Unimpaired Vitality
REMEMBER a Culture-conscious young man telling me once that he considered Gilbert and Sullivan operas
extremely vulgar, in deplorable bourgeois taste and as having no more vitality than an antimacassar. How fashionable such a view is I do not know, but the fact is that the Savoy Operas continue to please all levels of "brows" with the perpetual freshness of their fantastic worlds. As a listener to The Yeomen of the Guard for the first time for some years when it was broadcast from 1YA_ recently, even the tired condition of the recordings did not hinder me from enjoying again the delights of encountering old friends and of anticipating wellremembered pieces. This time, however, I felt I got a good deal more out of the opera as a result of having heard the BBC serial biography of the partners, which deepened my understanding of the personalities behind the operas and the milieu in which they had worked. How clean and sane are the children of this strange marriage! How alive sound even the most familiar of Sullivan’s. pieces! Where else in the arid seventies and eighties can we find a dramatist surpassing Gilbert in dramatic craftsmanship, in perfection of plot, in verbal skill and in. comic genius? Vulgar, indeed!
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 547, 16 December 1949, Page 10
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211Unimpaired Vitality New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 547, 16 December 1949, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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