The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty is a comic opera in two acts, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. Its official premiere was at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York City on 31 December 1879, where it was well received by both audiences and critics.Perry, Helga. Information from the Savoyoperas.org website , Savoy Operas, 27 November 2000, accessed 25 July 2009 Its London debut was on 3 April 1880, at the Opera Comique, where it ran for 363 performances.
The story concerns Frederic, who, having completed his 21st year, is released from his apprenticeship to a band of tender-hearted pirates. He meets the daughters of the incompetent Major-General Stanley, including Mabel, and the two young people fall instantly in love. Frederic learns, however, that he was born on 29 February, and so, technically, he has a birthday only once each leap year. His indenture specifies that he remain apprenticed to the pirates until his "twenty-first birthday", meaning that he must serve for another 63 years. Bound by his own sense of duty to honour his bond with the pirates, Frederic's only solace is that Mabel agrees to wait for him faithfully. The pirates' maid-of-all-work, Ruth, eventually reveals a fact that saves the day.
The Pirates of Penzance was the fifth Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration and introduced the much-parodied "Major-General's Song". It has been one of the most frequently played Gilbert and Sullivan operas, along with The Mikado and H.M.S. Pinafore. Pirates was performed for over a century by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in Britain until the copyrights expired and by many other opera companies and repertory companies worldwide.
Modernized productions include Joseph Papp's 1981 Broadway production, which ran for 787 performances, won the Tony Award for Best Revival and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical and spawned many imitations; the production was further adapted as a film in 1983. Another Broadway adaptation by Rupert Holmes was presented in 2025 as Pirates! The Penzance Musical.
Background
The Pirates of Penzance was the only Gilbert and Sullivan opera to have its official premiere in the United States. At the time, American law offered no copyright protection to foreigners. After the pair's previous opera, H.M.S. Pinafore, achieved success in London in 1878, approximately 150 American companies quickly mounted unauthorised productions that often took considerable liberties with the text and paid no royalties to the creators.Prestige, Colin. "D'Oyly Carte and the Pirates: The Original New York Productions of Gilbert and Sullivan", pp. 113–148 at p. 118, Papers Presented at the International Conference of G&S held at the University of Kansas, May 1970, edited by James Helyar. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Libraries, 1971Allen (1979), p. 2Goodman, Andrew. Gilbert and Sullivan at Law, pp. 204–205, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (1982), Gilbert and Sullivan hoped to forestall further "copyright piracy" by mounting the first production of their next opera in America, before others could copy it, and by delaying publication of the score and libretto.International copyright pirating , Edward Samuels, accessed 25 July 2009 They succeeded in keeping for themselves the direct profits of the first American production of The Pirates of Penzance by opening the production themselves on Broadway, prior to the London production, and they also operated profitable US touring companies of Pirates and Pinafore. However, Gilbert, Sullivan, and their producer, Richard D'Oyly Carte, failed in their efforts, over the next decade, to control the American performance copyrights to Pirates and their other operas.Rosen, Zvi S. "The Twilight of the Opera Pirates: A Prehistory of the Right of Public Performance for Musical Compositions", Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, Vol. 24, 2007, pp. 1157–1218, 5 March 2007, accessed 24 October 2012
Fiction and plays about pirates were ubiquitous in the 19th century.Adams, Cecil, "Why are pirates depicted with a parrot on their shoulder? What's the origin of the skull and crossbones pirate flag?" The Straight Dope, 12 October 2007 Walter Scott's The Pirate (1822) and James Fenimore Cooper's The Red Rover were key sources for the romanticised, dashing pirate image and the idea of repentant pirates.Williams, p. 130 Both Gilbert and Sullivan had parodied these ideas early in their careers. Sullivan had written a comic opera, The Contrabandista, in 1867, about a hapless British tourist who is captured by bandits and forced to become their chief. Gilbert had written several comic works that involved pirates or bandits. In Gilbert's 1876 opera Princess Toto, the title character is eager to be captured by a brigand chief. Gilbert had translated Jacques Offenbach's operetta Les brigands, in 1871. As in Les brigands, The Pirates of Penzance absurdly treats stealing as a professional career path, with apprentices and tools of the trade such as the crowbar and life preserver.Williams, pp. 131–132
Genesis While Pinafore was running strongly at the Opera Comique in London, Gilbert was eager to get started on his and Sullivan's next opera, and he began working on the libretto in December 1878.Ainger, p. 166 He re-used several elements of his 1870 one-act piece, Our Island Home, which had introduced a pirate "chief", Captain Bang. Bang was mistakenly apprenticed to a pirate band as a child by his deaf nursemaid. Also, Bang, like Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance, had never seen a woman before and felt a keen sense of duty, as an apprenticed pirate, until the passage of his 21st birthday freed him from his articles of indenture.Faning, Eaton and Shapcott Wensley. Extra Supplement: Our Island Home in Musical Times, Vol. 55, No. 859 (1 September 1914), pp. 1–12Gänzl, p. 29 Bernard Shaw believed that Gilbert drew on ideas in Les brigands for his new libretto, including the businesslike bandits and the bumbling police.Shaw (Vol. 1), p. 784 Gilbert and Sullivan also inserted into Act II an idea they first considered for a one-act opera parody in 1876 about burglars meeting police, while their conflict escapes the notice of the oblivious father of a large family of girls."A Talk With Mr. Sullivan", The New York Times, 1 August 1879, p. 3, accessed 22 May 2012 As in Pinafore, "there was a wordful self-descriptive set-piece for Stanley ["The Major-General's Song"], introducing himself much as Sir Joseph Porter had done ... a lugubrious comic number for the Sergeant of Police ... a song of confession for Ruth, the successor [to] Little Buttercup", romantic material for Frederic and Mabel, and "ensemble and chorus music in turn pretty, parodic and atmospheric."Gänzl, Kurt. "The Pirates of Penzance, or The Slave of Duty: Comic opera in 2 acts by Gilbert & Sullivan", Operetta Research Center, 5 October 2016
Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte met by 24 April 1879 to make plans for a production of Pinafore and the new opera in America.Ainger, p. 168 Carte travelled to New York in the summer of 1879 and made arrangements with theatre manager John T. Ford to present, at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, the authorised productions. He then returned to London.Ainger, p. 169 Meanwhile, once Pinafore became a hit in London, the author, composer and producer had the financial resources to produce future shows themselves, and they executed a plan to free themselves from their financial backers in the "Comedy Opera Company", which eventually succeeded. Carte formed a new partnership with Gilbert and Sullivan to divide profits equally among themselves after the expenses of each of their shows.
In November 1879, Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte sailed to America with a company of singing actors, to play both Pinafore and the new opera, including J. H. Ryley as Sir Joseph, Blanche Roosevelt as Josephine, Alice Barnett as Little Buttercup, Furneaux Cook as Dick Deadeye, Hugh Talbot as Ralph Rackstraw and Jessie Bond as Cousin Hebe, some of whom had been in the Pinafore cast in London.Jacobs, p. 129 To these, he added some American singers, including Signor Brocolini as Captain Corcoran.Ainger, pp. 182–183 Alfred Cellier came to assist Sullivan, while his brother François Cellier remained in London to conduct Pinafore there.Jacobs, p. 127 Gilbert and Sullivan cast talented actors who were not well-known stars and did not command high fees. They then tailored their operas to the particular abilities of these performers.Jacobs, p. 111; Ainger, pp. 133–134 The skill with which Gilbert and Sullivan used their performers had an effect on the audience: as critic Herman Klein wrote, "we secretly marvelled at the naturalness and ease with which [the Gilbertian quips and absurdities] were said and done. For until then no living soul had seen upon the stage such weird, eccentric, yet intensely human beings .... [They] conjured into existence a hitherto unknown comic world of sheer delight."Jacobs, p. 113 Gilbert acted as stage director for his own plays and operas. He sought naturalism in acting, which was unusual at the time, just as he strove for realistic visual elements. He deprecated self-conscious interaction with the audience and insisted on a style of portrayal in which the characters were never aware of their own absurdity but were coherent internal wholes.Cox-Ife, William. W. S. Gilbert: Stage Director. Dobson, 1978 . See also Bond, Jessie, Reminiscences, Introduction Sullivan conducted the music rehearsals.Ainger, p. 157
Sullivan had sketched out the music for Pirates in England. When he arrived in New York, however, he found that he had left the sketches for Act I behind, and he had to reconstruct the first act from memory, or compose new numbers.Ainger, p. 177Jacobs, p. 130 Gilbert told a correspondent many years later that Sullivan was unable to recall his setting of the entrance of the women's chorus, so they substituted the chorus "Climbing over rocky mountain" from their earlier opera, Thespis.Ainger, p. 179 Sullivan's manuscript for Pirates contains pages removed from a Thespis score, with the vocal parts of this chorus altered from their original arrangement as a four-part chorus. Some scholars (e.g. Tillett and Spencer, 2000) have suggested that Gilbert and Sullivan had planned all along to re-use "Climbing over rocky mountain," and perhaps other parts of Thespis. They argue that Sullivan's having brought the unpublished Thespis score to New York, when there were no plans to revive Thespis, might not have been accidental.March, Jerry. "Part of Thespis Score Discovered", The Savoyard, Vol. XX, No. 1 (March 1981), p. 25; and Stedman, p. 95, n. 52 In any case, on 10 December 1879, Sullivan wrote a letter to his mother about the new opera, upon which he was hard at work in New York. "I think it will be a great success, for it is exquisitely funny, and the music is strikingly tuneful and catching." As was his usual practice in his operas, Sullivan left the overture for the last moment, often sketching it out and entrusting completion of "the details" to an assistant, in this case the company's music director, Alfred Cellier.Ainger, p. 180