The Mikado

The Mikado is the work of the most famous collaborators of light opera, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900). For about twenty years, they produced many of the most enduring and charming operettas the world has ever known, with Gilbert as librettist and Sullivan as composer. The two began collaborating in 1869, but it was not until they met Richard D'Oyly Carte in 1874 that they started to achieve the fame that continues today. D'Oyly Carte leased an old opera building for their productions and, in 1881, he built the Savoy Theatre especially for the D'Oyly Carte company to produce Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas. Gilbert suggested to Sullivan the subject of The Mikado in 1884. The British fashion for things Japanese was at its height as the result of a Japanese village exhibition in the London borough of Kensington. (Knightsbridge, in the Kensington area, is mentioned in the dialogue as the place where Nanki-Poo was to have fled.) The opening of Japan to the West, spurred by U. S. naval officer Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853, created a Victorian fascination for Japanese art and architecture, and wealthier homes displayed expensive Japanese vases, decorated screens and fans, and colorful marionettes, items mentioned in the introductory chorus of nobles. In music, composers experimented with Japanese five-tone scales, rhythmic drums, and the exotic sounds of instruments such as the koto and gongs. The culmination of this musical fascination was Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, which ran for more than six hundred nights after it was first presented at the Savoy on March 14, 1885, and Giacomo Puccini's popular Italian opera Madam Butterfly, first performed in Milan on February 17, 1904.