Nineteenth-century English opera was mainly the creation of handful of people willing to endow their country with a musical and theatrical genre able to compete with the triumphant Italian opera currently performed at such venues as Her Majesty's Theatre and later Covent Garden. Despite the existence of a few highly successful works, the new artistic form never managed to gain recognition, being more the unattainable dream of a few men than the genuine demand of the opera-going public. English opera, a hybrid made up of a strange combination of local and continental traditions, eventually came to an identity crisis that did not escape Gilbert and Sullivan, the only significant authors of the nineteenth century. Some of the Savoy operas do indeed lend themselves to a meta-textual reading that suggests and dramatises the failure of a musical genre that never really materialised.
