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The Pirates of Penzance was the only
Gilbert and Sullivan opera to have its official premiere in the United States. At the time, American law offered no
copyright protection to foreigners. After the pair's previous opera,
H.M.S. Pinafore, achieved success in London in 1878, approximately 150 American companies quickly mounted unauthorised productions that often took considerable liberties with the text and paid no royalties to the creators. Gilbert and Sullivan hoped to forestall further "copyright piracy" by mounting the first production of their next opera in America, before others could copy it, and by delaying publication of the score and libretto. They succeeded in keeping for themselves the direct profits of the first American production of
The Pirates of Penzance by opening the production themselves on Broadway, prior to the London production, and they also operated profitable US touring companies of
Pirates and
Pinafore. Fiction and plays about pirates were ubiquitous in the 19th century.
Walter Scott's
The Pirate (1822) and
James Fenimore Cooper's
The Red Rover were key sources for the romanticised, dashing pirate image and the idea of repentant pirates. Both Gilbert and Sullivan had parodied these ideas early in their careers. Sullivan had written a comic opera,
The Contrabandista, in 1867, about a hapless British tourist who is captured by bandits and forced to become their chief. Gilbert had written several comic works that involved pirates or bandits. In Gilbert's 1876 opera
Princess Toto, the title character is eager to be captured by a brigand chief. Gilbert had translated
Jacques Offenbach's operetta
Les brigands, in 1871.
Genesis While
Pinafore was running strongly at the
Opera Comique in London, Gilbert was eager to get started on his and Sullivan's next opera, and he began working on the libretto in December 1878. He re-used several elements of his 1870 one-act piece,
Our Island Home, which had introduced a pirate "chief", Captain Bang. Bang was mistakenly apprenticed to a pirate band as a child by his deaf nursemaid. Also, Bang, like Frederic in
The Pirates of Penzance, had never seen a woman before and felt a keen sense of duty, as an apprenticed pirate, until the passage of his 21st birthday freed him from his articles of indenture.
Bernard Shaw believed that Gilbert drew on ideas in
Les brigands for his new libretto, including the businesslike bandits and the bumbling police. Gilbert and Sullivan also inserted into Act II an idea they first considered for a one-act opera parody in 1876 about burglars meeting police, while their conflict escapes the notice of the oblivious father of a large family of girls. As in
Pinafore, "there was a wordful self-descriptive set-piece for Stanley ["
The Major-General's Song"], introducing himself much as Sir Joseph Porter had done ... a lugubrious comic number for the Sergeant of Police ... a song of confession for Ruth, the successor [to] Little Buttercup", romantic material for Frederic and Mabel, and "ensemble and chorus music in turn pretty, parodic and atmospheric." Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte met by 24 April 1879 to make plans for a production of
Pinafore and the new opera in America. Carte travelled to New York in the summer of 1879 and made arrangements with theatre manager
John T. Ford to present, at the
Fifth Avenue Theatre, the authorised productions. He then returned to London. Meanwhile, once
Pinafore became a hit in London, the author, composer and producer had the financial resources to produce future shows themselves, and they executed a plan to free themselves from their financial backers in the "Comedy Opera Company", which eventually succeeded. Carte formed a new partnership with Gilbert and Sullivan to divide profits equally among themselves after the expenses of each of their shows. In November 1879, Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte sailed to America with a company of singing actors, to play both
Pinafore and the new opera, including
J. H. Ryley as Sir Joseph,
Blanche Roosevelt as Josephine,
Alice Barnett as Little Buttercup,
Furneaux Cook as Dick Deadeye,
Hugh Talbot as Ralph Rackstraw and
Jessie Bond as Cousin Hebe, some of whom had been in the
Pinafore cast in London. To these, he added some American singers, including
Signor Brocolini as Captain Corcoran.
Alfred Cellier came to assist Sullivan, while his brother
François Cellier remained in London to conduct
Pinafore there. Gilbert and Sullivan cast talented actors who were not well-known stars and did not command high fees. They then tailored their operas to the particular abilities of these performers. The skill with which Gilbert and Sullivan used their performers had an effect on the audience: as critic
Herman Klein wrote, "we secretly marvelled at the naturalness and ease with which [the Gilbertian quips and absurdities] were said and done. For until then no living soul had seen upon the stage such weird, eccentric, yet intensely human beings .... [They] conjured into existence a hitherto unknown comic world of sheer delight." Gilbert acted as stage director for his own plays and operas. He sought
naturalism in acting, which was unusual at the time, just as he strove for realistic visual elements. He deprecated self-conscious interaction with the audience and insisted on a style of portrayal in which the characters were never aware of their own absurdity but were coherent internal wholes. Sullivan conducted the music rehearsals. at Paignton Sullivan had sketched out the music for
Pirates in England. When he arrived in New York, however, he found that he had left the sketches for Act I behind, and he had to reconstruct the first act from memory, or compose new numbers. Gilbert told a correspondent many years later that Sullivan was unable to recall his setting of the entrance of the women's chorus, so they substituted the chorus "Climbing over rocky mountain" from their earlier opera,
Thespis. Sullivan's manuscript for
Pirates contains pages removed from a
Thespis score, with the vocal parts of this chorus altered from their original arrangement as a four-part chorus. Some scholars (e.g. Tillett and Spencer, 2000) have suggested that Gilbert and Sullivan had planned all along to re-use "Climbing over rocky mountain," and perhaps other parts of
Thespis. They argue that Sullivan's having brought the unpublished
Thespis score to New York, when there were no plans to revive
Thespis, might not have been accidental. In any case, on 10 December 1879, Sullivan wrote a letter to his mother about the new opera, upon which he was hard at work in New York. "I think it will be a great success, for it is exquisitely funny, and the music is strikingly tuneful and catching."
Pinafore opened in New York on 1 December 1879 and ran for the rest of December. After a reasonably strong first week, audiences quickly fell off, since most New Yorkers had already seen local productions of
Pinafore. The work's title is a multi-layered joke. On the one hand,
Penzance was a docile seaside resort in 1879, and not the place where one would expect to encounter pirates. On the other hand, the title was also a jab at the theatrical "pirates" who had staged unlicensed productions of
H.M.S. Pinafore in America. To secure the British
copyright, a D'Oyly Carte touring company gave a perfunctory
copyright performance of
Pirates the afternoon before the New York premiere, at the Royal Bijou Theatre in
Paignton, Devon, organised by
Helen Lenoir, who would later marry Richard D'Oyly Carte. The cast, which was performing
Pinafore in the evenings in
Torquay, received some of the music for
Pirates only two days beforehand. Having had only one rehearsal, they travelled to nearby Paignton for the matinee, where they read their parts from scripts carried onto the stage, making do with whatever costumes they had on hand.
Original production and aftermath as General Stanley, wearing
Wolseley's trademark moustache
Pirates premiered on 31 December 1879 in New York and was an immediate hit. Shortly thereafter, Carte sent three touring companies around the United States East Coast and Midwest, playing
Pirates and
Pinafore. Sullivan's prediction was correct. After a strong run in New York and several American tours,
Pirates opened in London on 3 April 1880, running for 363 performances there. It remains one of the most popular G&S works. The London sets were designed by
John O'Connor. The critics' notices were generally excellent in both New York and London. The character of Major-General Stanley was widely taken to be a caricature of the popular general
Sir Garnet Wolseley. The biographer Michael Ainger, however, doubts that Gilbert intended a caricature of Wolseley, identifying instead General Henry Turner, uncle of Gilbert's wife, as the pattern for the "modern Major-General". Gilbert disliked Turner, who, unlike the progressive Wolseley, was of the old school of officers. Nevertheless, in the original London production,
George Grossmith imitated Wolseley's mannerisms and appearance, particularly his large moustache, and the audience recognised the allusion. Wolseley himself, according to his biographer, took no offence at the caricature and sometimes sang "I am the very model of a modern Major-General" for the private amusement of his family and friends. ==Roles==