Editing Arthur Sullivan (section)

===Posthumous reputation===
{{Listen|type=music
|filename=1914 - Edison Light Opera Company - Favorite airs from The Mikado (restored).ogg
|title="Favorite airs from ''The Mikado''"<!--This is the name the recording was released under. Please do not correct it to British spelling-->
|description=A 1914 [[Edison Records]] recording of selections from ''[[The Mikado]]''. Includes parts of the overture, "A Wand'ring Minstrel", "Three Little Maids", "Tit-willow" and the Act II finale.
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In the decade after his death, Sullivan's reputation sank considerably among music critics. In 1901 Fuller Maitland took issue with the generally laudatory tone of the obituaries: "Is there anywhere a case quite parallel to that of Sir Arthur Sullivan, who began his career with a work which at once stamped him as a genius, and to the height of which he only rarely attained throughout life?&nbsp;...  It is because such great natural gifts – gifts greater, perhaps, than fell to any English musician since&nbsp;... Purcell – were so very seldom employed in work worthy of them."<ref>Fuller Maitland, J. A. "Obituary", ''Cornhill Magazine'', March 1901, pp. 300–309</ref> Edward Elgar, to whom Sullivan had been particularly kind,<ref>Young, p. 264</ref> rose to Sullivan's defence, branding Fuller Maitland's obituary "the shady side of musical criticism&nbsp;... that foul unforgettable episode".<ref>Quoted in Young, p. 264</ref>{{refn|Fuller Maitland was later discredited when it was shown that he had invented a banal lyric, passing it off as genuine and condemning Sullivan for supposedly setting such inanity.<ref name=burton/> In 1929 Fuller Maitland admitted that he had been wrong in earlier years to dismiss Sullivan's comic operas as "ephemeral".<ref>"Light Opera", ''The Times'', 22 September 1934, p. 10</ref>|group= n}}

[[File:D'oyly-carte-the-joy-of-three-generations-1921.jpg|thumb|left|20th-century audiences|alt=Drawing of a grandfather, father and boy, all dressed for the theatre, sitting in happy anticipation, over the caption "The Joy of Three Generations (To be seen any night at the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas)"]]
Fuller Maitland's followers, including [[Ernest Walker (composer)|Ernest Walker]], also dismissed Sullivan as "merely the idle singer of an empty evening".<ref name="Hughes, p. 6">Hughes, p. 6</ref> As late as 1966 [[Frank Howes]], a music critic for ''[[The Times]]'', condemned Sullivan for a "lack of sustained effort&nbsp;... a fundamental lack of seriousness towards his art [and] inability to perceive the smugness, the sentimentality and banality of the Mendelssohnian detritus&nbsp;... to remain content with the flattest and most obvious rhythms, this yielding to a fatal facility, that excludes Sullivan from the ranks of the good composers."<ref>Howes, p. 54</ref> [[Thomas Dunhill]] wrote in 1928 that Sullivan's "music has suffered in an extraordinary degree from the vigorous attacks which have been made upon it in professional circles. These attacks have succeeded in surrounding the composer with a kind of barricade of prejudice which must be swept away before justice can be done to his genius."<ref>Dunhill 1928, p. 13</ref>

[[Henry Wood|Sir Henry Wood]] continued to perform Sullivan's serious music.<ref>"Sir Henry Wood Jubilee Concert at Albert Hall", ''The Times'', 6 October 1938, p. 10</ref> In 1942 Wood presented a Sullivan centenary concert at the [[Royal Albert Hall]],<ref name=grove/> but it was not until the 1960s that Sullivan's music other than the Savoy operas began to be widely revived. In 1960 Hughes published the first full-length book about Sullivan's music "which, while taking note of his weaknesses (which are many) and not hesitating to castigate his lapses from good taste (which were comparatively rare) [attempted] to view them in perspective against the wider background of his sound musicianship."<ref name="Hughes, p. 6"/> The work of the Sir Arthur Sullivan Society, founded in 1977, and books about Sullivan by musicians such as Young (1971) and Jacobs (1986) contributed to the re-evaluation of Sullivan's serious music.<ref name=burton/> The ''Irish Symphony'' had its first professional recording in 1968, and many of Sullivan's non-Gilbert works have since been recorded.<ref name=Sulldiscog>Shepherd, Marc. [http://gasdisc.oakapplepress.com/sullidx.htm "Discography of Sir Arthur Sullivan"], the Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 10 July 2010, accessed 5 October 2014</ref> Scholarly critical editions of an increasing number of Sullivan's works have been published.<ref name=grove/>

In 1957 a review in ''The Times'' explained Sullivan's contributions to "the continued vitality of the Savoy operas": "Gilbert's lyrics ... take on extra point and sparkle when set to Sullivan's music.&nbsp;... [Sullivan, too, is] a delicate wit, whose airs have a precision, a neatness, a grace, and a flowing melody".<ref>"The Lasting Charm of Gilbert and Sullivan: Operas of an Artificial World", ''The Times'', 14 February 1957, p. 5</ref> A 2000 article in ''The Musical Times'' by Nigel Burton noted the resurgence of Sullivan's reputation beyond the comic operas:
{{quote|[Sullivan] spoke naturally to all people, for all time, of the passions, sorrows and joys which are forever rooted in the human consciousness.&nbsp;... It is his artistic consistency in this respect which obliges us to pronounce him our greatest Victorian composer. Time has now sufficiently dispersed the mists of criticism for us to be able to see the truth, to enjoy all his music, and to rejoice in the rich diversity of its panoply.&nbsp;... [L]et us resolve to set aside the "One-and-a-half-hurrahs" syndrome once and for all, and, in its place, raise THREE LOUD CHEERS.<ref name=burton>Burton, Nigel. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1004730 "Sullivan Reassessed: See How the Fates"], ''The Musical Times'', Winter 2000, pp. 15–22 {{subscription}}</ref>|}}
[[File:Mikado-1917.jpg|thumb|upright|Advertisement for the first recording of ''The Mikado'', 1917|alt=Poster advertising, in plain type, a recording of ''The Mikado'']]