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| Gilbert & Sullivan | |
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SeeingI 07:34 pm UTC 09/25/07 |
| I was just wondering how many people here are Gilbert & Sullivan fans. I adore them, personally. I was into them since I was a kid, and I think that a love of their shows definitely primed me to appreciate Jim's music (especially stuff like "Paradise" and "Dance In My Pants"). Everybody always says Steinman is like Wagner, but in terms of wit, word-play and musical style, I think he owes a lot more to G&S. What Jim gets from Wagner is loudness and intensity of emotion, and I suppose you could say that Jim's recycling of tunes amounts to a leitmotif structure, but in terms of actual music, he's much more in debt to Romantic "opera-comique" composers than the proto-modernistic Wagner. What's made me think to post this now is that I just discovered some of the "Tanz der Vampire" clips on YouTube. (Fantastic! Wish I could get hold of a DVD.) I never realized that the chorus singing "Sei bereit" are all paintings, just as in "Ruddigore" the ancestral portraits come to life and sing a ghostly song. I wonder how much of the musical version of "Tanz" is modelled on "Ruddigore," which was also a spoof of gothic melodrama. The song "Alles ist Hell" is basically a hornpipe, a form which also appears in "Ruddigore" (but then again hornpipes are everywhere in operetta). There are also some horn figures that sound a LOT like a certain 3-tone motif that appears in "Ruddigore." "Tanz" also has Jim's only full-fledged patter-song, "Logic," which owes a lot to G&S (opera die-hards would say it owes a lot to Rossini, as well). The most famous patter-song of them all is, of course, "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" from "The Pirates of Penzance" although the aforementioned "Ruddigore" has probably the most difficult patter-song ever written, "My Eyes Are Fully Open" (almost impossible to sing, but it was interpolated into the "Pirates" with Kevin Kline if you wish to check it out). I've never, to my recollection, heard Steinman mention Gilbert & Sullivan as an influence, but I'd be very surprised if he didn't enjoy their music. After all, he grew up in the middle of a veritable G&S renaissance - the 50s through the 70s saw G&S shows performed in amateur venues all over American on a regular basis, and the original D'Oyly Carte Opera Company was touring the world. Anyone? | |
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