Lost Chords and Christian Soldiers: The Sacred Music of Sir Arthur Sullivan by Ian C. Bradley

Abstract

Lost Chords and Christian Soldiers: The Sacred Music of Sir Arthur Sullivan by Ian C. Bradley Julian Onderdonk Lost Chords and Christian Soldiers: The Sacred Music of Sir Arthur Sullivan. By Ian C. Bradley. London: SCM Press, 2013. [xii, 239 p. ISBN 9780334044215. £25] Appendices, bibliography, discography, index. Few serious composers have suffered as much as Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) from their association with “light music.” Collaborating with W. S. Gilbert on the celebrated Savoy operas—The Mikado, The [End Page 345] Pirates of Penzance, Trial by Jury, and others—Sullivan achieved enormous fame and earned a reputation as a musician of unsurpassed grace and wit. Such accolades were typically double-edged, however, and were often accompanied by regret that a composer of such promise should waste his talent on mere “fooling.” Sullivan himself felt the truth of the criticism and throughout his career endeavored to silence his detractors with “serious” cantatas and odes, songs, orchestral and chamber music, and even a grand opera. These works were successful to a degree, but their popularity began to wane in the early twentieth century in the wake of a general reaction against all things Victorian. Indeed, the theory grew up in these years that Sullivan had not merely prostituted himself but was, in fact, constitutionally incapable of writing anything but insincere and vulgar music. The lightweight frivolity of the Savoy operas, and the mawkish sentimentality of parlor favorites like “The Lost Chord,” seemed for many to mark his true métier as a composer, with the consequence that his serious music, itself shaped by a similar Victorian aesthetic, was dismissed as a matter of course. These critics reserved special censure for Sullivan’s sacred music: the anthems, hymn tunes, sacred cantatas, oratorios, and songs that likewise partook of this emotional world. Part of their complaint was with the outright sentimentalism of Victorian popular religion itself, the endless procession of guardian angels, heavenly thoughts, and “sacred” hearths and homes that directly inspired Sullivan’s lilting melodies and syrupy harmonies. But the composer’s materialism and worldliness, his notorious womanizing and gambling, played its part too, suggesting an element of false piety in these works and ultimately fueling the charge of artistic insincerity. According to Ian Bradley, however, Sullivan’s religious faith was genuine, the product of a “spiritual quality of innocence” (p. 13) and a principled Broad Church liberalism that stressed a non-dogmatic approach to the gospels. If worldly pleasures prompted him to emphasize the secular in his music, still a strong “spiritual yearning” remained (p. 183). As he put it in an 1885 newspaper interview: “My sacred music is that on which I base my reputation as a composer. These works are the offspring of my liveliest fancy, the children of my greatest strength, the products of my most earnest thought and most incessant toil” (p. 1). Bradley is fighting a series of overlapping prejudices here, and he wisely tackles them one chapter at a time. First is the strong bias against Sullivan’s music, the blame for which he lays squarely at the feet of an elitist British musical establishment long suspicious of popular and material success. (He makes an interesting analogy between Sullivan and another industrious Englishman of the popular theater, Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose music has likewise been reviled by critics.) Second is the sentimentality of Victorian religious culture itself, which he engagingly explains and defends with reference to tumultuous times. Here, the social upheavals of the industrial revolution, the strict antimaterialism of the romantic movement, above all the nineteenth-century crisis of faith (to which an exaggerated religious expression would seem to be a kind of counterintuitive and counterfactual response) are all seen to play their part. A third, biographical chapter tracing the composer’s years as a boy chorister in the Chapel Royal provides an opportunity to explore Sullivan’s staunch royalism and the worldliness that developed partly as a consequence of the aristocratic contacts he made there. But Bradley also makes it clear that the experience introduced him to some of the most important figures in Anglican musical circles—Thomas Helmore, Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley, Joseph Barnby, and John Stainer among them—and asserts...