Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan MVO was an English composer. His works include 24 operas, 11 major orchestral works, ten choral works and oratorios, two ballets, incidental music to several plays, and numerous church pieces, songs, and piano and chamber pieces. He is best known for 14 operatic collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert.
About Arthur Sullivan in brief
Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan MVO was an English composer. His works include 24 operas, 11 major orchestral works, ten choral works and oratorios, two ballets, incidental music to several plays, and numerous church pieces, songs, and piano and chamber pieces. He is best known for 14 operatic collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, including H. M. S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado. The son of a military bandmaster, Sullivan composed his first anthem at the age of eight and was later a soloist in the boys’ choir of the Chapel Royal. He was awarded the first Mendelssohn Scholarship by the Royal Academy of Music, which allowed him to study at the academy and then at the Leipzig Conservatoire in Germany. Sullivan’s only grand opera, Ivanhoe, though initially successful in 1891, has rarely been revived. In his last decade Sullivan continued to compose comic operas with various librettists and wrote other major and minor works. He died at the aged of 58, regarded as Britain’s foremost composer. Sullivan was born in Lambeth, London, the younger of the two children, both boys, of Thomas Sullivan and his wife, Mary Clementina née Coghlan. His father was a militarybandmaster, clarinettist and music teacher, born in Ireland and raised in Chelsea, London; his mother was English born, of Irish and Italian descent. Sullivan composed an anthem, \”By the Waters of Babylon\”, when he was eight.
He also composed two cantatas, The Martyr of Antioch and The Golden Legend, his most popular choral work. In 1866 Sullivan composed a one-act comic opera, Cox and Box, which is still widely performed. Sullivan’s infrequent serious pieces during the 1880s included two cant atas, The Marty of Antioch and TheGolden Legend. Sullivan also wrote incidental music for West End productions of several Shakespeare plays, and held conducting and academic appointments. Despite concerns that he was too old to give voice, at nearly 12 years of age he was promoted to headmaster of the Royal Chapel Royal choir. Despite his parents and his parents’ concerns, he was soon accepted as a treble voice and soon became a voice soloist. He wrote his first opera, Thespis, in 1871. Four years later, the impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte engaged Gilbert and Sullivan to create aOne-act piece, Trial by Jury. Its box-office success led to a series of twelve full-length comicOperas by the collaborators. Among the best known of the later operas are The Mikados and The Gondoliers. In 1890, Gilbert broke from Sullivan and Carte in 1890, after a quarrel over expenses at the Savoy. They reunited in the 1890s for two more operas,. They did not achieve the popularity of their earlier works.
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