Impressions that Remained: Memoirs

Abstract

Among the pleasant things that befell early in that year was making the acquaintance of Sir Arthur Sullivan, who came up to me in the house we met in, introduced himself as ‘colleague’ so delightfully, with such a perfect blend of chaff and seriousness (the exact perfection of cadence there is in his work) that my one idea ever after was to see him whenever I could. He told me to show him a specimen of orchestration and was pleased on the whole, but I remember his putting his finger on a rather low flute passage and saying: ‘Now here’s a very pretty little pattern on paper, but…’ (here he pointed to some strenuous violins) ‘what’s the poor chap to do against that?’ And then he added: ‘An artist has got to make a shilling’s worth of goods out of a penn’orth of material, and here you go chucking away sovereigns for nothing!’ — a sound statement on Art, and also a well-deserved and kindly bit of criticism. One day he presented me with a copy of the full score of The Golden Legend, adding: ‘I think this is the best thing I’ve done, don’t you?’ and when truth compelled me to say that in my opinion The Mikado is his masterpiece, he cried out: ‘O you wretch!’ But though he laughed I could see he was disappointed.

Dame Ethel Mary Smyth (1858–1944) tells here a famous story often used to illustrate Sullivan’s lurking suspicion that his true musical talents were being obscured by the popularity of the Savoy operas. She was, in her own time, a vigorous crusader for women’s rights, an energetic and consistently interesting writer of memoirs, a writer of operas that were produced both in England and on the Continent, and an ambitious and largely successful composer of oratorios, concertos and chamber-music pieces. Her ‘March of the Women’ had some importance in the history of the women’s suffrage movement, and she herself went to Holloway Prison as punishment for her political crusading. See, in addition to Impressions that Remained: Memoirs, Streaks of Life (1921), A Final Burning of Boats (1928), Beecham and Pharaoh (1935), As Time Went On … (1936) and What Happened Next (1940) for the testimony they provide of a startlingly vivid personality.