Arthur Sullivan ─ A Musical Reappraisal

Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) was Victorian Britain’s most celebrated and popular composer, whose music still to this day reaches a wider audience than any of his contemporaries. Yet the comic operas on which Sullivan’s reputation is chiefly based have been consistently belittled or ignored by the British musicological establishment, while his serious works have until recently remained virtually unknown. The time is thus long overdue for serious scholarly reengagement with Sullivan. Building on over a decade of research, Benedict Taylor offers a new appraisal of the music of this most famous nineteenth-century British composer, combining close analytical attention to his music with critical consideration of the wider aesthetic and social context. Focusing on key pieces in all the major genres in which Sullivan composed, it includes accounts of his most important serious works - the music to The Tempest, the Symphony, The Golden Legend, Ivanhoe - alongside detailed examination of the celebrated comic operas created with W.S. Gilbert to present a balanced portrayal of Sullivan’s musical achievement.

Benedict Taylor is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Music, a Senior Research Fellow of New College and Lecturer at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He studied music at the Universities of Cambridge and King’s College London, and subsequently held fellowships at Heidelberg, Princeton and Berlin. He is the author of Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and has published articles on a variety of music in such journals as 19th-Century Music, The Journal of Musicology and Music Theory Spectrum.