page_title: Critical reputation of Arthur Sullivan
section_title: Posthumous reputation
hierarchical_section_title: Critical reputation of Arthur Sullivan / Posthumous reputation
caption_attribution_description: 1898 Cartoon giving Sullivan the last word against critics who said he wasted his talent on comic opera. Sullivan is depicted as ironically teasing Alexander Mackenzie after Mackenzie's comic opera, His Majesty flopped in 1897.
context_page_description: The critical reputation of the British composer Arthur Sullivan has fluctuated markedly in the 150 years since he came to prominence. At first, critics regarded him as a potentially great composer of serious masterpieces, the long-awaited great English composer. When Sullivan made a series of popular successes in comic operas with the librettist W.S. Gilbert, Victorian critics generally praised the operettas but reproached Sullivan for not concentrating on composing solemn choral works and grand opera instead. Immediately after Sullivan's death, his reputation was attacked by critics who condemned him for not taking part in what they conceived of as an "English musical renaissance". By the latter part of the 20th century, Sullivan's music was being critically reassessed, beginning with the first book devoted to a study of his music, The Music of Arthur Sullivan by Gervase Hughes.
context_section_description: After Sullivan's death, Sir George Grove wrote, "Form and symmetry he seems to possess by instinct; rhythm and melody clothe everything he touches; the music shows not only sympathetic genius, but sense, judgement, proportion, and a complete absence of pedantry and pretension; while the orchestration is distinguished by a happy and original beauty hardly surpassed by the greatest masters.". His obituary in The Times called him England's "most conspicuous composer ... the musician who had such power to charm all classes. ... The critic and the student found new beauties at every fresh hearing. What ... set Sullivan in popular esteem far above all the other English composers of his day was the tunefulness of his music, that quality in it by which ... [it] was immediately recognized as a joyous contribution to the gaiety of life. ... Sullivan’s name stood as a synonym for music in England." The obituary also stated: "Many who are able to appreciate classical music regret that Sir Arthur Sullivan did not aim consistently at higher things, that he set himself to rival Offenbach and Lecocq instead of competing on a level of high seriousness with such musicians as Sir Hubert Parry and Professor Stanford. If he had followed this path, he might have enrolled his name among the great composers of all time. ... That Sir Arthur Sullivan could aim high and succeed he proved by The Golden Legend and by a good deal of Ivanhoe".
  Over the next decade, however, Sullivan's reputation sank considerably among music critics. In 1901, shortly after the composer's death, Fuller Maitland took issue with the generally laudatory tone of most of the obituaries, citing the composer's failure to live up to the early praise of his Tempest music:
  Among the lesser men who are still ranked with the great composers, there are many who may only have reached the highest level now and then, but within whose capacity it lies to attain great heights; some may have produced work on a dead-level of mediocrity, but may have risen on some special occasion to a pitch of beauty or power which would establish their claim to be numbered among the great. Is there anywhere a case quite parallel to that of Sir Arthur Sullivan, who began his career with a work which at once stamped him as a genius, and to the height of which he only rarely attained throughout life?.  ...  Though the illustrious masters of the past never did write music as vulgar, it would have been forgiven them if they had, in virtue of the beauty and value of the great bulk of their productions. It is because such great natural gifts – gifts greater, perhaps, than fell to any English musician since the time of Purcell – were so very seldom employed in work worthy of them.... If the author of The Golden Legend, the music to The Tempest, Henry VIII and Macbeth cannot be classed with these, how can the composer of "Onward Christian Soldiers" and "The Absent-Minded Beggar" claim a place in the hierarchy of music among the men who would face death rather than smirch their singing robes for the sake of a fleeting popularity?
  Edward Elgar, to whom Sullivan had been particularly kind, rose to Sullivan's defence, branding Fuller Maitland's obituary "the shady side of musical criticism ... that foul unforgettable episode." Fuller Maitland was later discredited when it was shown that he had falsified the facts, inventing a banal lyric, passing it off as genuine and condemning Sullivan for supposedly setting such inanity. In 1929 Fuller Maitland admitted that he had been wrong in earlier years to dismiss Sullivan's comic operas as "ephemeral". In his History of Music in England (1907) Ernest Walker, was even more damning of Sullivan than Fuller Maitland had been in 1901:
  After all, Sullivan is merely the idle singer of an empty evening; with all his gift for tunefulness, he could never raise it to the height of a real strong melody of the kind that appeals to cultured and relatively uncultured alike as a good folk-song does – often and often on the other hand (but chiefly outside the operas) it sunk to mere vulgar 
caption: 1897 cartoon relishing the irony of the failure of Mackenzie's His Majesty, after Mackenzie and his Academy had claimed that Sullivan was "wasting his talent" on comic opera.[citation needed][33]
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