“The Best of Gilbert and Sullivan”

That awful "Mikado"? I know nothing about opera but I have heard about that one. I downloaded it and tried to like it but I just couldn't. I do like classical music but I can't bear opera. I do know that it takes a tremendous amount of talent to produce the sound that opera singers produce. It takes talent and hard work and dedication but, to my ears, the results are not good. They are almost comical, in fact. I've tried but I cannot cultivate the taste for opera.

Mike was handsome in that episode but really couldn't they have found a better album for him than the "Best of G & S"?"

It’s not opera. It’s operetta.

The Sun Whose Rays is their best song.

The entire finale to the first act of Iolanthe is genius. Pure genius, without any let up for almost an half an hour.

r5

Like the part in the Wizard of Oz that starts "It really was no miracle it happend just like this..."

They explain why the Kardashians have money and I don't.

See how the Fates their gifts allot

For A is happy, B is not

Yet B is worthy, I dare say

Of more prosperity than A

Pirates of Penzance, HMS Pinafore, Mikado

It was actually The Best of Gilbert O'Sullivan.

Draw your own conclusions.

Well, three little maids of course.

And the song that goes "Let the punishment fit the crime."

R5 Iolanthe is my favorite G&S work. It’s musically closer to a comic opera than an operetta. That first act finale sequence is reminiscent of the long finale of the second act of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. For me, the Iolanthe finale is diminished only by Sullivan’s reliance on an Edwardian music hall-type melody at the very end, something which, like the patter song earlier in Act 1, must have been required for G&S theatre goers.

R11 I hear what you say but I think that Sullivan got away with those occasionally obvious melodies -- the fact that they have such a strong beat is part of what makes them still popular today. What other popular music from that time is still played today with such frequency (or, for that matter, at all)?

Sullivan bemoaned that he would only be known for these operettas, and his friends constantly told him to compose more serious stuff -- which he did, but it's really not that good. This is what he did best, and he was wise to keep it going all the way to the end, where, however, everything finally fell apart. The Grand Duke, which I've never heard, is supposed to be appalling.

r12 no way

I find it interesting that Gilbert, though he made jokes about middle-aged women in love, would still write lyrics for sympathetic songs, as in Pirates of Penzance, Patience and The Mikado.