, incidental music (1871)
The Merry Wives of Windsor, incidental music (1874)
Henry VIII, incidental music (1878)
Macbeth, incidental music (1888)
The Foresters, incidental music (1892)
King Arthur, incidental music (1895)

The Tempest, incidental music (1861)

Background

Sullivan composed his incidental music to The Tempest as a kind of graduation exercise from the conservatory at Leipzig, where he had studied through the aid of the prestigious Mendelssohn scholarship. The work consisted of twelve numbers, of which six received their premiere in Leipzig on 6 April 1861. When the complete work was performed at the Crystal Palace on 5 April 1862, it caused an immediate sensation, effectively launching Sullivan on his professional career. So popular was The Tempest that it was repeated just a week later, and it continued to be one of Sullivan's most popular concert works. It was also used for its originally-intended purpose, as incidental music to the play, in a production at Manchester's Prince's Theatre, on 15 October 1864.

Recordings

1. Vienna Orchestral Society, F. Charls Adler, conductor, 1955.

   This recording includes the entire score and is one of the best non-operatic Sullivan recording ever made. Regretfully, the LP was not pressed in great numbers, and it has been out of print for over forty years.

   Issue History, see:

   Sir Arthur Sullivan: Music to Shakespeare's Tempest

2. City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Sir Vivian Dunn, conductor, 1972.

   This recording includes five of the score's twelve numbers: "Introduction," "Prelude to Act III," "Banquet Dance," "Overture to Act IV," and "Epilogue."

   Issue History, see:

   Tempest / Merchant of Venice / Overture in C: Dunn
   Sargent/Glyndebourne Ruddigore

3. BBC Philharmonic Orchestra; Richard Hickox, conductor; 2000.

   This recording includes a suite from the full score.

   Issue History, see:

   Sullivan: In Memoriam / Tempest / Symphony

The Merchant of Venice, incidental music (1871)

Background

Sullivan composed his incidental music to The Merchant of Venice for an 1871 Manchester production. The score comprised seven instrumental numbers and one song. The score doesn't seem to have been used for any further productions of the play, but it was an occasional concert selection (either in whole or in excerpts) during the composer's lifetime.

Recordings

1. City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Sir Vivian Dunn, conductor, 1972.

   This recording includes four of the score's seven numbers: "Introduction," "Bourée," "À la Valse," and "Finale."

   Issue History, see:

   Tempest / Merchant of Venice / Overture in C: Dunn
   Sargent/Glyndebourne Ruddigore

2. RTE Concert Orchestra; RTE Chamber Choir; Andrew Penny, conductor; 1992

   This recording of the complete score is part of Andrew Penny's excellent traversal of Sullivan's non-operatic music.

   Issue History, see:

   Arthur Sullivan: Incidental Music

The Merry Wives of Windsor, incidental music (1874)

Background

Sullivan's incidental music to The Merry Wives of Windsor premiered one week short of three years later than Thespis, at the same theater, and commissioned by the same impressario, John Hollinshead. The occasion was a new production of the infrequently-staged Shakespeare play. Just two days before the opening, Sullivan wrote to his friend, the music critic Joseph Bennet, about the score:

I was rather dismayed when I first got the commission to do The Merry Wives for I could see no opportunity for music. However in the last act I have been able to do a little, and it will I hope be bright . . . . I wouldn't write an overture, because I did not care about competing with the very pretty one of Nicolai.

Your masterly judgement, my dear Joseph, will at once enable you to see that as the faires are not real fairies (if such exist) but only flesh and blood imitations, I have endeavoured to indicate this, and have not written music of the same character as I wrote [sic] for The Midsummer Night's Dream, or that Mendelssohn [sic] wrote for the third act of The Tempest. I have only had three weeks to do the whole thing in . . . All the music is new, but (and this is not necessarily for publication) if you remember a ballet called L'Ile enchantée which I wrote for the Italian Opera, Covent Garden, many years ago, you will recognize two of the themes . . . .

Also notable in the score was a song for the character Anne Page, to lyrics by Algernon Swinburne, who would later be lampooned in Patience. As Selwyn Tillett has noted, "the whole suite has a straightforward jollity which exactly catches the mood of the pantomime season." Despite Sullivan's desire to avoid being Mendelssohnian, much of the score bears favorable comparison with that of the older composer.

Recordings

1. Fulham Light Operatic Society.

   The song for Anne Page, "Love laid his sleepless head," was included as a bonus item on the Fulham Light Operatic Society's recording of The Zoo,

   Issue History, see:

   Fulham Zoo

2. RTE Concert Orchestra; RTE Chamber Choir; Andrew Penny, conductor; 1993

   This recording comes on a CD that also includes excerpts from two other Sullivan incidental music suites, Macbeth and King Arthur.

   Issue History, see:

   Arthur Sullivan: Macbeth / King Arthur / etc

Henry VIII, incidental music (1877)

Background

In 1871, Sullivan had written incidental music for The Merchant of Venice for the Prince's Theatre, Manchester. Having found that experience a salutary one, in 1877 he accepted another lucrative commission from the same theater manager, Charles Calvert. Henry VIII has always been a rarity as Shakespearean plays go, and no doubt a Sullivan score enhanced the mass appeal of the production.

Sullivan's music, all heard in the fifth act, comprised four numbers:

1. March
2. King Henry's Song (to a text supposedly by Henry VIII himself)
3. Graceful Dance
4. Water Music

According to the liner notes of the Marco Polo recording, the score became extremely popular with brass and military bands. Perhaps more significantly, the Graceful Dance stood in as overture at the opening night of The Sorcerer, until a proper overture could be substituted later in the run.

The March number is perhaps the least effective of the four pieces, failing ever to rise above a mundane crudeness, but the other three numbers justify the Manchester Courier's contemporary verdict: "exquisite."

Recordings

1. Vienna Orchestral Society, F. Charls Adler, conductor, 1955.

   This recording includes the March, Graceful Dance, and Water Music.

   Issue History, see:

   Sir Arthur Sullivan: Music to Shakespeare's Tempest

2. King Henry's Song, recorded by Andrew Black, can be found on the Sir Arthur Sullivan Sesquicentennial Commemorative Issue

3. The Graceful Dance, in a vintage recording by H.M. First Life Guards, can be found on Sir Arthur Sullivan: Sacred and Secular Music.

4. D'Oyly Carte Opera Company; Royston Nash, conductor; 1975

   This performance, first published on the D'Oyly Carte's centenary recording of Trial By Jury, includes the March and Graceful Dance only.

   Issue History, see:

   1975 D'Oyly Carte Trial By Jury
   1976 D'Oyly Carte Grand Duke
   1979 The World of Sir Arthur Sullivan
   2001 British Music Collection: Arthur Sullivan

5. Band of the Royal Military School of Music, Kneller Hall; 1992.

   This recording, an arrangement for band, includes the March, King Henry's Song, and the Graceful Dance.

   Issue History, see:

   Sullivan Salute
   

6. RTE Concert Orchestra; RTE Chamber Choir; Andrew Penny, conductor; 1992

   This recording of the complete score is part of Andrew Penny's excellent traversal of Sullivan's non-operatic music.

   Issue History, see:

   Arthur Sullivan: Incidental Music

Macbeth, incidental music (1888)

Background

In the late 1880s, the actor/manager Henry Irving had achieved a string of notable successes with his spectacular stagings of classic plays at the Lyceum Theatre. Irving himself always played the protagonist in these productions, and they were always accompanied by a lush underscoring of incidental music—the analog to the background music heard today in televison and in movies.

Sullivan was well aware of Irving's popularity, and he gave his assent almost immediately when Irving's company manager, Bram Stoker, proposed that he should write a score for a new production of Macbeth. The production opened on 29 December 1888. It was an immediate sensation. Irving was not above rewriting Shakespeare: he staged the play in six acts, not the traditional five, and he deleted all scenes that didn't include either Macbeth or Lady Macbeth.

For the Leeds Festival of 1889, Sullivan adapted and reordered some of the movements and presented a Concert Suite from his score. However, his hope that the music would establish an independent life in the concert hall seems not to have been realized.

The Macbeth overture ranks among the best of Sullivan's theatrical overtures—surpassed, perhaps, only by that of The Yeomen of the Guard. Arthur Jacobs says that "the opening . . . suggests a tragic tone, with its hammer-like succession of three identical minor chords, [but] Sullivan chose not to anticipate in his overture the outcome of the play." Yet, Selwyn Tillett, in his introduction to the Penny recording, says that "it admirably depicts the pessimism and nervous tension of the whole play."

I must confess a great fondness for the overture; my own view falls closer to Tillett's than to Jacobs's. It was written when Sullivan was at the height of his creative powers, and there is no reason to doubt that it would still be popular today, if the genre of incidental music had not itself gone out of fashion. The frequency of recordings suggests that the overture has become in recent years the most popular of Sullivan's orchestral works outside of the Overture di Ballo.

Recordings

1. D'Oyly Carte Opera Company; Royston Nash, conductor; 1975

   This performance, of the overture only, was the happy product of the D'Oyly Carte's decision in the 1970s to start including excerpts from Sullivan's non-operatic music as filler material in recordings of that period.

   Issue History, see:

   1975 D'Oyly Carte Trial By Jury
   1976 D'Oyly Carte Utopia Limited
   1979 The World of Sir Arthur Sullivan
   2001 British Music Collection: Arthur Sullivan

2. Academy of St. Martin in the Fields; Sir Neville Marriner, conductor; 1993

   This recording, of the overture only, was part of an excellent overtures disc recorded by Sir Neville Marriner in 1993.

   Issue History, see:

   Gilbert & Sullivan Overtures

3. RTE Concert Orchestra; RTE Chamber Choir; Andrew Penny, conductor; 1993

   This recording is of the Concert Suite, including the overture, Andante espressivo, and preludes to Acts IV, V and VI. As a bonus, the "Chorus of Spirits in the Air" and "Chorus of Witches and Spirits" is included. The recording gives every indication that Sullivan's Macbeth score would rate today among Sullivan's great masterpieces, were it not that it is no longer economical to accompany plays with live orchestral music.

   Issue History, see:

   Arthur Sullivan: Macbeth / King Arthur / etc

4. The Hanover Band; Tom Higgins, conductor; 1999

   Issue History, see:

   May 1999 BBC Music Magazine Rose of Persia

5. BBC Symphony Orchestra; Charles Mackerras, conductor; 2000

   Issue History, see:

   March 2001 BBC Music Magazine CD

The Foresters, incidental music (1892)

Background

First Performance: New York, Daly's Theatre, 17 March 1892

Alfred Tennyson had a play based on the Robin Hood legend in gestation as early as 1881. He twice offered it to Henry Irving, who demurred on both occasions, finding Tennyson's treatment lacked the "sensational" elements that contemporary public taste required.

The American impresario Augustin Daly finally picked it up in 1891. Sullivan was engaged to write several detached songs and an extended fairy scene reminiscent of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The work enjoyed a great success in New York before touring to Washington, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Alas, the play flopped in London. Tennyson had died in the meantime, and so was spared the indignity of reading reviews such as the Pall Mall Gazette offered: "The Foresters is not a great play; it is not even a good play.... It is probable that the great, the aged poet dreamed that he was putting into his play all that the subject called for, all the breave breath of the old ballads, all the chivalry of the Lion Heart, all the heroism of the immortal outlaw.... The spectator may guess at the great ambition; he can only behold and bewail the melancholy result – a result as tactless and as tedious as a nursery tale."

It seemed Henry Irving was right.

Sullivan's part in the proceedings received favorable reviews, but it was not enough to save a play in which his role was merely incidental. The composer must have realized the difficulty of the task, when he wrote, "I have done the best I could with the music for Lord Tennyson's play, but it is after all not very satisfactory to have to write music which, whilst it is merely incidental to the play, at the same time requires proper and adequate interpretation."

Recordings

There is just one recording, but it is outstanding. It is on the Hyperion label, coupled with the first professional recording of The Contrabandista.

King Arthur, incidental music (1895)

Background

First Performance: Lyceum Theatre, 12 January 1895
Published: Suite of Five Movements, posthumous

Sullivan's last essay in the genre of incidental music was undoubtedly inspired by the success of his Macbeth music for Henry Irving seven years earlier. Sullivan had toyed with the idea of writing an Arthurian opera for years, so undoubtedly the subject appealed to him. The text of the play, in blank verse, was supplied by J. R. Comyns Carr. Irving and Ellen Terry played Arthur and Guinevere. Sullivan supplied some thirty-eight musical numbers, although most of the extended instrumental passages were harvested from earlier works.

The production garnered mixed reviews. Clement Scott said that "[T]he music is exactly what was wanted — ever subordinate to dramatic effect, and yet always assisting it." Yet, Bernard Shaw thought that Sullivan "sweetens the sentiment of the scenes here and there by penn'orths of orchestral sugar-stick, for which the dramatic critics, in their soft-eared innocence, compare him to Wagner."

Much of the music for King Arthur consisted of little motives and phrases that would make little sense outside of the play. After Sullivan's death, his secretary Wilfred Bendall assembled what he could of the score into a suite of five vocal numbers, which were published with a piano accompaniment. In some cases Bendall had either to compress material or to stitch disparate passages together. As Arthur Jacobs observed, "all this amounted to hardly more than a limb of what an opera by Sullivan entitled King Arthur . . . might have been."

Recordings

1. Imperial Opera; Michael Withers, conductor.

   This is a very solid performance. Now that the Penny recording is available (see below), it is no longer a must-have, but it is coupled with the Imperial Ode and The Prodigal Son—certainly the best recordings of those two works that we now have.

   Issue History, see:

   Imperial Ode / King Arthur / The Prodigal Son [SASS]

2. RTE Chamber Choir; RTE Concert Orchestra; Andrew Penny, conductor.

   This is a performance of the complete suite that Wilfred Bendall assembled after Sullivan's death. The five numbers are wonderful Sullivan, but they comprise so little of the full score that one really cannot tell what the play was like. The disc on which they're found also includes Sullivan's incidental music to Macbeth and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Taken together, these make for an entertaining hour of listening.

   Issue History, see:

   Arthur Sullivan: Macbeth / King Arthur / etc