Gilbert and Sullivan or "entertainments", for Thomas German Reed. At a rehearsal for one of these entertainments, "Ages Ago", in 1870, the composer Frederic Clay introduced Gilbert to his friend, the young composer Arthur Sullivan. Over the next year, before the two first collaborated, Gilbert continued to write humorous verse, stories and plays, including the comic operas "Our Island Home" (1870) and "A Sensation Novel" (1871), and the blank verse comedies "The Princess" (1870), "The Palace of Truth" (1870) and "Pygmalion and Galatea" (1871). Sullivan was born in London on 13 May 1842. His father was a military bandmaster, and by the time
Arthur Sullivan Although his melodies sprang from rhythm, some of his themes may have been prompted by his chosen instrumentation or his harmonic techniques. In the comic operas, where many numbers are in verse-plus-refrain form, Sullivan shaped his melodies to provide a climax for the verse, capped by an overall climax in the refrain. Hughes cites "If you go in" ("Iolanthe") as an example. He adds that Sullivan rarely reached the same class of excellence in instrumental works, where he had no librettist to feed his imagination. Even with Gilbert, on those occasions when the librettist wrote in unvaried metre, Sullivan often