I Have Landed (14 page)

I can only claim amateur status as an exegete of Gilbert and Sullivan, but I can offer a personal testimony that may help to elucidate these two necessary planes of excellence. My first book,
Ontogeny and Phylogeny
, traced the history of biological views on the relationship between embryological development and evolutionary change—and I remain committed to the principle that systematic alterations during a life span often mirror either a historical sequence or a stable hierarchy of fully developed forms at rising levels of complexity in our current world.

As stated at the outset, I fell in love with Gilbert and Sullivan at a tender age, and imbibed all the words and music before I could possibly understand their full context and meaning. I therefore, and invariably, enjoy a bizarre and exhilarating, if mildly unsettling, experience every time I attend a performance today. An old joke, based on an ethnic stereotype that may pass muster as a mock on a privileged group in an age of political correctness, asks why the dour citizens of Switzerland often burst into inappropriate laughter during solemn moments at Sunday church services. “When they get the jokes they heard at Saturday night's party.” Similar experiences attend my current Sundays with Gilbert and Sullivan, but my delays between hearing and comprehension extend to forty years or more!

I know all the words by childhood rote, but I couldn't comprehend their full cleverness at this time of implantation. Thus I carry the text like an idiot savant—with full accuracy and limited understanding because, although now fully capable, I make no conscious effort to ponder or analyze the sacred writ during my daily life. But whenever I attend a performance, I enjoy at least one “Swiss moment” when I listen with an adult ear and suddenly experience a jolt that can only induce an enormous grin for exposing human folly by personal
example: “Oh yes, of course, how stupid of me. So that's what those words, which I have known and recited nearly all my conscious life, actually mean.”

At this point I must highlight an aspect of this argument that I had hoped to elucidate
en passant
, and without such overt pedantry. But I have failed in all efforts to achieve this end, and had best bite the bullet of embarrassing explicitness. I do, indeed, intend this primary comparison between the vernacular versus Plato's plane as two necessary forms of excellence, and between my differing styles of childhood and adult affection for Gilbert and Sullivan. But I am, most emphatically, not arguing that the vernacular plane bears any legitimate analogy to any of the conventional descriptions of childhood as primitive, undeveloped, lesser, unformed, or even unsophisticated.

(If I really thought, in any conscious part of my being, that the vernacular character of my “popular” writings on science implied any disrespect for my audience or any adulteration of my content, I could not proceed because excellence would then lie beyond my grasp by inherent definition—and my personal quest for the two planes of this goal provides my strongest conscious motivation for this aspect of my career. Good popular writing in science builds an honored branch of our humanistic tradition, extending back to Galileo's composition of both his great books as accessible and witty dialogues in Italian, not as abstract treatises in Latin, and to Darwin's presentation of the
Origin of Species
as a book for all educated readers.)

I only compare childhood's love with the vernacular plane of excellence because both base their accurate perception and discernment upon the immediacy of unanalyzed attraction—and many forms of our highest achievement do lie beyond words, or even beyond conscious formulation, in a realm of “knowing that” rather than “stating why.” For example, I first saw Joe DiMaggio play when I was eight years old, but already a reasonably knowledgeable fan of the game. I knew, with certainty, that his play and presence surpassed all others. But I had probably never even heard the word
grace
, and I surely could not formulate any concept of
excellence
.

Thus, I know that Gilbert and Sullivan fulfill excellence's primary criterion of full and simultaneous operation on two planes because I have experienced them both, and sequentially, during my own life—and this temporal separation permits me to untangle the different appeals. Some intrusions of adult understanding upon childhood's rote strike me as simply funny, not particularly illustrative of anything about excellence, but worth mentioning to set a context and to potentiate my full confession. Failure to understand does not inhibit—and may actually abet—rote memorization or unconscious infusion.

As one silly example, I recently attended a performance of
H.M.S. Pinafore
,
and had my Swiss moment during Josephine's aria, as she wrestles with the dilemma of following her true love for a poor sailor or making an advantageous union with Sir Joseph Porter, “the ruler of the Queen's navy.” She says of her true love, Ralph Rackstraw, “No golden rank can he impart. No wealth of house or land. No fortune save his trusty heart. . . .” And the proverbial light-bulb finally illuminated my brain. I did not know the meaning of “save” as “except” at age eleven. At that time I remember wondering how fortune could “rescue” Ralph's admirable ticker—but I never resolved the line, and didn't revisit the matter for forty-five years.

Some little examples in this mode even prove embarrassing, and therefore ever so salutary in the service of humility for arrogant intellectuals. In
Iolanthe
, for example, the Lord Chancellor berates himself for mistaking a powerful fairy queen for an insignificant schoolmarm:

A plague on this vagary,
I'm in a nice quandary!
Of hasty tone with dames unknown
I ought to be more chary;
It seems that she's a fairy
From Andersen's library,
And I took her for the proprietor
Of a Ladies' Seminary!

Now, and obviously on the second plane, part of Gilbert's literary joke lies in his conscious distortion of words to force rhymes with others that we properly stress on the penultimate syllable—especially “fairy,” the key to the entire verse. But I didn't know the correct versions behind many of these distortions—and I pronounced “vagary” on the second syllable, thus exposing my pretentiousness, until a bit of auditory dissonance led me to a dictionary only about ten years ago!

As operative examples of the two planes—and of Gilbert and Sullivan's achievement of excellence through their unparalleled success in both domains, without disrespect for the vernacular, or preciousness on the upper level—consider these Swiss moments of my sequential experiences in music and text. I have relished my unanalyzed vernacular pleasure all my life, but I now appreciate the surpassingly rare quality of these works all the more because, in my maturity, I have added a few glimpses upon the depth and uniqueness of their dual representation.

Sullivan, to cite some examples in just one aspect of his efforts on the second
plane, had mastered all major forms of the classical repertory. He especially appreciated the English roots and versions of certain styles. Nothing can surpass his elegant Handelian parody in
Princess Ida
, when the three irredeemably stupid sons of King Gama seek freedom from mechanical restriction before a battle by removing their armor, piece by piece, as Arac intones his formal melody to the graceful accompaniment of strings alone (“This helmet, I suppose, was meant to ward off blows”). And, still speaking of
Princess Ida
, Sullivan took an ultimate risk, and showed his genuine mastery, when he wrote a truly operatic aria of real quality (“Oh goddess wise”) to accompany Gilbert's delicious spoof of Ida's serious pretensions. Durward Lely, who played the tenor lead of Cyril in the original production, said of this aria, “As an example of mock heroics it seems to me unsurpassable.” The composer, in modern parlance, really had balls.

Whenever Sullivan wrote his parodies of classical forms, he did so for a wickedly funny, and devastatingly appropriate, dramatic reason. But his device must remain inaccessible unless one knows the musical style behind Sullivan's tread on the higher plane. Still, the songs work wonderfully on the vernacular plane, even when a listener cannot grasp the intended musical joke because he does not know the classical form under parody. This I can assert with certainty, albeit for a limited domain, because I loved and somehow caught the “specialness” of the following two songs in my youth, but didn't learn about the musical forms (and thus recognize the parody) until my adult years, and even then didn't understand the intended contextual joke until a much later Swiss moment.

Even at age ten, I would have identified the trio (“A British tar is a soaring soul”) as my favorite song from Act I
of Pinafore
. I knew that Gilbert's text described this song as a “glee,” but I knew no meaning for the word besides “mirth,” and therefore did not recognize his citation of a genre of unaccompanied part songs for three or more male voices, especially popular in eighteenth-century England (and the source of the term “glee club,” still used to describe some amateur singing groups).

At an intermediary stage toward the second plane, I did recognize the song as a perfectly composed glee in the old style, including its a cappella setting of the two stanzas for Ralph Rackstraw, the Boatswain, and the Boatswain's Mate. But I only got the joke a few years ago. Sir Joseph Porter gives three copies of the song to Ralph, claiming that he wrote the ditty himself “to encourage independence of thought and action in the lower branches of the service.” The three men start to perform the unfamiliar piece by singing at sight from Sir Joseph's score. They begin, and manage to continue for an entire verse of four lines, in perfect homophony—Sir Joseph's obvious intention for the entire piece. But, as simple sailors after all, these men can boast little experience in sight-singing, and the poor Boatswain's Mate soon falls behind the others. The second verse of four lines therefore “devolves” into an elegant, if mock, polyphonic texture—that is, a part song, a perfect and literal glee (made all the more absurd in fulfilling, by this “imperfection,” Sir Joseph's stated intention to encourage independence among his men).

Gilbert's drawing (signed with his pseudonym “Bab”) of a British tar as “a soaring soul. . . whose energetic fist is ready to resist a dictatorial word.”

(I am confident that I have caught Sullivan's intent aright, but I remain surprised that modern performers generally don't seem to get the point, or don't choose to honor the potential understanding of at least some folks in their audience. Only twice, in about ten performances, have I seen the song performed by sailors holding the scores, with the Boatswain's Mate becoming frustrated as he falls behind. Why not honor Sullivan's theatrical instincts, and his lovely, if relatively sophisticated, musical joke? The piece, and the humor in the polyphonic discombobulation, works perfectly well even for listeners who only experience the vernacular plane, whereas the dual operation, with full respect accorded to both planes, expresses the
sine qua non
of excellence.)

The madrigal (so identified) from
The Mikado
(“Brightly dawns our wedding day”) exploits a similar device. Yum-Yum prepares for her wedding with Nanki-Poo, but under the slight “drawback” that her husband must be beheaded in a month. The four singers, including the bride and bridegroom, try to cheer themselves up through the two verses of this perfect madrigal, or four-part song in alternating homophonic and polyphonic sections. They start
optimistically (“joyous hour we give thee greeting”) but cannot sustain the mood (“all must sip the cup of sorrow”), despite the words that close both verses (“sing a merry madrigal, fal-la”).

To “get” the full joke, one must recognize the rigidly formal and unvarying texture of the musical part—thus setting a contrast with the singers' progressive decline into textual gloom and actual tears. Gilbert made his quartet stand rigidly still throughout the piece, as if declaiming their ancient madrigal in a formal concert hall—thus emphasizing the almost antic contrast of constant and stylish form with growing despair of feeling. In this case, I do sense that most modern directors grasp the intended point, but suspect that so few listeners now know the musical language and definition of a madrigal that the contrast between form and feeling must be reinforced by some other device. I do not object to such modernization, which clearly respects authorial intent, but I feel that directors have acquitted their proper intuition with highly varying degrees of success.

My vote for last place goes to Jonathan Miller's otherwise wonderful resetting at an English seaside resort. (As Gilbert's central joke, after all,
The Mikado's
Japanese setting is a sham, for each character plays an English stock figure thinly disguised in oriental garb—the ineffably polite upper-class Mikado, who boils his victims in oil but invites them to tea before their execution; his wastrel son; the phony noble pretender who will do any job for a price, and who gave his name, Pooh-Bah, to men of such multiple employments and salaries.) Miller's quartet sings the madrigal stock-still, in true Gilbertian fashion, while workmen ply their tools and move their ladders about the set to emphasize the key contrast. A decent concept, perhaps, but Sullivan never wrote a more beautiful song, and you can't hear a note amid the distractions and actual clatter of the workmen's movements. Pure kudos, on the other end, to Canada's Stratford Company. They recognized that most of the audience would not draw, from the song itself, the essential contrast between structured form and dissolving emotion—so they set the singers in the midst of a formal Japanese tea ceremony to transfer the musical point to visual imagery that no one could miss, and without disrupting the music either visually or aurally.