THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT ALSO TO LOOK AT KIP FENN, A MAJOR NOVEL ABOUT THE 21st CENTURY
- freely available on this site
Sullivan, Arthur Seymour ___ 1842-1900
___ British ___ composer
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Sullivan was born in Lambeth, London,
into a musical family - his father was a bandmaster at the Royal Military
College. By the age of 14, he was already an accomplished musician and won
several scholarships, one of which was at Leipzig, Germany, where Franz
List heard his study composition 'The Tempest'. On returning to England,
aged 20, 'The 'Tempest' was produced and received much acclaim. For a decade
he worked as a teacher (at what would become the Royal College of Music)
and organist (at the Royal Opera House), and was regarded as a leading composer.
He wrote 'Onward Christian Soldiers', and composed a variety of grand choral
works such as 'The Prodigal Son' and 'The Light of the World'. He began
collaborating with W S Gilbert in his late 20s. Their first piece was 'Thespis',
but their first success was 'Trial by Jury' which they wrote on commission
for Richard D'Oyly Carte. Together they produced many famous comic operas.
In the 1880s, Sullivan was appointed principal conductor of the Leeds Triennial
Musical Festival, for which he wrote 'The Martyr of Antioch' and 'The Golden
Legend'. During his lifetime, the latter was second in popularity only to
Handel's 'Messiah'. In 1883, he was knighted by Queen Victoria, for whom
he had written several pieces. Despite suffering from painful kidney stones
in the last decades of his life, Sullivan continued to work on many projects,
but, famously, he fell out with Gilbert for a short while in the early 1890s.
One of Sullivan's last big works - and his most ambitious - was the opera,
'Ivanhoe'.
One
biography link
DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1881-1900 ___ music
WEB TEXT LINKS
a
few extracts
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
Beinecke
Library, Yale University ___ 1886
diary
SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
Sir Arthur Sullivan; His Life,
Letters and Diaries
May 2005
THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
Please
email if you have any corrections, additions or comments. |
IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS:
1) The first line of basic information
may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different
names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or
uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown,
or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British'
a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was
compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts
were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if
they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates
and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with
caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are
only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies.
4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges,
and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising.
I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some
variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited
myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their
original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the
titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries. |