After the sensational success of H.M.S. Pinafore, many American performing companies presented unauthorized versions of that opera. Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte decided to prevent that from happening again by presenting official versions of their next opera, The Pirates of Penzance or The Slave of Duty, simultaneously in England and America. The opera premiered on December 31, 1879 at the Fifth Avenue Theater in New York with Sullivan conducting, but a single performance had been given on the previous day at the Royal Bijou Theatre, Paignton, England, to secure the British copyright.

    In the story Frederic, the hero of the piece, was as a child apprenticed to a pirate by his nurse who, being rather hard of hearing, had mistaken her master’s instructions to apprentice the boy to a pilot. The idea probably originated from the fact that Gilbert himself had been captured by a gang of Italian brigands at the early age of two, and had been ransomed for £25.

    With reference to the chorus of policemen in Act II, it is interesting to note that when Sullivan was quite young, about 20, he became organist at St. Michaels’ Chester Square, and having practically no tenors or basses he augmented his choir with a dozen or so policemen from the station near the church. “I used to think of them sometimes,” he wrote, “when I was composing the music for The Pirates of Penzance.”

     When Sullivan started to compose the music for The Pirates he commenced in the middle of Act II, but had not proceeded far before he was compelled to leave for America with Gilbert to stop the pirating of H.M.S. Pinafore; inadvertently leaving much of the work for Act I in England. Working under severe time pressure, Sullivan completed the score of Pirates at his hotel in New York. That may be why he and Gilbert used some of the words and music in this opera from their first joint production of 1871, Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old for the entrance of the daughters in Act I. The music of Thespis, however, was never published, so this is one of the few fragments of it that survived.

     On December 10, 1879, Sullivan had written 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.” True enough! The Pirates of Penzance was an immediate hit, running for 400 performances, and takes its place today as one of the most popular and enduring works of musical theatre.

More Pirates Treasures

     Sullivan’s friend and co-conductor of the American tour, Alfred Cellier, wrote the overture with a small 16-measure section written by Sullivan himself. There is also evidence that Cellier also composed the end of the Act II finale, under Sullivan’s direction.

     The New York orchestra went on strike during rehearsals because they claimed there was too much music in Pirates to be classified as operetta, and that they should get paid opera scale instead. The threat of importing an orchestra from England eventually caused the New York players to relinquish their demands.

     The first performance in England was presented the day before the New York opening to secure the English Copyright. It was not done in London, but rather at the Royal Bijou Theater, Paignton, Devon in a matinee performance for an audience of about 50, by a D’Oyle Carte touring company. All the music had not arrived, there had been only one rehearsal, and the cast sang from the sheet music that they held. The Major General’s song had not arrived from America, so he only spoke the lyrics, unaccompanied.

     In early March 1880, Gilbert and Sullivan returned to England for the London Premiere set for April 3, at the Opera Comique. This time the whole score turned up missing, and frantic searches were made. It seems it was left on the transatlantic steamer, and didn’t turn up until the ship’s next round trip brought it back to England. So the score actually crossed the Atlantic 3 times – and you thought lost luggage was just a problem in the jet age!

     Pirates finally had its official London Premiere on April 3, 1880, at the Opéra Comique in London, where it ran for 363 performances, having already been playing successfully for over three months in New York.

     There were nine encores at the opening performance, including “Poor Wandering One”, “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” and the Policemen’s Chorus.

     The revision of Pirates of Penzance by Joseph Papp in New York City starring Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt in the 1980’s and the subsequent movie version, has made Pirates the most performed of the Gilbert and Sullivan works in modern times.