Post by ellynmacg on Jan 7, 2018 9:17:31 GMT
I'm not a big fan of Gilbert's and Sullivan's operettas, in part because I'm not a big fan of operetta as a musical genre to start with, in spite of a few honorable exceptions (like Offenbach's which I generally like, and a few of the Viennese ones).
Satyagraha, as someone who is a big fan (for over fifty years) of G&S, I hope you'll excuse my correcting you: the works of Gilbert and Sullivan (as a team) should not be classified--no matter how often they are--as operettas. They are more properly described as "comic operas" or "light operas"--although probably the most precise term (because it sets G&S apart from Mozart and other sometime composers of comic opera) is "the Savoy operas", after the theater where most of them were first produced. What's the difference? There are many differences, but let's start off with these two. First: operettas, though they may have many humorous moments, take themselves seriously; the Savoy operas, though they had occasional serious moments--and one of them, The Yeomen of the Guard, has an arguably tragic ending--do not take themselves seriously. Second: in operetta (including the works of Victor Herbert, Franz Lehar, and Johann Strauss,Jr.), the music is of paramount importance; in G&S, the words are just as important as, if not more than, the music. Even well over a century after their debuts, one still hears quotations from Gilbert's lyrics (without including the music); when was the last time anyone used a quotation from, for instance, Rida Johnson Young, one of Victor Herbert's most frequent lyricists--without also singing the tune it was set to?
Sorry for the long-winded correction/explanation, but, as I indicated earlier, G&S is highly important to me.
Obsessed? Why ever would you say a thing like that?
