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PaperclipPerfector
23hr ago
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Notes -
Lately I've been listening to The Mikado, so of course I was very amused to see @Celestial-body-NOS's recent comment referencing it. But this got me thinking about the place of Gilbert & Sullivan culturally, and how much it has changed over my lifetime.
In the 90's it was very common to see Gilbert & Sullivan referenced. In The Simpsons you had Sideshow Bob routinely breaking into a G&S song. The Mikado was referenced in Seinfeld as something Jerry's cousin was in a production of. Other shows as well like Frasier and Cheers referenced it repeatedly. I get the sense that Gilbert & Sullivan was still extremely popular as sort of "Ivy League Humor" as late as the 1990s. Obviously most of these characters like Sideshow Bob were supposed to be pretentious, but at the same time the shows clearly expected the audience to recognize the reference. The audience might not know all the words like Sideshow Bob, but getting the joke requires recognizing the song to some extent. The joke wouldn't land if they were instead referencing some obscure medieval poem that would be completely unknown to the audience. I feel like it was sort of classified as pretentious but relatable, as in, if you were college educated in the 1990s you probably knew at least one friend that was way too into G&S.
Of course, needless to say I don't think it's that way anymore. I think amateur collegiate G&S productions were a staple of Ivy League college life, I mean you had Simpsons writers like Conan O'Brien that literally attended Harvard and was president of The Harvard Lampoon. When I was at college in the late 2000s I don't remember any of that. I think by then productions of G&S had largely been replaced by a capella groups and improv which share a lot of the same sensibilities but strip away any history or cultural tradition.
It makes me a bit sad and nostalgic. In a way it is very remarkable that operas from the 1880s still held any degree of currency in popular culture over 100 years later. I think it speaks to the aspirations of past generations that were still to some degree rooted in old aristocratic Victorian ideals. And I think it went along with a whole host of related ideals like reverence for Shakespeare and classical music and such, all as part of a package ideal of what the cultured intellectual looked like and I don't know that any of that has really survived to the present. It's not so much that G&S or Shakespeare would be frowned upon exactly, or read as gauche (though perhaps they would by some of the ultra-woke crowd), but more just that they aren't really a part of a culturally shared vision for what an intellectually developed person looks like anymore.
It does make me wonder, what do you think the image today of the "slightly pretentious but admirably cultured intellectual" looks like today, in the popular imagination? Do any fictional characters come to mind? What are the markers that would identify such a person most accurately?
Gilbert & Sullivan were everywhere when I was a kid, I still have I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major-General memorized, but I had no idea Americans had ever heard of it. Echo your sadness that the connection to the past has disappeared.
A scourge. I recall touring US colleges and every single one had a moment in the tour where they described their quiiiiiirky acapella group as if they were the only college that had thought to have it.
In the UK, a Daunt Books tote bag, New York Review of Books in the US. New Yorker for the person pretending to be such.
What? Of course Americans have heard of it! It's a popular stock parody. Just to name one example, xkcd's "Every Major's Terrible", which was later turned into a music video (Randall Munroe is, of course, American).
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That you focus on the reception of GS's works through time, rather than as artefacts of their own, indicates that you are correct in your assumptions. Were GS still part of living culture, you would in this society-focused website, draw parallels between the story of one of their works and some recent event. That would feel most natural to you. But if GS are now thought of existing merely in the meta-sense, only through what others think of them, then such a top-level post would feel alien.
I am a big fan of GS, most often I listen to their lesser known ones like: Trial by Jury (about a trial to hold a man to his promise to marry a woman, very short, only about 30 minutes), Utopia Limited (about a chief of some island incorporating his kingdom into a company), Princess Ida (about a princess who establishes a womens-only college, novelty in those days).
As I value them most for the glimpse into a different time, and a different country (1), I seek earliest still not too poor recordings, as libretto has through time undergone censorship. Recent recordings of The Mikado changing:
to
Is well-known, but the line in Princess Ida:
changed to
Not as much. Such changes being made already in 1945, is indicative of GS's days being numbered. For if the words must adulterated to be acceptable, the question of the acceptability of the thinking behind the creation of the work, is reasonable to ask. After all what sort of monster would use "n-word" so lightly
archive.org is great for finding transfers of records released when League of Nations still existed.
(1) What was thinkable, what was was assumed to be true, not being the same as here and now, allows one better to understand what is possible today, particularly as GS worked in a society that is socially and technologically closer than Ancient Rome or Greece were. As such GS's are close yet far, in a way Cicero is just far.
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The question shouldn't be very difficult but I'm finding it hard to picture what this person would look like. The public intellectuals we have today (Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Weinstein's) are all trying to sell you something: which makes it hard to separate their intellectual interests from what sells. The not so public intellectuals have all been ideologically captured by either the left or the right, so again it's hard for me to picture what these people might look like without woke or Curtis Yarvin type baggage.
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