- Date: 1866 -1867
- Composer: Arthur Sullivan
- Period: Post-Romantic (1870-1909)
Review
Cox and Box may have been Sullivan's second attempt at a light opera. In 1863 and 1864 he had collaborated with Henry Fothergill Chorley on an unfinished work entitled "The Sapphire Necklace," mostly now lost. The work had spoken portions, but its exact nature remains unknown. The Symphony in E made a great success in 1866 and established Sullivan as an important new voice in British music. An accidental encounter with the dramatist Francis Cowley Burnand led to an invitation to write some music for an all-male smoking party.Burnand was a writer of burlesques and would become the editor of the English humor magazine Punch from 1880 to 1906. Cox and Box was adapted from an 1847 comedy by J. Maddison Morton called Box and Cox. Originally, Sullivan and Burnand's comic frolic was about an hour long, although the version that is usually heard is a little over half that length. Recently, the deleted music has achieved some currency.
When one compares the plotting of this story with the delicious twists that Sullivan's later collaborator W.S. Gilbert would put into most of his stories, one might dismiss Morton's tale as simple. Furthermore, Burnand was nowhere as clever a wordsmith as Gilbert, but then, with the exception of Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, and very few others, who was or is?
What is important about this piece is that it indicates Sullivan's ability to write catchy melodies that match the words perfectly. His subtle sense of musical parody is already evident.
The work was first performed to piano accompaniment. As Sullivan's musical star rose, a London premiere performance was arranged, and Sullivan hastily orchestrated the piece. Cox and Box still holds its place as a popular curtain-raiser, although recently there has been more of a trend to perform it as part of a triple bill with Gilbert and Sullivan's Trial by Jury and another Sullivan work, The Zoo. Sullivan collaborated with Burnand once more on the still obscure The Contabandista, which would be rewritten many years later as The Chieftain.
Many of his contemporaries were unhappy that Sullivan would become involved in light entertainment when he was showing such promise as a symphonist. One of the critics who reviewed it opined that "Mr. Sullivan's music is, in many places, of too high a class for the grotesquely absurd plot to which it is wedded."
That critic was William Schwenck Gilbert, who would supply far more worthy libretti for Sullivan's art. ~ Eric Goldberg, All Music Guide
