Musings of a Savoyard

Turbot is ambitious brill. Today, these four words are likely to be as indecipherable to most young, or even not so young, people as they were to an impressionable 12-year-old lad in 1957, besotted with language, books, and music but terrified of sports. That boy was my preadolescent self, serving a term at a summer camp for Jewish kids in the Poconos. If one was not athletic, competitive, or outdoorsy, there was little respite from the courts, fields, lakes, and playing mounds other than in arts and crafts (but after all, how many lanyards, walking sticks, or copper ashtrays can one boy weave, whittle, or hammer in a summer?) or on the stage at the mess hall.

Gilbert and Sullivan saved me from constant embarrassment on the baseball diamond.

I already knew some of their songs. They were part of the air I breathed. Many of my relatives, theatergoing and musically inclined if not especially talented, were amateur singers, would-be treaders of the boards, or modest Anglophiles. Just as the professionals—Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, and later, Stephen Sondheim and Lin-Manuel Miranda—have always pledged their allegiance to G&S, so did stage-struck lawyers, doctors, teachers, and businesspeople along the Eastern Seaboard.

It was not only big-city sophisticates, opening-night black-tie crowds, and aspiring, middle-class suburbanite groupies who flocked to G&S. The appeal conquered all demographics. Decades later, when I came to write the biography of the American poet Amy Clampitt (1920–1994), the daughter of Quaker farmers in central Iowa, I found out that her tiny New Providence High School—with 20 students in each graduating class—put on an annual G&S production, along with a Shakespeare play or two. G&S was hardly an exotic or even an acquired taste. It belonged to an American culture that, for the better part of the century, followed the original late-Victorian London productions put on by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. One hundred years ago, community productions flourished throughout the States.

Allow me to return to my two fishes, the stately turbot and the aspiring, modest brill. Gilbert’s words captivated me; they had me hooked.

Owing perhaps more to a lack of competition than innate talent, I became the Captain of the Pinafore at Camp Tanalo. Our genius music counselor, a Penn undergraduate named Gary Goldschneider—who went on to an eccentric career, mostly in the Netherlands, as a composer and concert pianist—was a one-man director-producer-conductor. Photographic evidence of our H.M.S. Pinafore production, if it ever existed, has long since vanished. Although the camp was co-ed, my Little Buttercup was another roly-poly suburban Jewish boy. We must have made a lovely couple. We sang “Things Are Seldom What They Seem,” and all the rest, to the at-best semi-attentive audience in the hall. I do not remember who played Ralph Rackstraw, Josephine, Dick Deadeye, or Sir Joseph Porter, let alone the chorus of his sisters, cousins, and aunts, and the nautical tars. I like to think that parents visiting for the weekend were amused.

I was enthralled. Buttercup’s opening quatrain in her duet with the Captain passed one test for all great art, a test that I was taking unknowingly, unable as my young self was to articulate it as an aesthetic principle. That is, the verse was partly accessible yet partly mysterious:

Things are seldom what they seem,
Skim milk masquerades as cream;
Highlows pass as patent leathers;
Jackdaws strut in peacock’s feathers.

Skim milk and cream I knew, jackdaws were unfamiliar but easily recognizable as avian if one knew what a peacock was, and the third line of the stanza seemed to be about footwear. Familiarity vied with novelty. So it went, through the entire song, except for that one fishy line in the middle, which tantalized and perplexed equally. Who could know about turbot and brill unless one in fact already knew about them? The words did not explain themselves. I was not a fisherman, let alone an ichthyologist.

First and last, it was the irresistible combination of words and music working in sync that drew me in: Sullivan’s tunes and orchestrations—jaunty and upbeat, or mellow and lush—and Gilbert’s incomparable verbal inventions, which I recognized as poetry almost before I knew officially what poetry was supposed to be.