The Gilbert and Sullivan Newsletter ArchiveGILBERTIAN GOSSIPNo 9 — March 1978 Edited by Michael Walters
CENTENARIES AND FAREWELLS 1977 is the centenary of the first performance of The Sorcerer. It is also a hundred years this year since Thomas Edison spoke the words "Mary had a little lamb" (which was not simply a lapse of literary taste on Edison's part, but the standard test-phrase at the Edison laboratory) into a piece of tinfoil, and so created the device known as the gramophone. Edison was a man of great vision and imagination, but the perfection which the sound recording has reached today, must have exceeded even his wildest dreams. By another of those curious little twists of fate, 1977 also saw the death, in an accident, on December 7th, of Dr. Peter Goldmark, the inventor of the microgroove record. QUOTATIONS However thick the veneer of civilisation, man an animal who exists only to certain selfish desires of food, sex, money and power. Charles Hayter in a thesis on Gilbert. When you come to love the enigma variations, you know that your youth is over. Harmian Grisewood. Interpretation as demonstrated at this level is seen as fundamentally the same art as composition - the art of creating music. Frank Howes on Solomon. If, as Bernard Shaw writes, music is the brandy of the damned, we must all be bent on getting sloshed in hell. Adrian Foreman in the Middlesex Chronicle 25/11/1977. The art of comedy is in getting laughs for other people. Marie Tempest. One mounts the podium and either one knows how to conduct or one will never learn it. Hans Richter.
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