The Sorcerer

[1] Three years later, in 1875, talent agent and producer Richard D'Oyly Carte was managing the Royalty Theatre, and he needed a short opera to be played as an afterpiece to Jacques Offenbach's La Périchole.

[3][4] The piece was witty, tuneful and very "English", in contrast to the bawdy burlesques and adaptations of French operettas that dominated the London musical stage at that time.

Plans for a collaboration for Carl Rosa in 1875 fell through because Gilbert was too busy with other projects,[9][10] and an attempted Christmas 1875 revival of Thespis by Richard D'Oyly Carte failed when the financiers backed out.

Mr and Mrs Howard Paul had operated a small touring company booked by Carte's agency for many years, but the couple had recently separated.

Carte's agency supplied additional singers, including Alice May (Aline), Giulia Warwick (Constance), and Richard Temple (Sir Marmaduke).

[29] The villagers of Ploverleigh are preparing to celebrate the betrothal of Alexis Pointdextre, the son of the local baronet, and the blue-blooded Aline Sangazure ("Ring forth, ye bells").

At midnight that night ("'Tis twelve, I think"), the villagers awake and, under the influence of the potion, each falls in love with the first person of the opposite sex that they see ("Why, where be Oi").

All of the matches thus made are highly and comically unsuitable; Constance, for example, loves the ancient notary who performed the betrothal ("Dear friends, take pity on my lot").

As discussed below, it draws on an older theatrical tradition and satirises social and operatic conventions that are less accessible to modern audiences than the ones explored in the more famous G&S works starting with H.M.S.

The Times commented that "the music is spontaneous, appearing invariably to spring out of the dramatic situations, as though it was their natural concomitant";[53] The Musical Times mused that "it seems as if every composition had grown up in the mind of the author as he wrote the words"; and[57] The Pall Mall Gazette called the union between composer and librettist "well-assorted", arguing that "the opera contains several very happily designed pieces, in which one cannot tell (and need not know) whether the merit of the original underlying idea belongs to the composer of the poem or to the author of the score".

[60] Monthly Musical Record objected to the comic depiction of a clergyman, commenting that "the earnest, hard-working, and serious Clergy should not be made the subject of sneering caricature upon the stage",[61] and Lewis Carroll wrote in his 1888 essay:

Mr. Gilbert – to whom we owe a deep debt of gratitude for the pure and healthy fun he has given us in such comedies as "Patience" – seems to have a craze for making bishops and clergymen contemptible.

[62]Four numbers were encored during the opening night: Aline's aria "Oh, happy young heart", "My name is John Wellington Wells", the Act II quintet "I rejoice that it's decided" and Sir Marmaduke's and Lady Sangazure's duet "Welcome joy, adieu to sadness".

Abounding in tuneful numbers, one or two of which rank with anything that has come from Sir Arthur Sullivan's pen, the orchestration is thin compared with that of his later operas and its melodies have never taken the same popular hold as those of Pinafore, a work of about equal calibre from a musical point of view.

The libretto is sparkling and pungent, and the idea of presenting a British bagman in the guise of a controller of demons and vendor of family curses is as happy a conception as any which has taken form on this modern stage".

"[70] In 1996, Ian Bradley commented in the introduction to his annotated edition of the Gilbert and Sullivan libretti, "It will certainly be a great pity if it gradually fades away.

The Sorcerer contains two of W. S. Gilbert's best-drawn characters, the soulful Dr Daly ... and the flashy but ultimately tragic figure of John Wellington Wells.

Sir Arthur Sullivan's music is delightful and guaranteed to weave a magic spell over all those who hear it, if not actually to make them fall instantly in love with their next-door neighbours.

Still, The Sorcerer packs ample charms, including a felicitous score, a Verdian drinking song turned to teetotal ends, and at least one chorus that has reached the periphery of pop culture.

Other musical numbers that characterise the opera are the quintet in Act II, "I rejoice that it's decided", which is "one of the prettiest things Sullivan ever wrote in the Mendelssohnian manner ... while in the duet that follows between Mr. Wells and Lady Sangazure there is a divertingly sepulchral andante and a no less comic tarentello-like allegro".

In 1913, E. J. Dent wrote in reference to The Sorcerer: "It seems as if a course of Mozart in English might be the best preliminary step towards educating our on-coming public to a really intelligent appreciation of Sullivan".

The vicar's song, "Time was when love and I were well acquainted" is one of the first in a string of meditative "Horatian" lyrics in the Savoy operas, "mingling happiness and sadness, an acceptance and a smiling resignation".

[95] One notable innovation that is characteristic of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and confirmed by its extensive use in The Sorcerer, is the employment of the chorus as an essential part of the action.

Following Italian opera precedents, such as "Largo al factotum" from The Barber of Seville, these numbers juxtapose virtuosity in their speed of delivery (requiring clarity of elocution) with their often comic or satiric lyrics.

For example, in the vicar's Act I song, the same melody is sung in each of the two stanzas using the following text: In the second, the syllable trem has an optional high note to give it a unique character.

[106] Another example is satire on the aristocracy: while in The Sorcerer Lady Sangazure is in direct descent from Helen of Troy, in The Mikado Gilbert developed this idea, and Pooh-Bah can trace his ancestry "back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule".

[112] Originally, in the Act II finale, there was a second incantation in which J. W. Wells summoned Ahrimanes (to be played by Mrs Paul),[113] who told him that either he or Alexis must yield his life to quell the spell.

[135] A series of seven novels by Tom Holt concern young sorcerers who join the firm of "J. W. Wells & Co": The Portable Door (2003), In Your Dreams (2004), Earth, Air, Fire, and Custard (2005), You Don't Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But It Helps (2006), The Better Mousetrap (2008), May Contain Traces of Magic (2009) and Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages (2011).

[136] In Meet Mr Mulliner by P. G. Wodehouse, the title hero sings a fragment from Dr Daly's ballad and characterises his nephew as "the sort of young curate who seems to have been so common in the 'eighties, or whenever it was that Gilbert wrote The Sorcerer.

"[137] It has also been referenced in popular TV series, such as in the Family Guy episode "Patriot Games", where characters sing the song "If you'll marry me" from Act II.