Conductor: The Mikado and The Best of Gilbert & Sullivan
The Mikado wasn’t my first experience of conducting a Savoy Opera. That dubious distinction goes to Trial by Jury and The Yeomen of The Guard. It was, however, the first Gilbert collaboration I worked on, having had my eyes opened to Sullivan’s orchestral and melodic mastery through conducting The Tempest, The Scottish Play and The Golden Legend.
Perhaps more than any of the others, The Mikado represents for me the most acerbic, most deftly pointed political satire on politics, bureaucracy and government power of all the Savoy canon. In its wry exploration of the questionable workings of state power, it stands as a godparent to a tradition of British political comedy that runs from Ealing Studios through Yes Prime Minister to The Thick of It.
The displacement of the action from Whitehall to a fictitious Japan was a trick most recently pulled off by Offenbach to avoid the wrath of Napoleon III, but in many ways goes back to Jonathan Swift. After all, satire can afford to be so much more direct when, with a wink to the audience, you can all agree that you’re talking about somebody else entirely.
Although longer than most of its predecessors, the musical and dramatic invention never flags, and – perhaps reflecting the authors’ recent acrimony over ‘lozenges’ – the ending is particularly satisfying, with a happy resolution forged by the protagonists’ wit and invention rather than by a deus ex machina.
Sullivan also invests the characters with real depth; Katisha emerges as a very different personality in Act Two from the terrifying visage we encounter in Act One, and famously Sullivan ignored Gilbert’s egotistical allegro doggerel in ‘The Sun Whose Rays’ to create an introspection in his heroine that warms us to her almost literally.
These are just some of the reasons that it is the most internationally successful of all the Savoy Operas and I’m looking forward to revisiting it again with unmodified rapture
