I Have Landed (13 page)

I have thus lived, for several decades, in the ambiguity of many Savoyards: feeling a bit sheepish, even apologetic, given my vaunted status as a card-carrying intellectual, about my infatuation for this prototypical vestige of lowbrow entertainment imbued, at best, with middlebrow pretensions. Two major themes fueled my fear that this continued affection could only represent a misplaced fealty to my own youth, based on a refusal to acknowledge that such unworthy flowers could only seem glorious before the realities of life spread like crabgrass through the splendor of adolescent turf.

First, some of Gilbert's texts do strike a modern audience as silly and forced—as in the seemingly endless punning on “orphan” versus “often” in
The Pirates of Penzance
, though no worse, really, or longer for that matter, than the opening dialogue about cobbling in
Julius Caesar
, with its similar takes on “soul” versus “sole” and “awl” versus “all.” Perhaps the whole corpus never rises above such textual juvenility. Creeping doubt might then generate a corresponding fear that most of Sullivan's music, however witty and affecting to the Victorian ear, must now be downgraded as either mawkish (as in his “Lost Chord,” once widely regarded as the greatest song ever written, but now forgotten), or pompous (as in his “Onward Christian Soldiers”).

Second, evidence of declining public attention might fuel these fears about quality. While scarcely extinct, or even moribund, Gilbert and Sullivan's works have surely retreated to a periphery of largely amateur performance, spiced now and again by an acclaimed, but transient, professional foray, often in highly altered form (Joseph Papp's rock version of
The Pirates of Penzance
, or the revival of a favorite from the 1930s,
The Hot Mikado
, in the ultimate historical venue for terminations, Washington, D.C.'s Ford's Theater). England's D'Oyly Carte Opera, Gilbert and Sullivan's original company, performed for more than one hundred years, but expired about a decade ago from a synergistic mixture of public indifference and embarrassingly poor performances. And America's finest professional troupe, the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players, seems to mock this acknowledged decline in status by their own featured acronym of GASP.

And yet, despite occasional frissons of doubt, I have never credited these negative assessments, and I continue to believe that the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan prevailed over a vast graveyard of contemporary (and later) works—including the efforts of such truly talented composers as Victor Herbert and Sigmund Romberg—because they embody the elusive quality of
absolute excellence, the goal of all our creative work, and the hardest of human attributes to nurture, or even to define.

Peter Rainer, reviewing
Topsy Turvy
for
New York
magazine, intended only praise in writing, “The beauty of Gilbert and Sullivan's art, which is also its mystery, is that, gloriously minor, it's more redolent and lasting than many works regarded as major.” But we will never gain a decent understanding of excellence if we continue to use this standard distinction between major and minor forms of art as our primary taxonomic device.

We live in a fractal world, where scales that we choose to designate as major (a great tenor at the Metropolitan Opera, for example) hold no intrinsically higher merit than styles traditionally judged as vernacular or minor (a self-taught banjo player on a country porch, for example). Each scale builds a corral of exactly the same shape to hold all progeny of its genre; and each corral reserves a tiny corner for its few products of absolute excellence. To continue this metaphor, a magnified photo of this corner for a “minor” art cannot be distinguished from the same corner for a “major” art seen through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. And if these two photos, mounted on a wall at the same scale, cannot be told apart, then we must seek a different criterion for judgment based on the common morphology of scale-independent excellence.

As a man with Darwinian training, I do admit a bias toward accepting long survival as the first rough criterion in our guidebook for identifying species of true excellence. I continue to regard as sagacious a childhood bet that I made with my brother, although he never paid up—that Beethoven would outlast the rock hit of that particular moment, “Roll Over Beethoven.” But if we must set aside the spurious correlation of minor with transient and major with enduring, and then take the more radical step of rejecting the taxonomy of major versus minor altogether, then the mystery surrounding the survival of Gilbert and Sullivan cannot be ascribed to the minor status of their chosen genre. And yet the mystery remains, and even intensifies, when thus stripped of its customary context. Why their work, and no others of the time? And if excellence be the common substrate of such endurance, how can we recognize this most elusive quality
before
the test of time provides a merely empirical confirmation?

I have no original insight to propose on this question of questions, but I can offer a quirky little personal testimony about Gilbert and Sullivan that might, at best, focus some useful discussion. Unless a creative person entirely abjures any goal or desire to communicate his efforts to fellow human beings, then I suspect that all truly excellent works must exist simultaneously on two planes—and must be constructed (whether consciously or not) in such duality. I also confess to the elitist view that the novel and distinguishing aspect of excellent
works will be fully accessible to very few consumers—initially, perhaps, to none at all.

Two reasons regulate this “higher” plane: the motivating concept may be novel beyond any power of contemporary comprehension (“ahead of its time,” in a common but misleading phrase, for time marks no necessary incrementation of quality, and the first recorded human art, the 35,000-year-old cave paintings of Chauvet, matches Picasso at its best); or the virtuosity of execution may extend beyond the discriminatory powers of all but a very few viewers or listeners.

But, on the second, vernacular plane, excellent works must exude the potential to be felt as superior (albeit not fully known) to consumers with sufficient dedication and experience to merit the accolade of “fan.” A serious but untutored devotee of music in mid-eighteenth-century Leipzig should have been able to attend services at the Thomaskirche, hear the works of J. S. Bach, and recognize them as something weirdly, excruciatingly, and fascinatingly different from anything ever heard before. For the second criterion of virtuosity, a modern fan of opera might hear (as I did) Domingo, Voigt, and Salminan, under Levine and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, in the first act of
Die Walküre
—and just know, without being able to say why, that he had heard something surpassingly rare and transcendent.

I think that all geniuses “out of time”—if they do not go mad—consciously construct their works on these two planes, one accessible to reasonably skilled aficionados of the moment, and one for Plato's realm (and for possible future comprehension). Thus, on the vernacular plane, Bach had to accept whatever reputation (and salary) he could muster in his own time and parochial place by becoming the premier organ virtuoso of his age (a vain annoyance to many who hated the bravado and loathed the encrusting of beloved tunes with such frills of improvisation, but a source of awe and respect for the relative cognoscenti). Moreover, since Bach composed in an age that had not yet formulated our modern concept of the individual genius as an innovator, we cannot even know how he understood his own uniqueness—beyond observing that this superiority had not escaped his notice. Then, on Plato's plane, Bach could write for the angels. And Darwin had to content himself with making an explicit division of his life's work into a comprehensible vernacular plane for all educated people (the factual basis of evolution) and a second plane that even his most dedicated supporters could not grasp in all its subtle complexity (the theory of natural selection, based on a radical philosophy that inverted all previous notions about organic history and design).

This problem of composition on two planes becomes even more explicit and severe for any artist working in a genre designated as “popular” in our peculiar
taxonomies of human creativity. The master of an elite genre does not aim for widespread appeal in any case—so the vernacular plane of his duality already permits a great deal of rarefied complexity (and his second plane can be as personal and as arcane as he desires). But the equal master of a popular genre must build his vernacular plane in a far more accessible place of significantly lesser complexity. How much higher, then, can his second plane ascend before the two levels lose all potential contact, and the work dissolves into incoherence?

Finally, I must preface my thoughts about Gilbert and Sullivan with one further and vital caveat. My confessed elitism remains entirely democratic—for structural rather than ethical reasons. (I happen to embrace the ethical reasons as well, but the structural claim embodies the premise that excellence cannot be achieved without such respect for the sensibility of consumers.) No person can achieve excellence in a popular genre without a rigorous and undeviating commitment to providing a personal best at all times. At the first moment of compromise—the first “dumbing down” for “easier” or “wider” acceptability, the first boilerplating for reasons of simple weariness or an overcommitted schedule—one simply falls into the abyss. (I rarely speak so harshly, but I do believe that this particular gate remains so strait, and this special path so narrow.) The difference between elite and popular genres bears no relationship whatever to any notion of absolute quality. This common distinction between genres is purely sociological. Excellence remains as rare and as precious in either category. The pinnacle of supernal achievement holds no more DiMaggios to play center field than Domingos to inquire about the location of Wälse's sword.

And so, I simply submit that Gilbert and Sullivan have survived for the best and most defendable of all reasons: their work bears a unique stamp of excellence, best illustrated by its optimal and simultaneous functioning on both levels—on the vernacular plane of accessibility to all people who like the genre (for these works tickle the funnybone, delight the muse of melody, and expose, in a gentle but incisive way, the conceits and foibles of all people and cultures); and on Plato's plane, by the most fiendishly clever union of music and versification ever accomplished in the English language. Moreover, since excellence demands both full respect and undivided attention to consumers at both levels, the uncanny genius of Gilbert and Sullivan rests largely upon their skill in serving these two audiences with, I must assume, a genuine affection for the different and equal merits of their product in both realms.

Sullivan has often been depicted as a man yearning to fulfill his supposed destiny as England's greatest classical composer since the immigrant Handel, or the earlier native Purcell—a higher spirit tethered to a more earthly Gilbert only for practical and pecuniary reasons generated by the tables of Monte Carlo
and his other expensive vices. Part of his character (a rather small part, I suspect), abetted by the sanctimonious urgings of proper society (especially after Victoria dubbed him Sir Arthur, but left his partner as mere Mr. Gilbert), pulled him toward “serious” composition, but love beyond need, and a good nose for the locus of his own superior skills, led him to resist the blandishments of “higher” callings unsuited to his special gifts.

Gilbert, though often, and wrongly, cast as an acerbic martinet, came to better personal terms with the genre favored by his own muse. He supervised every detail of staging, and rehearsed his performers to the point of exhaustion. But they honored Gilbert's fierce commitment, and gave him all their loyalty, because they also knew his unfailing respect for their professionalism. Flaccid concord does not build an optimal foundation for surpassing achievement in any case.

The particular intensity of this “two level” problem for creating excellence in mass entertainment has always infused the genre—surely more so today (when the least common denominator for general appeal stands so low) than in Gilbert and Sullivan's time, when Shakespearean references, and even a Latin quip or two, might work on the vernacular plane. Chuck Jones, with Bugs Bunny and his pals at Looney Tunes, holds first prize for the twentieth century, but Disney, at his best, set the standard for works that function, without any contradiction or compromise, both as unoffensive sweetness for innocent children at one level, and as mordant and sardonic commentaries, informed by immense technical skill in animation, for sophisticated adults.

Gilbert's drawing of his Sorceror, John Wellington Wells
.

Pinocchio
(1940) must rank as the first masterpiece in this antic style of dual entertainment. But Disney then lost the way (probably in a conscious and politically motivated decision), as saccharine commercialism, replete with pandering that precluded excellence at either level, enveloped most of his studio's work. But a recent film rediscovered this wonderful and elusive path:
Toy Story II
, a sweet fable with brilliant animation for kids, and a rather dark, though still comic, tale for adults about life in a world of Scylla and Charybdis, with no real pathway between (leading to the ultimate existential message of “just keep truckin'.” Our hero, a “collectible” cowboy modeled on an early TV star, must either stay with the boy who now loves him, and resign himself to eventual residence and dismemberment on the scrap heap, or go with his fellow TV buddies, whom he has just met in joyous discovery of his own origins, to permanent display in Japan—that is, to immortality in the antisepsis of a glass display case).