The 1890s

Arthur Sullivan’s final decade was overshadowed by increasing and debilitating ill health and growing criticism of the light-weight nature of his work by critics associated with the English Musical Renaissance centred around two younger composers, C.H. Parry and C.V. Stanford. Sullivan did at last produce the grand opera, Ivanhoe (1891), which he had wanted to write for so long. He also continued to write comic operas for the Savoy Theatre, most of them with librettists other than Gilbert. He wrote a ballet and a hymn tune for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, set a patriotic song by Rudyard Kipling to raise funds for the families of troops serving in the Boer War, and wrote a Te Deum to be used when that war ended. He died in 1900, mourned and remembered as much as a church musician and for his sacred works as for his comic operas.