Sullivan’s Slyly Shifting Schemas

Praise for Arthur Sullivan’s operetta music often singles out his varied rhythmic treatment of Gilbert’s highly regular verse. Prior studies tend to examine Sullivan’s text-setting in a vacuum, without a framework for comparing his approach to that of nineteenth-century composers more generally. Such a framework has emerged in recent scholarship on German art song. This article thus attempts both to use current theory (particularly Yonatan Malin’s theory of “declamatory schemas”) to pinpoint the distinctive aspects of Sullivan’s approach and also to use Sullivan’s music to expand our conception of the possible relationships between poetic and musical meters. The article particularly focuses on cases when Sullivan shifts from one schema to another. Rather than describe these moments as successions (in which one schema follows another), the article instead treats them as transformations (in which one schema is converted into another), with focus on four schema transformation techniques: selective compression/expansion and stress promotion/demotion. It shows how Sullivan’s deployment of these transformations is motivated by characterization and the inflection of particular words and concludes by affirming the value of applying declamatory schema theory to music that is neither German nor “serious” and the necessity of performing style analysis within a framework that discloses an individual composer’s dialogue with common musical practices, shedding light on composer and practice alike.