Ever since I appeared in The Pirates of Penzance as a boy, I have had a fascination for Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan. Sullivan’s collaborations with WS Gilbert are still immensely popular – but there’s more to him than that. Sullivan composed numerous “serious” works for the concert hall and was for many years the British musical establishment’s brightest hope for the future.

Sullivan was born in London on May 13, 1842. As a boy his fine singing voice gained him a prized place in the choir of the Chapel Royal. In his teens he studied at the Royal Academy of Music. He was the inaugural holder of the Mendelssohn Scholarship, enabling him to study at the Leipzig Conservatory. 

Sullivan’s first job in an English theatre was in 1864, when he composed a one-act ballet called The Enchanted Isle. In 1866 his symphony in E major (Irish) was premiered at the Crystal Palace. The Times said it was “the best musical work… for a long time produced by any English composer”. In the same year Sullivan wrote his concert overture In memoriamand his cello concerto. 

Following the success of these works, another overture, Marmion, was premiered by the Philharmonic Society in 1867. It was also early in his career that he wrote the small amount of chamber music, which has survived. Sullivan’s first oratorio was premiered in 1869: The Prodigal Son is a remarkable work which deserves to be revived. And for the Birmingham Triennial Festival in 1870, he wrote one of his most enduring concert works, Overtura di ballo.

Sullivan supplemented his income by working as a church organist, something which accounts for the large amount of small-scale sacred music and hymns he produced. He was also a prolific writer of songs and partsongs. Some of his many hymn tunes became the Anglican equivalent of “standards”. His best-known is Onward Christian Soldiers.

Sullivan’s songs catered for an unashamedly sentimental market at a time when sentimentality in such material was accepted as wholesome. Most famous of all was The Lost Chord, written in 1877. 

He composed the Festival Te Deum for performance in the Crystal Palace in 1872 as part of the national celebrations marking the recovery of the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) from a near-fatal attack of typhoid.  

Sullivan continued to write incidental music for plays, returning to the genre which launched his professional career. The music for The Tempest was joined by music for other Shakespeare plays: The Merchant of Venice in 1871, The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1874 and Henry VIII in 1877. More would come, most notably the music for Macbeth in 1888 and for Tennyson’s The Foresters in 1893.

The focus of his career between 1875 and 1890 on his comic collaborations with Gilbert didn’t lower his esteem in the eyes of his peers. In 1880 he was appointed conductor of the Leeds Triennial Musical Festival. For Leeds he wrote The Martyr of Antioch in 1880 and The Golden Legend in 1886. Sullivan also longed to contribute to the world of grand opera andIvanhoe was the result. Premiered in 1891, the work was a failure despite a remarkable initial run of 160 performances.

Sullivan’s last completed work was a grand setting of the Te Deum, written in 1900 in anticipation of the end of the Boer War. But he died in November 1900, before the war ended, and was laid to rest in the crypt of St Paul’s.

Enough time has passed for us now to view Sullivan’s serious works in a new light and accept the best of them as well worth our attention.