What were the name of the two movements discovered by Spencer and Tillett?
A five-movement ballet occurred somewhere in Act II, staged by W. H. Payne. A heading in the libretto, "Chorus and Ballet", attaches it to the last section of the finale but does not indicate how it figured in the plot. Most press accounts placed it at about this point, although some placed it slightly earlier in the act. At some performances, the ballet was performed in Act I, but it was certainly in Act II on opening night, and it seems finally to have settled there.In 1990, Roderick Spencer and Selwyn Tillett discovered the ballet from Act II of Thespis. Two of the five movements, in the same hand that had copied the score of "Climbing over rocky mountain", were found together with the surviving performance materials for Sullivan's 1864 ballet, L'Île Enchantée. Another section was found in the material for his 1897 ballet, Victoria and Merrie England. The page numbering of the surviving three sections gave approximate lengths for the missing pieces, and a contemporary engraving, seen at left, along with other circumstantial evidence, allowed plausible identifications of the two remaining movements: a dragon costume, used nowhere in the libretto, is presumably from the ballet, and the harp visible in the orchestra pit was an unusual instrument for the Gaiety's orchestra. Movements of appropriate length that made sense of these oddities were found in Sullivan's other ballets, and the reconstructed ballet has been recorded twice on CD.
Sullivan tended to re-use his ballet music. Of the five movements that Tillett and Spencer identified, only one (the Waltz, No. 3) is not known to have been used in any other work. Three of the movements had previously been used in L'Île Enchantée. Two of those, and one other, were eventually re-used in Victoria and Merrie England. One was also used in his incidental music to Macbeth. Sullivan was asked in 1889 to supply a ballet for a French-language production of The Mikado in Brussels, which he duly did. Tillett suggests that the Thespis ballet was almost certainly the music that Sullivan provided, given that it was the only ballet that he wrote for use in an opera, and that three weeks after producing The Gondoliers he is unlikely to have written something original.
Climbing over rocky mountain L'Île Enchantée