The Overture di Ballo is a concert overture by Arthur Sullivan

Arthur Sullivan

Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan MVO was an English composer of Irish and Italian ancestry. He is best known for his series of 14 operatic collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, including such enduring works as H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado...

. Its first performance was in August 1870 at the Birmingham Triennial Festival, conducted by the composer. It predates all his work with W. S. Gilbert

W. S. Gilbert

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for his fourteen comic operas produced in collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, of which the most famous include H.M.S...

, and is his most frequently played concert work for orchestra.

Name

The title of the work as printed on the original programme was Overtura di Ballo – a linguistic slip on Sullivan's part, as there is no Italian word overtura. When the score was published in 1889, the hybrid title Overture di Ballo was used. Arthur Jacobs

Arthur Jacobs

Arthur David Jacobs was an English music critic, musicologist, teacher, librettist and translator. Among his many books, two of the best known are his Penguin Dictionary of Music, which was reprinted in several editions between 1958 and 1996, and his biography of Arthur Sullivan, which was praised...

 suggests that it would have been better if Sullivan had called it A Dance Overture.

Description

The work consists of a short emphatic introduction, followed by three distinct but thematically linked sections:

• a slow opening section in polonaise
  Polonaise
  The polonaise is a slow dance of Polish origin, in 3/4 time. Its name is French for "Polish."The polonaise had a rhythm quite close to that of the Swedish semiquaver or sixteenth-note polska, and the two dances have a common origin....
  
   rhythm.
• a longer waltz
  Waltz
  The waltz is a ballroom and folk dance in time, performed primarily in closed position.- History :There are several references to a sliding or gliding dance,- a waltz, from the 16th century including the representations of the printer H.S. Beheim...
  
   section with the first subject played by the woodwinds and the second (syncopated) subject by the strings.
• a lively galop
  Galop
  In dance, the galop, named after the fastest running gait of a horse , a shortened version of the original term galoppade, is a lively country dance, introduced in the late 1820s to Parisian society by the Duchesse de Berry and popular in Vienna, Berlin and London...
  
   as a finale.

The version of the score published during Sullivan's lifetime takes eleven minutes or so in performance. In the 1980s, a longer version of the score was prepared, drawing on Sullivan’s manuscript and including two passages deleted by the composer before the original 1889 publication. One of the two is a formal recapitulation of the first waltz subject, making the whole middle section a classical example of sonata form

Sonata form

Sonata form is a large-scale musical structure used widely since the middle of the 18th century . While it is typically used in the first movement of multi-movement pieces, it is sometimes used in subsequent movements as well—particularly the final movement...

. Most performances in concert or on record use the shorter version, but the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company

D'Oyly Carte Opera Company

The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company was a professional light opera company that staged Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas. The company performed nearly year-round in the UK and sometimes toured in Europe, North America and elsewhere, from the 1870s until it closed in 1982. It was revived in 1988 and...

's 1992 recording uses the uncut text.

Analysis and reception

What makes the piece unusual is that (the first waltz tune excepted) all three dances use the same melodic theme. The rhythmic and harmonic treatment, however, gives each dance its own character. Liszt

Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...

 had developed this technique, but its use in a light orchestral piece was new. Sullivan later used the technique in his comic operas: for example the Lord Chancellor’s motif in Iolanthe

Iolanthe

Iolanthe; or, The Peer and the Peri is a comic opera with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It is one of the Savoy operas and is the seventh collaboration of the fourteen between Gilbert and Sullivan....

, which appears in three different forms. After Sullivan’s death, Elgar

Edward Elgar

Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet OM, GCVO was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos...

 adopted and extended the technique in his First Symphony

Symphony No. 1 (Elgar)

Sir Edward Elgar's Symphony No. 1 in A-flat major, Op. 55 is one of his two completed symphonies. The first performance was given by the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Hans Richter in Manchester, England, on 3 December 1908. It was widely known that Elgar had been planning a symphony for more than...

, where the scherzo is scarcely recognisable as transformed in the adagio.

The piece was well-received at its premiere in Birmingham. Reviewing a performance of the overture at The Crystal Palace

The Crystal Palace

The Crystal Palace was a cast-iron and glass building originally erected in Hyde Park, London, England, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in the Palace's of exhibition space to display examples of the latest technology developed in...

 a month later, the critic for The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

wrote, "A more sparkling and animated orchestral piece of its kind it would be difficult to name." The contemporary critic Henry Lunn wrote in The Musical Times

The Musical Times

The Musical Times is an academic journal of classical music edited and produced in the United Kingdom. It is currently the oldest such journal that is still publishing in the UK, having been published continuously since 1844. It was published as The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular until...

, "Mr Sullivan's themes are so melodious [combining] instinct with refined feeling, his instrumentation so graceful and ingenious, and his treatment of the subjects so thoroughly musician-like, that his composition appeals as much to the educated as to the uneducated ear."

A section of the galop is the only music used by Sir Charles Mackerras

Charles Mackerras

Sir Alan Charles Maclaurin Mackerras, AC, CH, CBE was an Australian conductor. He was an authority on the operas of Janáček and Mozart, and the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan...

 in his ballet Pineapple Poll

Pineapple Poll

Pineapple Poll is a Gilbert and Sullivan-inspired comic ballet, created by choreographer John Cranko with arranger Sir Charles Mackerras. Pineapple Poll is based on "The Bumboat Woman's Story", one of W. S. Gilbert's Bab Ballads, written in 1870. The Gilbert and Sullivan opera H.M.S. Pinafore was...

that is not taken from Sullivan's operas.

Recordings

The Overture di Ballo is the most frequently recorded of Sullivan's non-operatic compositions. As of 2009, recordings conducted by Sir Adrian Boult

Adrian Boult

Sir Adrian Cedric Boult CH was an English conductor. Brought up in a prosperous mercantile family he followed musical studies in England and at Leipzig, Germany, with early conducting work in London for the Royal Opera House and Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company. His first prominent post was...

, Anthony Collins, Alexander Faris

Alexander Faris

Alexander "Sandy" Faris is an Irish composer, conductor and writer, known for his television theme tunes. He has composed and recorded many operas and musicals, and has composed film scores and orchestral works.-Life and career:...

, Arthur Fiedler

Arthur Fiedler

Arthur Fiedler was a long-time conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, a symphony orchestra that specializes in popular and light classical music. With a combination of musicianship and showmanship, he made the Boston Pops one of the best-known orchestras in the country...

, Sir Charles Groves

Charles Groves

Sir Charles Barnard Groves CBE was an English conductor. He was known for the breadth of his repertoire and for encouraging contemporary composers and young conductors....

, Tom Higgins, Sir Charles Mackerras

Charles Mackerras

Sir Alan Charles Maclaurin Mackerras, AC, CH, CBE was an Australian conductor. He was an authority on the operas of Janáček and Mozart, and the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan...

, Sir Neville Marriner

Neville Marriner

Sir Neville Marriner is an English conductor and violinist.-Biography:Marriner was born in Lincoln and studied at the Royal College of Music and the Paris Conservatoire. He played the violin in the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Martin String Quartet and London Symphony Orchestra, playing with the...

, John Pryce-Jones, and Sir Malcolm Sargent

Malcolm Sargent

Sir Harold Malcolm Watts Sargent was an English conductor, organist and composer widely regarded as Britain's leading conductor of choral works...

were or had been available in the UK.

External links

• Overture di Ballo at The Gilbert & Sullivan Discography
• Link to a MIDI file of the overture can be found at this G&S Archive page
• Review in The Times, 2 September 1870