page_title: Trial by Jury
section_title: Genesis of the opera
hierarchical_section_title: Trial by Jury / Background / Genesis of the opera
caption_attribution_description: Gilbert's original draft of Trial by Jury: A short comic piece published in Fun 1868.
context_page_description: Trial by Jury is a comic opera in one act, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It was first produced on 25 March 1875, at London's Royalty Theatre, where it initially ran for 131 performances and was considered a hit, receiving critical praise and outrunning its popular companion piece, Jacques Offenbach's La Périchole. The story concerns a "breach of promise of marriage" lawsuit in which the judge and legal system are the objects of lighthearted satire. Gilbert based the libretto of Trial by Jury on an operetta parody that he had written in 1868.
  The opera premiered more than three years after Gilbert and Sullivan's only previous collaboration, Thespis, an 1871–72 Christmas season entertainment. In the intervening years, both the author and composer were busy with separate projects. Beginning in 1873, Gilbert tried several times to get the opera produced before the impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte suggested that he collaborate on it with Sullivan. Sullivan was pleased with the piece and promptly wrote the music.
context_section_description: The genesis of Trial by Jury began in 1868, when Gilbert wrote a single-page illustrated comic piece for the magazine Fun entitled Trial by Jury: An Operetta.  Drawing on Gilbert's training and brief practice as a barrister, it detailed a "breach of promise" trial going awry, in the process spoofing the law, lawyers and the legal system.  (In the Victorian era, a man could be required to pay compensation should he fail to marry a woman to whom he was engaged.) The outline of this story was followed in the later opera, and two of its numbers appeared in nearly their final form in Fun.  The skit, however, ended abruptly: the moment the attractive plaintiff stepped into the witness box, the judge leapt into her arms and vowed to marry her, whereas in the opera, the case is allowed to proceed further before this conclusion is reached.
  In 1873, the opera manager and composer Carl Rosa asked Gilbert for a piece to use as part of a season of English opera that Rosa planned to present at the Drury Lane Theatre; Rosa was to write or commission the music. Gilbert expanded Trial into a one-act libretto. Rosa's wife, Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, a childhood friend of Gilbert's, died after an illness in 1874, and Rosa dropped the project. Later in the same year, Gilbert offered the libretto to the impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte, but Carte knew of no composer available to set it to music.
  Meanwhile, Sullivan may have been considering a return to light opera: Cox and Box, his first comic opera, had received a London revival (co-starring his brother, Fred Sullivan) in September 1874.  In November, Sullivan travelled to Paris and contacted Albert Millaud, one of the librettists for Jacques Offenbach's operettas.  However, he returned to London empty-handed and worked on incidental music for the Gaiety Theatre's production of The Merry Wives of Windsor.  By early 1875, Carte was managing Selina Dolaro's Royalty Theatre, and he needed a short opera to be played as an afterpiece to Offenbach's La Périchole, which was to open on 30 January (with Fred Sullivan in the cast), in which Dolaro starred.  Carte had asked Sullivan to compose something for the theatre and advertised in The Times in late January: "In Preparation, a New Comic Opera composed expressly for this theatre by Mr. Arthur Sullivan in which Madame Dolaro and Nellie Bromley will appear."  But around the same time, Carte also remembered Gilbert's Trial by Jury and knew that Gilbert had worked with Sullivan to create Thespis.  He suggested to Gilbert that Sullivan was the man to write the music for Trial.
  Gilbert finally called on Sullivan and read the libretto to him on 20 February 1875.  Sullivan was enthusiastic, later recalling, "[Gilbert] read it through ... in the manner of a man considerably disappointed with what he had written.  As soon as he had come to the last word, he closed up the manuscript violently, apparently unconscious of the fact that he had achieved his purpose so far as I was concerned, inasmuch as I was screaming with laughter the whole time."  Trial by Jury, described as "A Novel and Original Dramatic Cantata" in the original promotional material, was composed and rehearsed in a matter of weeks.
caption: Gilbert's original sketch of Trial by Jury, published in Fun in 1868
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