In 1984, I attended a talk by Arthur Jacobs, whose biography of Arthur Sullivan was then new. In the Q&A, he was asked why no one had written a biography of Helen D’Oyly Carte. Jacobs replied that he didn’t think there was enough available information about her. Helen is, of course, a recurring figure in the history of the Savoy Operas, but she is usually portrayed in a supporting role, not as one worthy of study in her own right.

Cunningham Bridgeman, who with François Cellier wrote one of the first histories of the G&S partnership, thought differently, suggesting that “it is confidently anticipated that the life-work of Helen Lenoir . . . may yet form the subject of a separate volume.” It took ninety-seven years for someone to prove Bridgeman right, and Jacobs wrong, but Brian Jones has now done it.

Jones’s account of Helen’s early family life and brief career on the stage will be new to most readers, as will her impressive education. Helen was in the first class of four women admitted to London University, completing all the requirements for a degree of “Mathematics and Mechanical Philosophy.” She was arguably better educated than Gilbert, Sullivan, or Carte. As Carte would relate in an 1885 interview:

Miss Lenoir . . . can draw up an ‘ironclad’ agreement as well as any solicitor. On international copyright and dramatic rights she is probably one of the best living authorities; her knowledge is derived from practical litigation as well as text books. Before she came to me Miss Lenoir had passed with honours examinations at the University of London that would have entitled her to a BA degree had it then been given to women.

Despite that, the best job she could find, at first, was as a governess. She then went on the stage and found her way into Carte’s employ in 1877. Before long, she was authorized to sign letters in his name. By 1880, she was sent to New York to run Carte’s U.S. business, at a time when there were few women in theatrical management. Between 1880 and 1884, she spent entire winters in New York, returning to London over the summer months to manage Carte’s provincial tours. From 1880–87, she made at least fifteen trips back and forth between the two countries.

In 1885, Carte’s first wife, Blanche née Prowse, died of pneumonia. Exactly how Carte’s relationship with Helen became intimate is not known. Jones tells the story of their marriage through a remarkable resource: the 1888 diary of Lucas D’Oyly Carte, Richard’s older son. That volume has never been quoted at all, in any source I’m aware of. To this diary Jones devotes his longest chapter, allowing Lucas’s account to speak mostly for itself.

A fascinating series of entries comes on 6–7 April, when Carte takes Lucas and his brother Rupert to Manchester, where they take in three performances of Patience, with three different leading ladies, apparently scheduled that way so that he could assess their suitability for more prominent roles within his large organization.

It is clear from the diary that Helen had become a de facto member of the family; still, the marriage seems to have come as a surprise to the children. On 11 April 1888, Lucas writes: “Dinner with HL, Father, us, Mr. Stanley, and Mr. Fladgate. Afterwards Father [told us?] of his intentions [double-underlined] for the following day. Billiards.” The family honeymooned in France, with the children joining the newlyweds.

Although Jones finds enough material to justify a full biography of the woman he calls “Gilbert and Sullivan’s 4th Partner,” there is a good deal of what might be called filler. Many historical incidents are described without any new information. A chapter on the construction of the Savoy Theatre provides welcome detail, but barely mentions Helen at all, as she had no significant role in that project.

The one period in her life that Jones covers inadequately is 1906–09, when Helen mounted the first repertory seasons at the Savoy. Many letters passed between Gilbert and Helen: the librettist was particularly irked at the casts, which Helen chose without consulting him, and which he considered inadequate. Jones neither quotes nor mentions any of those letters (now residing in the British Library), which makes me wonder if he was aware of them. It is a rather substantial omission.

I wish that were the only problem. The book reads like a very rough draft. There is scarcely a page without a mechanical or other error. Many passages are so disorganized that you would think a family friend who knew nothing about Gilbert and Sullivan, had typed the author’s preliminary notes into a word processor, and then published them with no editing at all.

Most of the time, you can at least grasp Jones’s meaning. Except when you can’t. On p. 39, “When Helen came back to Carte’s office in autumn 1877, she must have been excited by the new technology involved.” No technology is mentioned. On p. 46, “The casting of Blanche Roosevelt as Josephine [in New York] was a further clue.” A clue of what?

On the same page, “She took the United States to her heart, and the United States developed a similar affection for Helen.” No evidence is shown of great affection by either party, and certainly not the entire United States, most of which she is not known to have visited. After the failure of The Chieftain, “Much credit for the wisdom of the next choice [The Mikado] must go to Helen” (p. 108), but it is not explained how she had anything to do with it.

Thoughts, abilities, and emotions are attributed to Helen without basis. “Helen was . . . aware of contemporary tastes” (p. 46). When two of the touring companies mounted a benefit for Helen, she “won their hearts because of . . . her mathematical ability to make the journey from theatre to theatre smooth and rapid” (p. 63). “Helen, with her academic background in Mechanical Philosophy must have particularly welcomed the freedom from gas lamps” (p. 92). These seem to be guesses, not facts.

The lack of known letters from Richard D’Oyly Carte to his son is supposedly “because Helen was capable of keeping the family in touch with one another” (p. 74). Did Carte really delegate family correspondence to her, even before they were married? Lucas’s diary mentions letters from Helen; it doesn’t mean that Richard wrote none.

Jones  frequently expresses himself awkwardly. For instance, on p. 45, “In 1878, copyright protection for works originated in London was inadequate.” What he means is, “In 1878, copyright protection in America for works originated in other countries was inadequate.” The inadequacy wasn’t specific to London-based authors, nor did every other nation share the peculiarities of U.S. law.

On p. 119 comes the following strange sentence: “At the start of the previous chapter, near the cartoon of Barrington in The Vicar of Bray it became clear in the 1890s that Richard D’Oyly Carte was a chronically sick man.” Syntactically, Jones is suggesting that a cartoon of Barrington had sickened Carte. What he means is that at the start of the previous chapter, at around the point where a cartoon of Barrington is shown, Jones has already told us that Carte was sick. The actual passage Jones has in mind isn’t on the same page as the cartoon anyway.

There are many factual errors, some of which could be typos. On p. 42, “Carte’s Second Pinafore Company was performing HMS Pinafore for the first time in the provinces” (in late 1879). Actually, it was a different company that had done so, a year earlier. Jones gets it right, four pages later.

On p. 46, the date of the premiere of The Pirates of Penzance is given as December 1878 (it should be 1879). On p. 105, Nancy McIntosh’s role in Utopia, Limited is given as “Princess Selene,” not Zara. (He is probably mixing it up with Fallen Fairies, in which Nancy did play Selene.) On p. 121, the closing date of The Emerald Isle is given as “9 November 201” [sic].

He repeats Leslie Baily’s well known error that Carte’s famous demonstration from the stage of the new Savoy Theatre, in which he broke an electric light covered in muslin to show it would not catch fire, occurred on the first night. As long ago as 1958, Reginald Allen had shown that this happened months later, as the electric lighting on the stage wasn’t even working on the first night.

On page 38, Nancy McIntosh is described as Gilbert’s ‘adopted’ daughter, quoted thus, but without explanation. On p. 131, the word adopted appears without quotes, but a footnote explains that “Nancy McIntosh as an adult was too old to be legally adopted.” Why make the error at all, only to correct it?

The name of the former curator of the G&S Collection at the Pierpont Morgan Library is given as “Frederic” Wilson (p. 4) and “Rick” Wilson (p. 73), neither of which is correct: it is either “Fredric” or “Ric”.

Jones adopts a not-quite-chronological order, and as a result, tells much of the story twice. Impresario Michael Gunn’s wife, Bessie Sudlow, was introduced to him by Richard D’Oyly Carte. This anecdote is related on pp. 19–20 and p. 37. In 1877, Helen had received an offer to perform in India, which she accepted initially, but then declined after deciding to remain with Carte. This story occupies a third of a page on p. 23, and then half a page on p. 40.

Pages 46–47 describe Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour to America. Helen also arranged a lecture tour for one Matthew Arnold; his story is told on 57–58. Both are then re-told, in almost identical words, on pp. 66–67. Details of the production of Pinafore in New York on 1 December 1879 are given on p. 46 and again on p. 62, right down to the detail of W. S. Gilbert’s participation in the chorus, wearing a fake beard.

Sometimes a sentence is repeated on the same page, or even the same paragraph. For instance, on p. 103, the command performance of The Mikado is described in the second paragraph, and again in the fourth. Frank Desprez’s authorship of the libretto to Carte’s operetta Happy Hampstead is told twice, a few lines apart, on pp. 34–5. Jones also discusses the piece on p. 31, attributing its lyrics to Carte himself.

The circumstances of the “piracy” of Pinafore, the lack of copyright protection, and so forth, are told twice between pp. 41–46, with (in some cases) the identical sentences repeated within a page or two of one another. The material is so disorganized that one not familiar with the facts would be completely lost. For instance, in describing the Paignton performance:

However, the first pages of music had not been received in London and the performance was postponed. . . . The music arrived in Torquay from London on 29 December, to give the Pinafore company only one rehearsal of the completed piece. They would have known most of act one and something of act two.

So, “the first pages of music had not been received,” but somehow the cast “would have known most of act one and something of act two.” In fact, the music was sent in two shipments, and it was the second act they received first, exactly the opposite of what he says.

Most astoundingly, an interview that Helen gave with the Philadelphia Times in 1881 is quoted at length (2 full pages) from pp. 47–49, and then quoted again, at similar length, starting on p. 63. A comparison of the two versions shows numerous differences of wording and punctuation. I don’t know which one is correct. Perhaps neither.

On many occasions, Jones prints the same material twice, but differently. George Edwardes (then called “Edwards”) came to work at Carte’s office in the late 1870s on Michael Gunn’s recommendation. Jones quotes Gunn’s letter thus on p. 20:

This is George Edwards. Give him a job, pay him a pound a week, and make sure he earns it.

And thus on p. 37:

This is George Edwards. Give him a job, pay him a pound a week and see that he earns it.

Carte’s ancestors were named “Cart”. Where did the extra ‘e’ come from? On p. 28:

. . . Richard Carte added an e to his surname to avoid confusion with Britain’s other top flautist Thomas Card.

On p. 37:

The e in Richard D’Oyly Carte had been added by his father, who wanted to distinguish himself from another Richard Cart who was already established as a musical performer.

After Helen and Richard were married, the members of the touring “E” Company presented them with a pair of silver candlesticks, with an inscription that read, in part:

We . . . hope the accompanying offering . . . will give you a tithe of the pleasure in acceptation that we experience in presentation.

Jones prints it in facsimile on p. 87. On p. 88 he quotes it inaccurately:

We . . . hope the accompanying offering . . . will give you a taste of the pleasure in anticipation that we experience in anticipation.

On p. 99 is the well known Gilbert quote after the production of The Gondoliers, but oddly garbled:

. . . it gives me the chance of shining through the twentieth century with a reflected light.

It is quoted correctly on p. 102:

It gives one the chance of shining right through the twentieth century with a reflected light.

On page 69, a letter from Carte to Helen is quoted from Leslie Baily, The Gilbert and Sullivan Book, p. 163. Actually, it is on p. 263 that book, but let that pass. Baily begins the quote with, “Knowing your peculiar disposition as I do. . . .” Jones replaces “peculiar” with “particular”.

A quote on p. 120, attributed to Cellier and Bridgeman, is incorrect: a semi-colon is replaced with a comma, and the words “distinguished medical attendant” are replaced with “doctor”.

Late in life, Gilbert testified before a parliamentary inquiry on theatrical censorship. A quote on p. 130 is from this inquiry:

. . . there was no preliminary correspondence. There was some feeling afterwards he simply took my property and laid an embargo upon it.

Jones cites no source, but Dark and Gray, p. 149, word and punctuate the passage thus:

. . .there was no preliminary correspondence—there was some afterwards—he simply took my property and laid an embargo upon it.

I checked every quote that I could. In not one case is Jones accurate. Not one. This is a sad state of things. There is a much larger quantity of quotes that I could not check, but many of them have garbled syntax, with punctuation or even entire words clearly missing. I have to assume they are mere paraphrases, one and all.

This is to say nothing of the many mechanical errors, missing punctuation, quotes opened but not closed, non-sequiturs, incomplete ideas, facts told out of sequence, and so forth. The carpet quarrel, for instance, is described after the opening of Ivanhoe, when the two actually happened in the reverse order. I think Jones knows this, but the general reader would be confused. I could go on, but behold, I have said enough.

The book is copiously illustrated, although many of the illustrations lack captions, and at times one has to hunt through the text to figure out what they are. There is also an index, which is quite as full of errors and omissions as the rest of the book.

It is not for me to guess what went wrong. Jones served capably for many years as editor of both The Savoyard and the W. S. Gilbert Society Journal. His other book, an excellent biography of Henry Lytton, was not beset by similar problems. Perhaps it had an outside editor, and this one did not. G&S fans will no doubt be grateful to learn about a strong, talented woman, who is long overdue her moment in the sun. To tell her story was obviously a labor of love for Jones, who says he spent thirty years on it. His abundant affection for the subject is not diminished by his many errors.

But Helen, who was so careful, accurate, and well organized in everything she did, would be aghast that the only biography she is likely ever to have, is so full of mistakes. I have never seen anything quite like it.

*

Postscript: I recommend this book despite its many errors. Fortunately, the audience for such a volume is likely to consist mainly of G&S fans, who are more likely to forgive the mistakes and less likely to be misled by them. Nevertheless, the book could have been so much better. There are plenty of capable people in our community who would happily have edited the book gratis, or at least have read a manuscript and pointed out the more egregious slips. There is nothing to be done about it now, but I still endorse the book, faults and all.

There is a crucial reason why Arthur Conan Doyle tells most of the Sherlock Holmes stories through the eyes of the detective’s less brilliant companion, Dr. Watson. Doyle needs a character who can reveal Holmes’s deductions, while at the same time being astounded by them. This is something that neither Holmes himself nor an omniscient moderator could do.

The lack of a Watson is what dooms Laurie R. King’s Pirate King, the G&S-themed eleventh book in a series featuring Holmes and his young wife, Mary Russell. She’s a kind of “junior Holmes,” possessing many of his remarkable abilities, but to a lesser degree. She is also a crashing bore, as she has none of the eccentricities that make Holmes the riveting character he is.

She is also the narrator, and her humility leaves her unable to astonish the reader with her deductions, the way Holmes always astonished Watson. Her limitations are apparent when Holmes enters the story, but he is present for only about a quarter of the novel. The rest of the book feels like marking time for his arrival.

The story takes place after World War I, when Holmes is about three times Russell’s age. In their scenes together, their relationship seems sterile and passionless: more like a business arrangement. Watson and Holmes showed more genuine affection for one another than this pair. I assume the earlier books made a more credible case for their marriage, but I am left with no burning desire to read them.

The story concerns Fflyte Films, which is making a silent film about a company that is producing a version of The Pirates of Penzance. The director, Randolph Fflyte, has such a passion for realism that he insists on filming on location in Spain and Morocco, and hiring locals with no acting experience as pirates. Scotland Yard believes that someone in Fflyte’s orbit is involved in smuggling.

As the Yard has no jurisdiction in Spain, our old friend, the ageless Inspector Lestrade (with Mycroft Holmes as a behind-the-scenes puppet-master), arranges for Russell to offer herself as traveling secretary to the film’s producer, Geoffrey Hale, so that she can find out if anything nefarious is going on. Naturally, there is, although it takes hundreds of pages before the author finally gets around to it. For a long while, it feels more like a soap opera than a detective novel.

While we wait for anything resembling a real mystery, Russell immerses herself in the film production, surrounded by the film crew and the cardboard cut-out actors and actresses who are to play the roles in Pirates, if ever the troubled film can ever get underway. (Oddly enough, they all know the words and music of the opera by heart, even though they would never have the chance to use them in a silent film.) For much of the book, Russell’s main role is as chaperone for the girls playing General Stanley’s daughters, and she is quite the kill-joy.

Obviously, the book is full of G&S references, most of which are accurate (the libretto is misquoted once or twice), but like Sir Despard’s penny readings, they are not remarkably entertaining. The book is tedious, the narrative dull, the story plodding and preposterous. Of course, many of the original Holmes stories likewise defied rational belief. It was Holmes himself who brought them to life. Mary Russell is as dull as a dishrag.

To the Mikado’s list of punishments can be added a new horror: being forced to read The Pocket Guide to Gilbert and Sullivan by Diane Canwell and Jonathan Sutherland. This is an abominable, pointless book, poorly written and full of errors. At 5 3/8 by 8 1/2 inches, it is not really pocket-sized, either.

The publisher, Pen & Sword, specializes in military, maritime, and aviation history. Canwell and Sutherland are house authors, having written such classics as Air War East Africa 1940–1941, Farming Industry, Zulu Kings and their Armies, and Unsolved East Anglian Murders. In all, I count 22 titles for the pair, none of which have anything to do with theatre history—except this one.

The book jacket tells us that the husband-and-wife team “are passionate about musical theatre and Jon worked for London Sadler’s Wells when D’Oyly Carte performed Gilbert & Sullivan for five months each season.” Sutherland’s recollection of his own biography is incorrect. The D’Oyly Carte never had a five-month season at Sadler’s Wells: seasons there varied from eight to fourteen weeks.

I frequently considered giving up on this book, and finally did so around page 160, by which time I had noted 140 errors, and I didn’t write down every one I saw. Perhaps the book’s only virtue is that a lengthy first-night press review (usually that of The Times) is quoted for each opera. These are practically the only well written pages that are free of factual error.

It would be pointless to list all of their mistakes, but I’ll quote a few illustrative examples:

On pp. 1–2: “Although [Richard] D’Oyly Carte died in 1901, his name would also live on . . . as The D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, which continues to exist and to perform Gilbert and Sullivan works to this day.” Where can I book tickets?

On p. 5: “Gilbert went to King’s College . . . to study law.” He did not study law there.

On p. 6: “By the time [Gilbert] was 24 he had written 15 theatrical works; each time they were rejected.” What works? Rejected by whom?

On p. 22: “Gilbert and D’Oyly Carte went to Sullivan’s house and Gilbert read the libretto [of Trial by Jury] to him.” Carte did not go to Sullivan’s house.

On p. 27: “As soon as Trial by Jury was up and running D’Oyly Carte tried to get Gilbert and Sullivan together again to write a full-length comic opera.” No, he tried to revive Thespis, and then suggested another one-act piece.

On p. 27: “Trial by Jury’s end did not come as a result of lack of interest, but in the illness of Fred Sullivan.” It continued to be performed, both with and without Fred Sullivan.

On p. 30: “Sullivan had also struck up a friendship with Mary Frances Ronalds. . . . In fact it is almost certain that she was his mistress.” Almost??

On p. 31: “Mrs Howard Paul was selected to play Lady Sangazur [sic]. . . Many of the other members of the cast were students. . . .” Huh?

On p. 38: “Soon Richard Temple . . . would join the company in time for HMS Pinafore.” He was in The Sorcerer too.

I could go on for hours, but I will not.

There is an astounding quantity of typographical and mechanical errors, such as:

• The London landmark “Charring [sic] Cross”
• The American city of “Lewisville” (they mean Louisville)
• Sullivan’s friend “George Groves” (they mean Grove)
• The G&S characters “Council,” “Munthorne,” “Gianett,” and “Ph?be” (I am not making this up)
• “Frederick,” rather than “Frederic,” in Pirates
• Fred Sullivan was to have had a “principle” [sic] part in The Sorcerer
• Gilbert and Sullivan “complimented [sic] one another very well.”
• Hilarion is to “woe” (not woo) Princess Ida
• “The Witches [not Witch’s] Curse”
• The Yeoman of the Guard (throughout the book)
• In the plot summary of The Gondoliers, the “Palmieris [sic] family”
• “Blind man’s bluff” (should be “buff”)
• In The Grand Duke, the Baroness is Rudolph’s “fiancé” (with one ‘e’)
• “pompons” (where “pompous” is meant)
• “National Training School of Music” (should be for Music)

The first-night reviews seem to have been lifted from the G&S Archive site. This would explain why the word “Yeomen” is spelled correctly in the review, but everywhere else in the book, they use “Yeoman.” It would also explain the repeated misspelling “Ph?be,” which on the Archive site is “Phœbe.” Apparently their software could not translate the ‘œ’ digraph.

The writing is extremely pedestrian. If it were the work of a child, perhaps you would be impressed. Here is a typical paragraph:

Gilbert and Sullivan would become the fathers of the modern blockbuster musical. They created a formula that almost guaranteed theatrical success. Their musicals were melodic and funny and they would continue to attract literally millions of fans to this very day. It was one of the first musical marriages; an artistic partnership, a testing one for the pair of them, and one that was often punctuated with disputes and quarrels. Yet their partnership would become the blueprint for the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Lloyd Webber and Rice, to name but a few. Gilbert and Sullivan created 14 light operas and so popular would they become that they have been, and continue to be, performed by professional and amateur groups across the world.

Consecutive statements are often linked with “and,” “but,” or “in fact,” when they are unrelated to one another. An example comes on pp. 86–7: “Gladstone was amongst those who thoroughly enjoyed the performance of Iolanthe and in the spring of 1883 he would write to Sullivan, offering him a knighthood.” Both facts are true, but they were unrelated: the composer was knighted for his serious music, not his comic operas.

A similar example comes on p. 155: “Sullivan completed the Te Deum in July; this was his last piece of finished work, but it incorporated the tune of Onward Christian Soldiers in the last chorus.” Although both are true, the use of “but” suggests a non-existent relationship.

There are numerous misstatements about their works. Sullivan’s “In Memoriam” and The Golden Legend (called Longfellow’s Golden Legend, italicized thus, on a later page) are both described as oratorios. Gilbert apparently wrote a hitherto undiscovered play called The Sentimental Sweethearts. Sullivan wrote a hitherto unknown comedy called The Wicked World. His first opera, Cox and Box, was written in the 1870s. Later in his career, he managed to write The Gondoliers and Ivanhoe simultaneously. Sullivan did not just find Schubert’s Rosamunde; he completed it, as well.

I am sure that scholars will be delighted to discover Mrs. Ronalds’ recording of The Lost Chord, which we learn (on p. 30) was “one of the first ever recordings made in England.”

There is a chapter per opera, with a brief historical overview, a lengthy first-night review, the opening night cast, and a plot synopsis, the latter invariably incorrect. I could give many examples; for instance, in Trial by Jury: “Edwin . . . suggests that he will marry Angelina and then his new girlfriend the following day. The judge tells him that this is unlawful.” Actually, the judge says the idea is reasonable; it’s the counsel who points out that it is unlawful.

One will search in vain for the passage in The Mikado where Ko-Ko seeks to change the law against flirting, or the scene in Yeomen where Leonard helps to steal the keys from Shadbolt. In Ruddigore, we learn that in Act II Despard and Margaret have “rekindled their relationship,” not that they are married.

The book ends with twenty or so pages of biographies of Savoyards, but the selection is very eccentric. Why a bio for William Lugg (creator of Scynthius) but not Blanche Roosevelt (creator of Mabel)? Why Henry Lytton but not Bertha Lewis? The biographies are, of course, full of mistakes, just like everything else.

The book ends with a brief bibliography and a four-page chronology. There is no index.

There is a generous quantity of illustrations (all in black and white), many taken from the Library of Congress collection. I cannot imagine what prompted them to use this source, but it does at least mean that a good number of the illustrations aren’t the commonly seen ones. And every illustration included is a half-page where the authors cannot make any more errors.

W. S. Gilbert doesn’t rate highly in academic literary criticism. The English universities hardly credit him at all. Gilbert’s standing is better in American academia, but never before to the extent of a book-length study. That’s what we have here, a book of impressive depth by Carolyn Williams, professor of English at Rutgers University. Her specialties there is Victorian literature, theater, and culture.

I don’t want to suggest that studies of Gilbert by non-academics have failed to make a useful contribution to the field. But most of those studies are by G&S specialists, whose broader knowledge of Victorian culture is, like Gilbert’s Utopia, limited. As the theatrical precursors on which Gilbert was reared — burlesques, pantomimes, and extravaganzas — have disappeared from the modern stage, it takes real effort to hunt them down. This is what Williams has done.

After “discovering” G&S in graduate school, she spent ten years researching Victorian theater, to try to understand precisely what W. S. Gilbert was parodying. Williams puts Gilbert’s libretti in the context of the theatrical genres he lampooned. As she points out, a successful parody depends on the listener being able to recognize the prototype that is being imitated. It also extends the life of its model: thus, Gilbert’s Patience, for example, is practically the only artifact of aestheticism that has survived on the modern stage. If it wasn’t for Gilbert, we might not know of it at all.

Posterity remembers Gilbert because his works remain funny even if you don’t recognize the models they are based on. The universality of his libretti is what separates them from the mine run of burlesques that were a dime a dozen on the Victorian stage. Thus, audiences can and do laugh at Patience even if they have never encountered aestheticism.

Williams goes farther than anyone to find Gilbert’s antecedents. That F. C. Burnand wrote an aesthetic play, The Colonel, at around the time of Patience, is well known. Less known is the source both of them relied on, Morris Barnett’s three-act comedy The Serious Family (1849), or Barnett’s source, Jean-François Bayard’s Le mari à la campagne (The Husband in the Country, 1844).

While the Patience chapter is especially good (she devotes one to each opera), every one is full of fresh insights and a deep understanding of the theatrical and cultural currency that Gilbert had inherited.

Gender, along with Genre and Parody, is the third prong of Williams’s argument. It is also the weakest. Her thesis is that Gilbert’s characters “perform” their genders, and that while Gilbert seems to affirm traditional gender roles, he also subjects them to critique. She falls very much in the camp that Gilbert’s old ladies are parodies of the traditional pantomime dame, and thus they should not be seen as evidence of misogyny.

As the proverb tells, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Gender is Prof. Williams’s hammer, and some of her arguments are force-fit. She plainly concedes that Yeomen is less useful to her, because it is “less centrally dedicated to gender issues,” and this leads her to underrate the work. She appears to overrate The Grand Duke because it happens to be congenial to her agenda.

She is a bit over-fond of the word “meditation,” as in, “Barataria is well cast as the setting for a farcical meditation on republicanism”; or, “marriage comes into this meditation on corporate entities formed from the hypothetical union of individuals”; or, “this opening scene of marriage [can be] recognized as part of the opera’s meditation on identity.” I never realized Gilbert was meditating so much. (He “meditates” in other chapters too, but in The Gondoliers chapter he does it three times within five pages.)

Notwithstanding this verbal tic, the book is fully accessible to a non-academic. It is written in an approachable style that any educated reader can easily grasp. Williams rigorously cites her sources, as any academic should. She is fully up-to-date on recent G&S scholarship, and has consulted every previous book I’m aware of that is at all relevant. The endnotes alone take up 50 pages. I would have preferred that those with substantive content (as opposed to mere source citations) had appeared as footnotes. It becomes tedious (and I finally gave up) checking each note, to see if she was actually adding to her argument, or just giving credit.

The book is reasonably free of factual error. I encountered a slip or two, but nothing serious. Contrast this with Gayden Wren, who despite a lifetime in G&S performing and directing, wrote a similar (but less sophisticated) book with errors by the bucketful.

The book is lavishly illustrated, with 21 color plates and dozens more in black & white. Consider it essential.

This rather bizarre book uses W. S. Gilbert’s Pygmalion and Galatea as a “hook” to explore the ethics and science of cloning. As the editor, Fred Sander, puts it:

Why did I pick this forgotten though once very popular play? Gilbert’s drama not only anticipates psychoanalysis in the 20th century, but also, written a hundred years before the discovery of stem cells, it metaphorically resonates with the 21st century of genomic medicine. In Gilbert’s play, written eighteen centuries after Ovid, Pygmalion creates many copies (i.e., clones) of his wife, Cynisca. One of these copies, Galatea, spontaneously comes to life. . . .

In the play, the character of Galatea—an innocent born into an adult woman’s body—falls in love with her creator, Pygmalion. A moral crisis ensues when Pygmalion finds himself in the untenable position of having two almost identical wives. Moreover, he faces blindness if he breaks his vow of fidelity to Cynisca. Reading Gilbert’s comedy today points to new biological, psychological, social, and ethical issues raised by the recent sequencing of the genome and the explosion of stem cell research.

Fifty-eight of the book’s 189 pages are taken up with the text of the play itself, “with minimal revisions and a supplemental ending” by Sander.

There are seven essays by different writers, but most of them are drawn from pre-existing sources and make no mention of the Gilbert play at all. A new essay by Carolyn Williams discusses gender roles in Victorian England, but does not touch upon the topic of cloning at all. Hence, it is really up to Sander to make the tenuous connection that links these disparate subjects, and he isn’t quite up to the task. Had all seven of his contributors, or at least a few more of them, subscribed to the book’s theme, perhaps the book would seem more coherent.

Most of the essays make enjoyable reading on their own terms, even if the mooted connection between art and science never really comes together. For Gilbert fans, I cannot make the case that the book is worth spending $25 on. For more information, or to order a copy, visit the book’s website, http://www.createdinourownimages.com/.

The volume is quaintly captioned Operas Without Gilbert, Vol. 5. For the life of me, I can’t count four operas without Gilbert before The Zoo; to get to three, one needs to count The Sapphire Necklace, which probably won’t have an R. Clyde edition unless a whole bunch of hitherto lost material resurfaces.

Like the others from R. Clyde, this is a critical edition, with a detailed introduction and editorial commentary. It is a professional job, likely to suffice for decades to come.

There are no new discoveries of consequence. The deleted song for Laetitia, No. 4, is printed with the same conjectural lyrics that the same publisher printed in its 1991 vocal score (“Laetitia waits for her belov’d”). The original lyrics have not survived.

Marked in Sullivan’s autograph score, there are a number of cuts, apparently dating to the original production, and these are noted as optional in the new score. For instance, bars 54–84 of the Finale are marked “cut” in the autograph. This is the passage in which Brown tells Eliza that he has bought the zoo and its contents as a wedding gift, which I suspect no modern producer would dream of cutting: it is one of the best jokes in the piece. There is an even more drastically cut-down finale, which is represented only by a surviving leader violin part, from which Harris reconstructs the remaining elements.

Harris notes that performers and audiences have not found The Zoo in need of compression, so these newly documented cuts are mostly of academic interest.

Harris did the typesetting himself, and it is conspicuously a home-made effort, not quite on the same level of professionalism as his excellent scholarship. However, it is certainly good enough to use in performance. The edition comes in either softback (£50) or hardback (£75).

Christopher Browne now distributes all of the R. Clyde editions. Unlike the past (when Harris did it himself), Browne takes credit cards and can accept payment in other currencies. To order, visit http://www.gilbertandsullivanonline.com/. For information on R. Clyde Editions, visit http://www.r.clyde.dial.pipex.com/.

Although I knew of Menzies, I had never read anything about him. His D’Oyly Carte career was a minor one. He played mostly small parts and went on occasionally as an understudy. Then, he was promoted to the New Company in 1925, where he was the lead comedian for two years. When that company disbanded, he left D’Oyly Carte, eventually going to Australia to play the comedy parts for J. C. Williamson, starting in 1931.

Menzies was a major star for Williamson, joining them regularly for tours throughout the depression and World War II, and making his final tour in 1951. He also made a brief return to D’Oyly Carte in 1939 at the beginning of the war, sharing the comedy parts briefly with Grahame Clifford.

Early in his D’Oyly Carte career, he began courting Elsie Griffin, the company’s leading soprano at the time. This took quite a bit of gumption on his part, given that she was a star, and he merely a chorister and bit-part player. However, he was finally able to persuade her to marry him, over her parents’ objection. He was a terrible husband. He undertook his first tour with Williamson with little regard for Griffin and their infant daughter, Mahala, whom he left behind.

While away, Menzies partied and womanized wantonly, boasting of his conquests in letters back home to Elsie, which she passed along to her solicitor, intending to file for divorce. He was an ungenerous performer, frequently hogging the stage and making extravagant demands upon management, betting (correctly) that he was too big a star to be fired.

In 1934, he met a woman named Peggy Williams from the Oxford Group, later known as the Moral Re-Armament, a Christian movement founded at Oxford in the 1920s. Somehow, Williams recruited Menzies into the fold. He resolved to change his life completely, adopting aggressively the group’s so-called “four absolutes”: honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love.

Now wearing his newly-born Christianity on his sleeve, he spent virtually every waking moment proselytizing, except when he was onstage. Supposedly a gripping public speaker (at least as told here), he claimed many converts among his successes. However, he frequently did so by belittling, humiliating, and patronizing those whom he found less pious than himself.

It is perhaps telling of his insufferable priggishness, that when he returned to Australia for another tour with Williamson, he “felt it was a call from God to pioneer in a country that had never known a major spiritual awakening.” Now, Australia wasn’t exactly the bushland in the 1920s. It was a civilized nation. The notion that Menzies was going to rouse it from a spiritual slumber, all by himself, is more than faintly nauseating.

That he continued to believe this to the end of his life is clear from the quote with which the book ends: “God called me to remake men and nations . . . and that task is never finished.”

The words “As Told To” do not precede the authors’ names on the title page, but they might as well. It is an understatement to say they are sympathetic to the subject. A good deal of the material could have come from no one but Menzies himself, and they do not question any of it.

There isn’t really much about Menzies as a performer. The authors’ main purpose is to write about Menzies the evangelist, not Menzies the actor. In their opinion, he was the definitive star of his era, at least in Australia and New Zealand. Williamson kept hiring him, so they must have considered him a success, but if one is looking for a balanced assessment of his stagecraft, you won’t find it here.

By the way, Menzies did save his marriage to Elsie Griffin, although the couple must have spent at least half of their years apart, given the many lengthy tours he undertook without her. The book was published in 1976, nine years before his death (and thirteen before hers), but by then the pair were no longer traveling or performing, owing to ill-health.

The authors, or perhaps I should call them the hagiographers, clearly intend to to put Menzies in a favorable light. For my part, I don’t much like either version of him, pre- or post-conversion. One of the movement’s so-called absolutes was unselfishness, and it seems to me Menzies’ life was always all about himself. Earlier in life, he was at least honest about that.

is this yellowface production offensive or not? if so, any plans of attack? where are the starving asian actors instead of using yellowface?

The mooted protest, or “attack,” never happened. But it was this post that prompted Josephine Lee’s new book, The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

The title is a feint: Lee’s real aim is to portray The Mikado as a racist tract. I am quite sure she could have devised a title that made her mission explicit, but she would have risked losing the reader before she had even begun. Once she is finished there is no doubt where her sympathies lie:

Though The Mikado harbors political sentiments of all kinds, it consistently escapes the charge that it means any of them. This shifty quality is ingrained in the nature of its yellowface: seemingly light, it can easily disavow any mean intention. . . . The very flippancy of these gestures further intensifies their effect, reminding us simultaneously how easy it is to demean nonwhite bodies and denying that such careless actions might impact real people (p. 191).

Lee admits that while she was writing the book, she was “asked many times whether my real objective is to prevent the opera from ever having another production” (p. xxi). She is not so foolish as to embark on a fool’s errand. That the question would be asked speaks volumes about where she is coming from.

It would be much easier to write this review if Lee were an unschooled quack. One could then dismiss her agenda as a simplistic exercise in racial politics, and be done with it. Lee, an associate professor of English and Asian Studies at the University of Minnesota, cannot be so readily ignored. This is a serious piece of scholarship, copiously researched. Lee offers a deep and thorough study of the production and reception history of The Mikado, albeit from a singular perspective that I find profoundly offensive and fundamentally flawed. For all its faults, the book commands attention.

To call a work racist is not quite the same thing as calling the sky blue, or sunflowers yellow. It’s a word freighted with social and political implications, most of them overwhelmingly unacceptable. It may not be Lee’s aim to see the opera banned, but if it were widely accepted as racist—as that word is usually defined—there is a good chance that it would be.

“Racism” has multiple definitions (Wikipedia offers a good overview), and Lee never states which one she is using. It could be that she hasn’t thought deeply about the matter, or that she is sold on a rhetorical flourish that entered racial studies in about the 1970s—namely, that “racism” is whatever one finds it politically useful to be, and that to admit of other possibilities is a needless show of weakness.

There emerged a school of thought at around that time, that racism is something that whites (defined as those of European descent, with Hispanics sometimes excluded) do to nonwhites. Taken to its extreme, every white baby is a born racist. It’s an ossified view of racism that locks the human race permanently into two non-intersecting categories—whites and everyone else. This seems to be Lee’s view:

On Western stages dominated by white actors, the practice of yellowface—the playing of oriental characters by non-Asian actors—marks the privilege to represent. Whiteness has traditionally been granted the power of racial transformation: white actors could successfully enact a variety of colored others, whereas nonwhite performers, as we have seen with the black performances of The Mikado, were invariably marked by what was seen to be the indelible and natural features of their race. Even when allowed more artistic freedom than as a quaint curiosity or display of brute primitivism, the nonwhite performer was rarely credited with the ability to transform into a full range of characterizations (169–70).

I was struck that “yellowface” is the accepted scholarly term for “the playing of oriental characters by non-Asian actors.” There are many ironies here that Lee does not comment upon. For one thing, it presupposes the old stereotype that Asians have yellow skin—which they do not. Now, I could well imagine a bigoted writer calling Asians “yellow,” but why would someone who is Asian herself acquiesce in that description? The term is also founded on the presumption that Asians are all one race, an assertion I believe the Japanese themselves would dispute.

Of course, yellowface is just one of many possible combinations in which people of one nationality impersonate another on stage. There are abundant examples (Gilbert wrote some of them; so did Monty Python) where English actors impersonate characters from France or Scotland, adopt exaggerated versions of real French or Scottish accents, and mimic well known stereotypes of those two nations for comic effect. Why has the scholarship of racial politics devised no shorthand word for that? I don’t know if Lee has been to Scotland, but I can assure her that many Scots are thoroughly convinced they are a different race from the English. And it must be noted that when Gilbert puts the French or Scots onstage, no one says (as they have about The Mikado) that Gilbert is really poking fun at England. To the extent his portrayal of those nations is offensive, Gilbert’s intention is exactly what it appears to be.

Lee never articulates clearly whether the charge of racism inheres in the author, the work, the performer, or the audience. Her discussion ricochets between the text, the actors who put it on, and the attitudes of those who watch and listen. In one particularly telling passage, she critiques Peter Sellars’s 1983 production for Lyric Opera of Chicago, but as evidence of “complex fears behind the modern version of the yellow peril” (153) that allegedly inhabit the production, the best she can muster is a quote from a British writer who lived in Japan—in 1904! Attitudes towards Japan might have changed in eighty years, and if she cannot produce anything more current, it could be that the Sellars production simply doesn’t have the racial overtones she attributes to it.

At times, she writes as if The Mikado were a living thing with actions and intentions of its own:

The Mikado has also defined what is Japanese in a variety of ways and to a multitude of audiences. Though it bills itself as a fanciful invention and source of innocent merriment, it also represents Japan both metaphorically and metonymically through its creation of Titipu and its characters and through the prominent display of Japanese objects and costumes onstage (141).

However compellingly light the touch of the opera, it still carries the weight of having to stand for Japanese people and Japanese culture. . . . it operates not only as a harmless divertissement but also as a touchstone of racial sensitivity (142).

As these modern versions all suggest, the revitalization of Gilbert and Sullivan lies in innovative restaging, youthful performers, and energetic performances. Unfortunately, in the case of The Mikado, this also entails a revisiting of stereotypes—the foreign invader or the immigrant coolie—that hammer home an overtly hostile and racist message. These moments reveal how The Mikado can never really disguise its own power to represent Japan and its connections to a political orientalism that exists within its patrician fantasy (164).

As we have seen, the opera disclaims any responsibility for racial representations even while visions of racial difference are at its very heart (180).

Lee seems to hold The Mikado responsible for events long past the period when it was written: “At the heart of Asian American discontent with orientalist images and practices, such as have been amply demonstrated in The Mikado, is a desire for stage representation to reflect some offstage authenticity, usually imagined as the laboring bodies of the disenfranchised” (171). How The Mikado could be held to stand in for Asian American discontent that no one had imagined in 1885, is not explained. (In the preceding quote, as in many, Lee refers to Asians as “bodies,” rather than “people.” I do not know why.)

There is no doubt that Asians have long been subject to ugly, vicious, and unconscionable bigotry. Lee traces this history, and while the hard evidence of Gilbert’s views is thin on the ground, she produces an abundance of repugnant cultural references from his own time that he cannot have been unaware of. For those who would hold Gilbert wholly innocent, it is tough but enlightening reading. She argues that Ko-Ko and Katisha are derived from stock characters of blackface minstrelsy. If there is a blackface antecedent for a joke, rest assured Lee will seek it out. I am not entirely convinced, but her argument is not without merit.

Yet, she gives Gilbert no credit for his attempt (unprecedented at the time) to make the original production at least visually authentic, down to hiring Japanese artists from the village at Knightsbridge to coach the cast. If Gilbert had never been to Japan himself, neither had his audience; had he wished to caricature the Japanese, rather than to portray them accurately, he surely could have gotten away with it. To Lee, Gilbert’s mimicry is just “commodity racism”—a fetishism of fabrics and objects that never strives to find real people underneath the clothing and make-up they wear:

The pleasure of The Mikado’s yellowface is in a racial transformation unencumbered by the real, a version of playacting that could be easily adopted and just as easily dispensed with (191).

Lee struggles, but never actually manages to find, much evidence that The Mikado is considered offensive by the Japanese themselves. It is true that the work was banned briefly in 1907 at the request of the Japanese embassy. Yet, when a correspondent of the Tokyo newspaper Asahi went to see the opera, he took no offense and concluded the ban was unnecessary. She seems almost disappointed in the reporter’s failure to be insulted (144–5).

The opera was not produced in Japan until the American occupation at the end of World War II. However, the lack of performances was not because of its specific content, but because it was illegal to put a comic portrayal of the emperor on stage. This would have been true, in other words, no matter what the opera had said, and no matter who had written it. The first productions there were mounted by (or for) the American occupying forces. Lee is full of sympathy for what she assumes the occupied country might have felt about “the superiority of American democracy over an imagined backward Japan” (196), without pausing to acknowledge what that country had done to become occupied in the first place. Some Japanese were troubled to find their emperor the object of comic satire—something they had never before been allowed to see—but there were no full-throated objections to the opera, though Lee tries desperately to find them. Most Japanese seem to have recognized the opera for the English fantasy that it was.

In 1956, Fujiwara Opera toured the United States with a production of The Mikado in English. Critics were respectful, but complained that non-native speakers struggled to enunciate Gilbert’s words. To Lee, “These reviews remind us that . . . the characterizations of The Mikado stood to lose rather than gain in credibility with Japanese performers in the flesh” (204). A better argument is that The Mikado stood to lose when the words got short shrift, regardless of who was speaking them.

Lee is vexed that the opera has not been protested more often. The only protest she describes in any detail, occurred at Pomona College in 1990. A few students picketed, but there was no mass boycott or cancellation. Later in the book, she refers to protests in the plural (169), and the “long history of Mikado protest” (215), which would lead the uninitiated reader to believe that organized objection to the opera has occurred far more often than it has.

The specter of selection bias hovers over Lee’s analysis. Between the 1930s and the 1980s, just one production of The Mikado commands her attention, the 1963 film The Cool Mikado, which she concedes is “painful to watch” (136), but probably not for the reason I would give, namely, that it is not very good. To Lee, it “demonstrates the ways that the radical utopias of The Mikado have been updated to reflect the image of the United States as a new superpower spreading its message of liberal tolerance around the globe” (134). But does the film really demonstrate that, when it basically disappeared after a short run, having made no perceptible cultural impact at all?

The last two chapters concern Mikado productions in America with Asian-American actors, and performances in Japan itself. In quite a few cases, it appears that Lee did not see the productions herself, and is instead relying on reviews and press releases, a procedure likewise prone to error. These productions, in any event, are not available on video, so her assessment of them cannot be tested or challenged.

Not many productions meet with her approval. One of the few that does is a 2007 production by Lodestone Theatre, The Mikado Project, a show about a group of Asian actors putting on The Mikado while struggling against its caricatures and stereotypes. The actress playing Yum-Yum complains that, by agreeing to stage the work, they’ll “be putting our stamp of approval on an Imperialist-Colonial, White-Male-centric, dick-waggling . . racist piece of crap” (qtd. on 181–2). The director concedes that their company is on the brink of financial ruin, and they need a sure-fire hit like The Mikado to remain afloat. The performers, obliged to perform an opera they loathe, resolve to rewrite it—practically beyond recognition.

To Lee, The Mikado Project “provides several opportunities not only for critique, but also for imagining how the opera might be liberated in order to comment on the politics of race, gender, and sexuality” (184). But whatever its merits, The Mikado Project is not The Mikado at all, but an original work that happens to use the opera as a mere backdrop. It doesn’t really answer the question of how Gilbert and Sullivan’s text could be presented to Lee’s satisfaction—if indeed it ever could.

She does not allow that the opera’s light satire and inescapably Victorian English outlook might just be fundamentally unsuited to the burden she wishes it to bear. In a recent production of Hot Mikado, “It is difficult to catch anything more than a fleeting glimpse of a more substantive message about race” (132). Another, this time in Madison, Wisconsin, “seems only to confirm a pleasing version of aesthetic foreignness that in fact covers over any more complicated understanding of exchange, commodities, labor, and commerce” (174).

Lee’s familiarity with Gilbert’s broader output is superficial. She refers to the actor who created the role of The Mikado as Richard Templeton, not Temple (73); she refers to the penultimate G&S opera as Utopia Unlimited, not Limited (87); and she describes Joseph Papp as the director, rather than his actual role as producer, of the so-called Papp’s Pirates (156). Twice, she claims (xix, 125) that the David Bell/Rob Bowman Hot Mikado of 1986 now rivals the original in popularity, a statement that is absurd on its face.

On p. 87, she quotes the Mikado’s song:

In “A More Humane Mikado,” the Mikado states that the fitting punishment for “The lady who dyes a chemical yellow / Or stains her grey hair puce / Or pinches her figger” is to be “blacked up like a nigger / With permanent walnut juice.”

The misquote—“blacked up,” rather than just “blacked”—is not a momentary slip, as Lee uses “blacked up,” in quotes, throughout the book. I don’t suggest that her hypothesis would have turned out any differently, but if you are going to describe a work as racist, you ought at least to quote it accurately. It makes one wonder what other mistakes could be lurking in Lee’s text.

Lee is aware that, from the beginning, critics have said that the opera is really about England, not Japan. She concludes, quite simply, that its racial overtones are inescapable:

Having Japanese performers in The Mikado challenges the logic of its racial impersonation. These examples belie the claim that the opera is only about England and insist on its power as a representation of Japan. In turn, they present versions of a Titipu that show the complexity of claims to a distinctively Japanese history for the opera.

These productions are framed not only by their rarity within a world overwhelmingly populated by yellowface versions of The Mikado, but also by the long history of resistance to the opera on the part of Japan (192).

But the very rarity of productions in Japan was directly the result of a censorship regime that prohibited putting the emperor on stage. Whatever the merits of this policy, The Mikado cannot be held responsible for it. Beyond the issue of censorship, it is hardly surprising that the Japanese hewed predominantly to their own theatrical tradition, just as the English hewed to theirs. In 1885, there were no Japanese performers in London who could have given The Mikado in English. If Gilbert was going to write a play situated somewhere other than England, who else but English performers could have been expected to act it?

The Mikado is not the only work in which Gilbert uses an exotic foreign locale as a stand-in for England. He does so in The Gondoliers, with Venice substituted for Japan; and he does so again in Utopia, Limited, with an imaginary South Pacific island. Is Utopia a racist work, when it is situated in an invented place? Lee points out repeatedly that the names of the characters in The Mikado, such as Pooh-Bah and Ko-Ko, are inauthentic. In a made-up place, they naturally would be. If Gilbert had actually tried to use real Japanese names, wouldn’t it just make the problem worse? The reviewer for the Tokyo newspaper Asahi described The Mikado as “an imaginary world, not in the least like Japan” (qtd. on 145). He got the point exactly.

There is far too much good here to dismiss the book out of hand; still, Josephine Lee’s The Japan of Pure Invention is frustrating on many levels. Locked into rigid and outdated notions of race and racism, it leans upon and reinforces the very stereotypes it seeks to explode. The legacy of racism in the English-speaking world is sufficiently broad and deep that some of Lee’s barbs cannot help but strike home. Yet, the one-sidedness of her analysis leaves one suspicious that she can’t be trusted, even when she appears to be right.

* * * *

The Japan of Pure Invention is available on Amazon.com for $21.37 (paperback), or $15 (kindle). It is 248 pages, plus an index and numerous illustrations, many of which will be new to most readers.

The new score is simply the 1892 Chappell edition, with the dialogue and an attractive cover added. It is nothing that you could not obtain yourself by downloading readily available sources on the net, but it’s nice to have it in one volume, if you happen to be interested in The Mountebanks.

It is available here.

There is a new logo (right), replacing the ugly monstrosity with concentric green circles (shown below). There is also a new color scheme, with gentle shades of blue and gray replacing the former mixture of bright blue, bright green, and cornfield yellow.

Incidentally, if you are ever in the market for a logo, I highly recommend logosnap.com. Its  pre-defined templates and a rich graphics library make logo design a snap. I wouldn’t call the Discography’s new logo a great work of art, but from a blank slate I couldn’t have done anything nearly as good.

I have received a number of comments about the availability of digital downloads, such as MP3, iTunes, and so forth. This is a dimension not noted on the site, which indicates availability only on tangible media (LPs, cassettes, CDs, DVDs, and so forth).

Most recordings issued nowadays are available as digital downloads, and older recordings are added all the time. Just to update the site for what is available today would be a daunting task, and the information would be continuously out of date.

Accordingly, I have decided not to indicate which recordings are available as downloads, if they were also issued in physical form. If a G&S recording is issued only as a download (there are none so far that I am aware of), I will note the fact.