Review of A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Art of Gilbert and Sullivan by Gayden Wren (Oxford University Press, 2001). This review originally appeared in Gilbert and Sullivan News.
The world of Gilbert and Sullivan opera used to be such a cosy place. It was a comforting Victorian world of silly policemen, pompous peers, sailors and fairies, pirates and gondoliers, lovers and their lasses. And no one took it seriously.
It's true, people wrote books on the subject: jolly, light reading, recounting the joint biography of the two men as if they were Siamese twins, and with an endearingly vague attitude to the facts. Leslie Baily, who wrote the "standard" book on the subject in the 1950s, simply invented facts if the ones he was given weren't interesting enough--but what of it? He told a good story.
However, that kind of thing simply doesn't do these days. Strange whey-eyed creatures have started writing about G&S in a completely different way, trying to disentangle fact from fiction. They even try to disentangle Gilbert from Sullivan, and, what is more, they seem to be succeeding. Their concern is not so much to entertain as to be accurate. Thus Arthur Jacobs's magisterial biography of Sullivan (1984) and Jane Stedman's superb life of Gilbert (1996). They may be less fun than Leslie Baily, but at least they know what they're talking about.
Like it or not, it is simply not good enough to write about G&S in the old way any more. The field has been taken over by scholars, and that means you have to get things right.
Gayden Wren has only half-understood this. His book A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Art of Gilbert & Sullivan tries to impress us with its footnotes--but on examination these footnotes prove to be largely a joke. Chapter One, Footnote One sources a Gilbert anecdote to The Drake Guide to Gilbert and Sullivan (1973)--a bargain-basement volume of no academic value. The true source, if Wren is interested, seems to be Edith Browne's W.S. Gilbert (1907), which was written with Gilbert's cooperation and assistance.
He seems to have no idea that the purpose of a reference is to give a reliable, preferably early, source for a quotation, or that primary sources are better than secondary. He quotes from a Sullivan letter, but omits to give a date, merely stating that Jacobs quotes it in his Sullivan biography. This is useless.
He places much too heavy a reliance on a few secondary sources like Leslie Baily or Caryl Brahms. Presumably these were the books nearest to hand as he was writing.
G&S scholarship has come a long way since the 1950s. No one has told Wren that the "lost" song "When Jealous Torments Rack My Soul" has been found--and recorded at least twice. (It's actually rather good.) He doesn't know that Sullivan wrote the overtures to Princess Ida and The Gondoliers, and that he didn't write the overture to Ruddigore.
He thinks that the short story "An Elixir of Love" dates from 1869 rather than 1876. Well, the source of that mistake is easy to identify--Peter Haining's unbelievably awful Introduction to The Lost Stories of W.S. Gilbert (1982). But Wren should have known better than to trust a word Haining says.
The book is littered with silly mistakes like this; perhaps the silliest is the dating of a Gilbert letter to the year 1994!
All this might be more forgivable if Wren didn't seem so confident of his own rightness in all things. He airily dismisses stories as apocryphal when, judging by the extent of his reading on the subject, he can't possibly be in a position to decide. His Bibliography is eccentric in scope: it omits basic sources like Hesketh Pearson's Gilbert and Sullivan and Dark and Grey's W.S. Gilbert: His Life and Letters--but includes trashy "guides" to G&S and even a murder mystery! We may assume that this is the extent of his reading on the subject; if it isn't listed, he doesn't know about it. This makes the omissions all the more scandalous.
Wren adorns the Bibliography with absurdly judgmental comments; "accepts all sources unquestioningly", "profoundly irritating", "sloppy", "frequent errors". The sense of the pot calling the kettle black is never far away.
And the worst thing of all is that this book does after all contain many valuable insights into the operas.
He is for instance one of the very few people who have managed to read Tennyson's The Princess, on which Princess Ida is based. Wren is able to show how Gilbert changed the storyline--even reversing the outcome of the climactic battle!--and is able to suggest reasons for these conscious artistic choices. What was in Tennyson a genteel and humane "comedy of misunderstanding" becomes in Gilbert much more extreme, a battle of the sexes overlaid with images of conquest and by implication rape. This is convincingly argued.
He is at his best assessing the relative merits of the operas. Unlike many enamoured Savoyards, he doesn't hesitate to criticise HMS Pinafore for being over-conventional in its ballads and cardboard in its characterisation. He contrasts it in particular with Patience and Iolanthe, which he considers the most accomplished operas in the series.
Interestingly, he singles out The Mikado as not the most typical G&S opera but the most untypical. It is, he insists, unusually light in tone, with an almost improvised feel to its dialogue. Unfortunately he traces this back to the "fact" that Gilbert created the characters before the plot. This is simply untrue: Wren has been misled by relying on extracts from a Gilbert article from 1885, as quoted in Leslie Baily, rather than going back to the source and reading the original in full.
His analyses are sometimes contentious, to say the least, as when he states that Patience makes her own salvation at the end of the opera which bears her name: frankly, this is not supported by the text. But Wren does us a good turn by expressing opinions that are bound to provoke debate. The G&S operas are worth discussing, worth arguing about.
He is persuasive in arguing that The Yeomen of the Guard was their last "great" opera; its successor, The Gondoliers, already shows a falling-off of technique, particularly on Gilbert's side--probably because they had already achieved all they could in the genre. All that remained was repetition.
This irritating, illuminating, absurd book demands an errata slip as long as your arm, or at least a complementary bag of salt for the reader to pinch as he reads. I turn once more to the Bibliography, and find this comment on Gilbert and Sullivan by Charles Hayter: "a hit-and-miss book, with revealing insights marred by inaccurate generalizations and flat-out errors."
Enough said.