Talking About Trial by Jury
Opera North has a new production of Trial by Jury by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, as part of its season of Little Greats one-act operas.
As I'm a Yorkshire lad myself (from Bradford), the author of a biography of Gilbert, and the Secretary of the W.S. Gilbert Society, I think it's more or less compulsory for me to say a few words about it. This is going to be purely from the Gilbert perspective, of course - because that's what I know. Sullivan's music is gorgeous, brilliant, hilarious, and perfectly matched to the words: it's just that I am not expert enough in music to comment on it in detail.
W.S. Gilbert was a writer through and through. From 1861 onwards he was a professional cartoonist and comic writer for the humorous and satirical paper Fun (a then rival of Punch). In November 1863 he was "called to the Bar" and for a few years after that he was technically a barrister, both in London and, for some time in 1866 and 1867, on the Northern Circuit in Liverpool and Manchester. But he was never very good at it; he later admitted: "I was always a clumsy and inefficient speaker, and, moreover, an unconquerable nervousness prevented me from doing justice to myself or my half-dozen unfortunate clients." In the meantime, he was making a name for himself both for his work at Fun and for his stage burlesques.
Gilbert never really took his work as a barrister very seriously. Even before his call to the Bar, when he was attending cases as pupil to the barrister Charles James Watkin Williams (who some years later, in 1884, died at a brothel in Nottingham), Gilbert employed his time in court sketching the lawyers with a humorous eye (Fun, 16 & 23 May 1863):
Later, when he became a fully fledged barrister himself, he was even capable of criticising his fellow barristers by name, and publishing caricatures of them, when he thought they deserved it (Fun, 12 March 1864):
By 1868 Gilbert's legal career (such as it was) had been more or less abandoned, because he was earning far more from his writing. But his experiences in court stayed with him, and on 11 April 1868 Fun published a one-page skit called "Trial By Jury: An Operetta":
It's easy to imagine his long boring hours in court relieved by imagining its solemnity broken by silly operetta tunes and lines of singing, dancing lawyers. What was published in Fun that day really was a short, first draft of the piece Sullivan was to set seven years later:
You can find the whole thing here.
In 1873, Gilbert was approached by Carl Rosa, who had just set up an opera company to perform works in English, to write a one-act libretto. Gilbert spruced up and expanded "Trial by Jury", but the scheme never came to fruition because of the death of Rosa's wife, Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa.
When at the start of 1875 up-and-coming impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte was in search of a one-act piece to conclude his evening of comic opera at the Royalty Theatre, he remembered Gilbert having previously mentioned the libretto he had written for Rosa.
One of the first books about Sir Arthur Sullivan was written by Arthur Lawrence, based on interviews with the composer, and published in 1899, very shortly before his death. Here is what Sullivan recalled of his first encounter with the piece:
The opera was, to make no more secret of the matter, a big hit. I'm not going to quote the reviews, but they were pretty good. Gilbert and Sullivan had collaborated before - on the Christmas entertainment Thespis (now mostly lost) and on a small handful of drawing-room ballads, the best of which is probably "Sweethearts." But it was with Trial by Jury that their future together became a talking point (due also in part to their new involvement with the ambitious Richard D'Oyly Carte).
There's always been a lot of discussion, in the kind of circles where this kind of thing matters, as to whether Gilbert was a "real" satirist or just someone who made jokes about the establishment without meaning it. It's a big topic, too big to go into here, and indeed I almost regret bringing the subject up. But I might condense my answer down into a brief abstract and say: "He was a bit of both." His jokes really are funny, which tends to suggest there's a lack of "savage indignation", that most tedious of things. Nevertheless, there is real anger somewhere in there, and we would be unwise to assume his sometimes very pointed jibes were not meant, just because they are jokes.
In 1906, Gilbert wrote in a letter: "I met [Sir Arthur] Kekewich [a Chancery Judge] the other day. He says he likes all my plays except Trial by Jury. He seemed to think that in holding the proceedings up to ridicule I was trenching on his prerogative."
Andrew Crowther
Hon Secretary, W.S. Gilbert Society
http://www.andrewcrowther.co.uk/
As I'm a Yorkshire lad myself (from Bradford), the author of a biography of Gilbert, and the Secretary of the W.S. Gilbert Society, I think it's more or less compulsory for me to say a few words about it. This is going to be purely from the Gilbert perspective, of course - because that's what I know. Sullivan's music is gorgeous, brilliant, hilarious, and perfectly matched to the words: it's just that I am not expert enough in music to comment on it in detail.
W.S. Gilbert was a writer through and through. From 1861 onwards he was a professional cartoonist and comic writer for the humorous and satirical paper Fun (a then rival of Punch). In November 1863 he was "called to the Bar" and for a few years after that he was technically a barrister, both in London and, for some time in 1866 and 1867, on the Northern Circuit in Liverpool and Manchester. But he was never very good at it; he later admitted: "I was always a clumsy and inefficient speaker, and, moreover, an unconquerable nervousness prevented me from doing justice to myself or my half-dozen unfortunate clients." In the meantime, he was making a name for himself both for his work at Fun and for his stage burlesques.
Gilbert never really took his work as a barrister very seriously. Even before his call to the Bar, when he was attending cases as pupil to the barrister Charles James Watkin Williams (who some years later, in 1884, died at a brothel in Nottingham), Gilbert employed his time in court sketching the lawyers with a humorous eye (Fun, 16 & 23 May 1863):
Later, when he became a fully fledged barrister himself, he was even capable of criticising his fellow barristers by name, and publishing caricatures of them, when he thought they deserved it (Fun, 12 March 1864):
In 1873, Gilbert was approached by Carl Rosa, who had just set up an opera company to perform works in English, to write a one-act libretto. Gilbert spruced up and expanded "Trial by Jury", but the scheme never came to fruition because of the death of Rosa's wife, Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa.
When at the start of 1875 up-and-coming impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte was in search of a one-act piece to conclude his evening of comic opera at the Royalty Theatre, he remembered Gilbert having previously mentioned the libretto he had written for Rosa.
One of the first books about Sir Arthur Sullivan was written by Arthur Lawrence, based on interviews with the composer, and published in 1899, very shortly before his death. Here is what Sullivan recalled of his first encounter with the piece:
The opera was, to make no more secret of the matter, a big hit. I'm not going to quote the reviews, but they were pretty good. Gilbert and Sullivan had collaborated before - on the Christmas entertainment Thespis (now mostly lost) and on a small handful of drawing-room ballads, the best of which is probably "Sweethearts." But it was with Trial by Jury that their future together became a talking point (due also in part to their new involvement with the ambitious Richard D'Oyly Carte).
There's always been a lot of discussion, in the kind of circles where this kind of thing matters, as to whether Gilbert was a "real" satirist or just someone who made jokes about the establishment without meaning it. It's a big topic, too big to go into here, and indeed I almost regret bringing the subject up. But I might condense my answer down into a brief abstract and say: "He was a bit of both." His jokes really are funny, which tends to suggest there's a lack of "savage indignation", that most tedious of things. Nevertheless, there is real anger somewhere in there, and we would be unwise to assume his sometimes very pointed jibes were not meant, just because they are jokes.
In 1906, Gilbert wrote in a letter: "I met [Sir Arthur] Kekewich [a Chancery Judge] the other day. He says he likes all my plays except Trial by Jury. He seemed to think that in holding the proceedings up to ridicule I was trenching on his prerogative."
Andrew Crowther
Hon Secretary, W.S. Gilbert Society
http://www.andrewcrowther.co.uk/
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