"Пираты Пензанса: Комикалық опера"

1879 comic opera by Gilbert & Sullivan

The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty is a comic opera in two acts, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. Its official premiere was at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York City on 31 December 1879, where it was well received by both audiences and critics. Its London debut was on 3 April 1880, at the Opera Comique, where it ran for 363 performances. The story concerns Frederic, who, having completed his 21st year, is released from his apprenticeship to a band of tender hearted pirates. He meets the daughters of Major General Stanley, including Mabel, and the two young people fall instantly in love. Frederic soon learns, however, that he was born on 29 February, and so, technically, he has a birthday only once each leap year. His indenture specifies that he remain apprenticed to the pirates until his "twenty first birthday", meaning that he must serve for another 63 years. Bound by his own sense of duty, Frederic's only solace is that Mabel agrees to wait for him faithfully. Pirates was the fifth Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration and introduced the much parodied "Major General's Song". The opera was performed for over a century by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in Britain and by many other opera companies and repertory companies worldwide. Modernized productions include Joseph Papp's 1981 Broadway production, which ran for 787 performances, winning the Tony Award for Best Revival and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical, and spawning many imitations and a 1983 film adaptation. Pirates remains popular today, taking its place along with The Mikado and H. M. S. Pinafore as one of the most frequently played Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

The Pirates of Penzance was the only Gilbert and Sullivan opera to have its official premiere in the United States. At the time, American law offered no copyright protection to foreigners. After the pair's previous opera, H. M. S. Pinafore, achieved success in London in 1878, approximately 150 American companies quickly mounted unauthorised productions that often took considerable liberties with the text and paid no royalties to the creators. Gilbert and Sullivan hoped to forestall further "copyright piracy" by mounting the first production of their next opera in America, before others could copy it, and by delaying publication of the score and libretto. They succeeded in keeping for themselves the direct profits of the first American production of The Pirates of Penzance by opening the production themselves on Broadway, prior to the London production, and they also operated profitable US touring companies of Pirates and Pinafore. Fiction and plays about pirates were ubiquitous in the 19th century. Walter Scott's The Pirate (1822) and James Fenimore Cooper's The Red Rover were key sources for the romanticised, dashing pirate image and the idea of repentant pirates. Both Gilbert and Sullivan had parodied these ideas early in their careers. Sullivan had written a comic opera, The Contrabandista, in 1867, about a hapless British tourist who is captured by bandits and forced to become their chief. Gilbert had written several comic works that involved pirates or bandits. In Gilbert's 1876 opera Princess Toto, the title character is eager to be captured by a brigand chief. Gilbert had translated Jacques Offenbach's operetta Les brigands, in 1871.

While Pinafore was running strongly at the Opera Comique in London, Gilbert was eager to get started on his and Sullivan's next opera, and he began working on the libretto in December 1878. He re used several elements of his 1870 one act piece, Our Island Home, which had introduced a pirate "chief", Captain Bang. Bang was mistakenly apprenticed to a pirate band as a child by his deaf nursemaid. Also, Bang, like Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance, had never seen a woman before and felt a keen sense of duty, as an apprenticed pirate, until the passage of his 21st birthday freed him from his articles of indenture. Bernard Shaw believed that Gilbert drew on ideas in Les brigands for his new libretto, including the businesslike bandits and the bumbling police. Gilbert and Sullivan also inserted into Act II an idea they first considered for a one act opera parody in 1876 about burglars meeting police, while their conflict escapes the notice of the oblivious father of a large family of girls. As in Pinafore, "there was a wordful self descriptive set piece for Stanley ["The Major General's Song"], introducing himself much as Sir Joseph Porter had done a lugubrious comic number for the Sergeant of Police a song of confession for Ruth, the successor [to] Little Buttercup", romantic material for Frederic and Mabel, and "ensemble and chorus music in turn pretty, parodic and atmospheric." Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte met by 24 April 1879 to make plans for a production of Pinafore and the new opera in America. Carte travelled to New York in the summer of 1879 and made arrangements with theatre manager John T. Ford to present, at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, the authorised productions. He then returned to London. Meanwhile, once Pinafore became a hit in London, the author, composer and producer had the financial resources to produce future shows themselves, and they executed a plan to free themselves from their financial backers in the "Comedy Opera Company". Carte formed a new partnership with Gilbert and Sullivan to divide profits equally among themselves after the expenses of each of their shows. Sullivan wrote to a former producer, John Hollingshead of the Gaiety Theatre, saying: "You once settled a precedent for me which may just at present be of great importance to me. I asked you for the band parts of the Merry Wives of Windsor and [you] said, 'They are yours, as our run is over ' Now will you please let me have them, and the parts of Thespis also at once. I am detaining the parts of Pinafore, so that the directors shall not take them away from the Comique tomorrow, and I base my claim on the precedent you set." See Rees, p. 89. The Comedy Opera Company directors engaged another theatre to play a rival production of Pinafore, but they had no scenery. On 31 July, they sent a group of thugs to the Opera Comique to seize the scenery and props during the evening performance of Pinafore. See Ainger, p. 170 and Jacobs, pp. 124–125. Stagehands and cast members managed to ward off their backstage attackers and protect the scenery. The police arrived to restore order, and the show continued. See Stedman, pp. 170–171 and Gillan, Don. "The Fracas at the Opera Comique", The Theatre, 1 September 1879, reprinted at the Stage Beauty website, accessed 6 May 2009. See also "The Fracas at the Opera Comique", The Era, 10 August 1879, p. 5 and "The Fracas at the Opera Comique", The Leeds Mercury, 13 August 1879, p. 8. The matter was eventually settled in court, where a judge ruled in Carte's favour about two years later. See Ainger, p. 175</ref>

In November 1879, Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte sailed to America with a company of singing actors, to play both Pinafore and the new opera, including J. H. Ryley as Sir Joseph, Blanche Roosevelt as Josephine, Alice Barnett as Little Buttercup, Furneaux Cook as Dick Deadeye, Hugh Talbot as Ralph Rackstraw and Jessie Bond as Cousin Hebe, some of whom had been in the Pinafore cast in London. To these, he added some American singers, including Signor Brocolini as Captain Corcoran. Alfred Cellier came to assist Sullivan, while his brother François Cellier remained in London to conduct Pinafore there. Gilbert and Sullivan cast talented actors who were not well known stars and did not command high fees. They then tailored their operas to the particular abilities of these performers. The skill with which Gilbert and Sullivan used their performers had an effect on the audience: as critic Herman Klein wrote, "we secretly marvelled at the naturalness and ease with which [the Gilbertian quips and absurdities] were said and done. For until then no living soul had seen upon the stage such weird, eccentric, yet intensely human beings  [They] conjured into existence a hitherto unknown comic world of sheer delight." Gilbert acted as stage director for his own plays and operas. He sought naturalism in acting, which was unusual at the time, just as he strove for realistic visual elements. He deprecated self conscious interaction with the audience and insisted on a style of portrayal in which the characters were never aware of their own absurdity but were coherent internal wholes. Sullivan conducted the music rehearsals. Sullivan had sketched out the music for Pirates in England. When he arrived in New York, however, he found that he had left the sketches for Act I behind, and he had to reconstruct the first act from memory, or compose new numbers. Gilbert told a correspondent many years later that Sullivan was unable to recall his setting of the entrance of the women's chorus, so they substituted the chorus "Climbing over rocky mountain" from their earlier opera, Thespis. Sullivan's manuscript for Pirates contains pages removed from a Thespis score, with the vocal parts of this chorus altered from their original arrangement as a four part chorus. Some scholars (e. g. Tillett and Spencer, 2000) have suggested that Gilbert and Sullivan had planned all along to re use "Climbing over rocky mountain," and perhaps other parts of Thespis. They argue that Sullivan's having brought the unpublished Thespis score to New York, when there were no plans to revive Thespis, might not have been accidental. In any case, on 10 December 1879, Sullivan wrote a letter to his mother about the new opera, upon which he was hard at work in New York. "I think it will be a great success, for it is exquisitely funny, and the music is strikingly tuneful and catching." Pinafore opened in New York on 1 December 1879 and ran for the rest of December. After a reasonably strong first week, audiences quickly fell off, since most New Yorkers had already seen local productions of Pinafore. The work's title is a multi layered joke. On the one hand, Penzance was a docile seaside resort in 1879, and not the place where one would expect to encounter pirates. On the other hand, the title was also a jab at the theatrical "pirates" who had staged unlicensed productions of H. M. S. Pinafore in America. To secure the British copyright, a D'Oyly Carte touring company gave a perfunctory copyright performance of Pirates the afternoon before the New York premiere, at the Royal Bijou Theatre in Paignton, Devon, organised by Helen Lenoir, who would later marry Richard D'Oyly Carte. The cast, which was performing Pinafore in the evenings in Torquay, received some of the music for Pirates only two days beforehand. Having had only one rehearsal, they travelled to nearby Paignton for the matinee, where they read their parts from scripts carried onto the stage, making do with whatever costumes they had on hand.

Pirates premiered on 31 December 1879 in New York and was an immediate hit. Shortly thereafter, Carte sent three touring companies around the United States East Coast and Midwest, playing Pirates and Pinafore. Sullivan's prediction was correct. After a strong run in New York and several American tours, Pirates opened in London on 3 April 1880, running for 363 performances there. It remains one of the most popular G&S works. The London sets were designed by John O'Connor. The critics' notices were generally excellent in both New York and London. The character of Major General Stanley was widely taken to be a caricature of the popular general Sir Garnet Wolseley. The biographer Michael Ainger, however, doubts that Gilbert intended a caricature of Wolseley, identifying instead General Henry Turner, uncle of Gilbert's wife, as the pattern for the "modern Major General". Gilbert disliked Turner, who, unlike the progressive Wolseley, was of the old school of officers. Nevertheless, in the original London production, George Grossmith imitated Wolseley's mannerisms and appearance, particularly his large moustache, and the audience recognised the allusion. Wolseley himself, according to his biographer, took no offence at the caricature and sometimes sang "I am the very model of a modern Major General" for the private amusement of his family and friends.

The overture to The Pirates of Penzance was composed by Sullivan and his musical assistant Alfred Cellier. It follows the pattern of most Savoy opera overtures: a lively opening (the melody of "With cat like tread"), a slow middle section ("Ah, leave me not to pine alone"), and a concluding allegro in a compressed sonata form, in which the themes of "How beautifully blue the sky" and "A paradox, a paradox" are combined.

The score parodies several composers, most conspicuously Verdi. "Come, friends, who plough the sea" and "You triumph now" are burlesques of Il trovatore, and one of the best known choral passages from the finale to Act I, "Hail Poetry", is, according to the Sullivan scholar, Arthur Jacobs, a burlesque of the prayer scene, "La Vergine degli Angeli", in Verdi's La forza del destino. However, another musicologist, Nicholas Temperley, writes, "The choral outburst 'Hail, Poetry' in The Pirates of Penzance would need very little alteration to turn it into a Mozart string quartet." Another well known parody number from the work is the song for coloratura, "Poor wand'ring one", which is generally thought to burlesque Gounod's waltz songs, though the music critic of The Times called it "mock Donizetti". In a scene in Act II, Mabel addresses the police, who chant their response in the manner of an Anglican church service. Sullivan even managed to parody two composers at once. The critic Rodney Milnes describes the Major General's Act II song, "Sighing softly to the river", "as plainly inspired by – and indeed worthy of – Sullivan's hero Schubert", and Amanda Holden speaks of the song's "Schubertian water rippling accompaniment", but adds that it simultaneously spoofs Verdi's Il trovatore, with the soloist unaware of a concealed male chorus singing behind him.

Writing about patter songs, Shaw, in his capacity as a music critic, praised "the time honored lilt which Sir Arthur Sullivan, following the example of Mozart and Rossini, chose for the lists of accomplishments of the Major General in The Pirates or the Colonel in Patience." This opera contains two well known examples of Sullivan's characteristic combination of two seemingly disparate melodies. Jacobs suggests that Berlioz's La damnation de Faust, a great favourite in Sullivan's formative years, may have been the model for Sullivan's trademark contrapuntal mingling of the rapid prattle of the women's chorus in Act I ("How beautifully blue the sky") in 2/4 time with the lovers' duet in waltz time. Jacobs writes that "the whole number [shifts] with Schubertian ease from B to G and back again." In Act II, a double chorus combines the policemen's dogged tune, "When the foeman bares his steel" and the soaring line for the women, "Go, ye heroes, go to glory". In adapting the four part chorus "Climbing over rocky mountain" from Thespis for re use in Pirates, Sullivan took less trouble: he wrote only a single vocal line, suitable for soprano voices. Despite this, the number ends with another example of Sullivan's counterpoint, with the chorus singing the second melody of the piece ("Let us gaily tread the measure") while the orchestra plays the first ("Climbing over rocky mountain"). Sullivan set a particular vocal challenge for the soprano who portrays Mabel. The Sullivan scholar Gervase Hughes wrote, "Mabel must be a coloratura because of 'Poor wand'ring one! ', yet 'Dear father, why leave your bed' demands steady beauty of tone throughout the octave F to F, and 'Ah, leave me not to pine' goes a third lower still." In The Music of Arthur Sullivan (1959), Hughes quoted four extracts from Pirates, saying that if hearing each out of context one might attribute it to Schubert, Mendelssohn, Gounod or Bizet respectively, "yet on learning the truth one would kick oneself for not having recognised Sullivan's touch in all four." Hughes concluded by quoting the introductory bars of "When a felon's not engaged in his employment", adding, "There could never be any doubt as to who wrote that, and it is as English as our wonderful police themselves."

In 1980, Joseph Papp and the Public Theater of New York City produced a new version of Pirates, directed by Wilford Leach and choreographed by Graciela Daniele, at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, as a Shakespeare in the Park summer event. Musical direction and arrangements were by William Elliott. The show played for 10 previews and 35 performances. It then transferred to Broadway, opening on 8 January 1981 for a run of 20 previews and 787 regular performances at the Uris and Minskoff Theatres, the longest run for any Gilbert and Sullivan production in history. This take on Pirates earned enthusiastic reviews and seven Tony Award nominations, winning three, including the award for Best Revival and for Leach as director. It was also nominated for eight Drama Desk Awards, winning five, including Outstanding Musical and director. Compared with traditional productions of the opera, Papp's Pirates featured a more swashbuckling Pirate King and Frederic, and a broader, more musical comedy style of singing and humour. It did not significantly change the libretto, but it used a new orchestration and arrangements that changed some keys, added repeats, lengthened dance music and made other minor changes in the score. The "Matter Patter" trio from Ruddigore and "Sorry her lot" from H. M. S. Pinafore, two other Gilbert and Sullivan operas, were interpolated into the show. The Australian production opened in Melbourne in January 1984, opening the new Victorian Arts Centre, directed by John Feraro. It starred Jon English as the Pirate King, Simon Gallaher as Frederic, June Bronhill as Ruth, David Atkins as the Sergeant of Police and Marina Prior as Mabel. The six week limited season was followed by an Australian national tour from 1984 to 1986 and another tour with same cast in the mid 1990s. blockquote|[Papp's version] has been regularly revived on both sides of the Atlantic – a British revival in 2000 transferred from the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, to the Open Air Theatre in Regents' Park – and has also become well established in the repertoire of amateur student societies. No other production has had as much lasting impact or influence. It also helped to promote G&S in places where it has been little performed and bring it to the attention of a much wider and younger audience. Some modern productions are also influenced by the Disney film franchise Pirates of the Caribbean, combining aspects of the Papp production with the Disney design concepts. Not all of these revivals have generated the same enthusiasm as Papp's 1980s productions. A 1999 UK touring production received this critique: "No doubt when Papp first staged this show in New York and London it had some quality of cheek or chutzpah or pizzazz or irony or something that accounted for its success. But all that's left now is a crass Broadway style musical arrangement ground out by a seven piece band, and the worst kind of smutty send up of a historic piece of art."

Pirates is one of the most frequently referenced works of Gilbert and Sullivan. The Major General's Song, in particular, is frequently parodied, pastiched and used in advertising. Parody versions have been used in political commentary as well as entertainment media. Its challenging patter has proved interesting to comedians; notable examples include Tom Lehrer's song "The Elements" and David Hyde Pierce's monologue, as host of Saturday Night Live. In 2010, comedian Ron Butler released a YouTube pastiche of the song in character as President Obama which, as of September 2021, had garnered more than 1.9 million views. Pastiche examples include the Animaniacs version, "I am the very model of a cartoon individual", in the episode "H. M. S. Yakko"; the Doctor Who audio "I am the very model of a Gallifreyan buccaneer" in Doctor Who and the Pirates; the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip version in the episode "The Cold Open" (2006), where the cast performs "We'll be the very model of a modern network TV show"; and the Mass Effect 2 video game version, where the character Mordin Solus sings: "I am the very model of a scientist Salarian". The song is often used in film and on television, unchanged in many instances, as a character's audition piece, or seen in a "school play" scene. Examples include a VeggieTales episode entitled "The Wonderful World of Auto Tainment! "; the Frasier episode "Fathers and Sons"; The Simpsons episode "Deep Space Homer"; and the Mad About You episode "Moody Blues", where Paul directs a charity production of Penzance starring his father, Burt, as the Major General. In The Muppet Show (season 3, episode 4) guest host, comedian Gilda Radner, sings the song with a 7 feet (2 m) talking carrot (Parodying the pilot/pirate confusion in Pirates, Radner had requested a 6 feet (2 m) talking parrot, but was misheard). In an episode of Home Improvement, Al Borland begins to sing the song when tricked into thinking he is in a soundproof booth. In the Babylon 5 episode "Atonement", Marcus Cole uses the song to drive Dr Stephen Franklin crazy on a long journey to Mars. Examples of the use of the song in advertising include Martyn Green's pastiche of the song listing all of the varieties of Campbell's Soup and a 2011 Geico commercial in which a couple that wants to save money, but still listen to musicals, finds a roommate, dressed as the Major General, who awkwardly begins the song while dancing on a coffee table. Gimbels department store had a campaign sung to the tune of the Major General's Song that began, "We are the very model of a modern big department store." George Washington, in the number "Right Hand Man" from the 2015 musical Hamilton by Lin Manuel Miranda, refers to himself with irony as "The model of a modern major general", which he rhymes with "men are all" and "pedestal". Miranda commented: "I always felt like 'mineral' wasn't the best possible rhyme."

Other film references to Pirates include Kate & Leopold, where there are multiple references, including a scene where Leopold sings "I Am The Very Model of A Modern Major General" while accompanying himself on the piano; and in Pretty Woman, Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) covers a social gaffe by prostitute Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts), who comments that the opera La traviata was so good that she almost "peed [her] pants", by saying that she had said that she liked it better than The Pirates of Penzance". In Walt Disney's cartoon Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers (2004), there is a performance of Pirates that becomes the setting for the climactic battle between the Musketeers and Captain Pete. Pirates songs sung in the cartoon are "With cat like tread", "Poor wand'ring one", "Climbing over rocky mountain" and the Major General's song. "Poor wand'ring one" was used in the movie An American Tail. The soundtrack of the 1992 film The Hand That Rocks the Cradle includes "Poor Wand'ring One" and "Oh Dry the Glistening Tear". A nonsense pastiche of the Major General's song in the 2017 film Despicable Me 3, sung by Minions, was termed "amusing" and "the film's finest moment"; it was uploaded to YouTube by Illumination Entertainment as a singalong challenge, which has garnered more than 19 million views as of 2023. Television references, in addition to those mentioned above, included the series The West Wing, where Pirates and other Gilbert and Sullivan operas are mentioned in several episodes, especially by Deputy Communications Director, Sam Seaborn, who was recording secretary of his school's Gilbert and Sullivan society. In Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a poster from Pirates hangs on Matt Albie's office wall. Both TV series were created by Aaron Sorkin. In the pilot episode of the 2008 CTV series Flashpoint, a police officer and his partner sing the policeman's song. In an Assy McGee episode entitled "Pegfinger", Detective Sanchez's wife is a member of a community theatre that performs the opera. In a 1986 episode of the animated television adaptation of The Wind in the Willows entitled A Producer's Lot, several characters put on a production of Pirates. In a 2005 Family Guy episode "Peter's Got Woods", Brian Griffin sings "Sighing Softly", with Peter Griffin's assistance. In a 2012 episode, "Killer Queen", Peter gives a garbled rendition of the Major General's Song. In the 2009 Criminal Minds episode "The Slave of Duty", Hotch quotes "Oh dry the glist'ning tear". In the 1992 episode "The Understudy" of Clarissa Explains it All, the title character is chosen to understudy Mabel in a school production of Pirates and is unprepared when she must go on; a scene from The Mikado is also heard.

Other notable instances of references to Pirates include a New York Times article on 29 February 1940, memorialising that Frederic was finally out of his indentures. Six years previously, the arms granted to the municipal borough of Penzance in 1934 contain a pirate dressed in Gilbert's original costuming, and Penzance had a rugby team called the Penzance Pirates, which is now called the Cornish Pirates. In 1980, Isaac Asimov wrote a short story called "The Gilbert & Sullivan Mystery" (later retitled "The Year of the Action"), concerning whether the action of Pirates took place on 1 March 1873, or 1 March 1877 (depending on whether Gilbert took into account the fact that 1900 was not a leap year). The plot of Laurie R. King's 2011 novel Pirate King centers on a 1924 silent movie adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance. The music from the chorus of "With cat like tread", which begins "Come, friends, who plough the sea," was used in the popular American song, "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here." "With cat like tread" is also part of the soundtrack, along with other Gilbert and Sullivan songs, in the 1981 film, Chariots of Fire, and it was pastiched in the "HMS Yakko" episode of Animaniacs in a song about surfing a whale. In the case Pierson v. Ray, which established the doctrine of qualified immunity for police officers, the United States Supreme Court held that "[a] policeman's lot is not so unhappy that he must choose between being charged with dereliction of duty if he does not arrest when he had probable cause, and being punished with damages if he does." State courts have cited the same song for other purposes: "Where does this extraordinary situation leave the lower Courts and State Courts in their required effort to apply the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States ? Like the policeman in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance, their 'lot is not a happy one.'"