The Golden Legend (cantata)

The Golden Legend is a cantata by Arthur Sullivan with libretto by Joseph Bennett, based on the 1851 poem of the same name by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The piece premiered at the triennial Leeds Music Festival. At least 17 performances of the cantata were given in Britain during the first year after its premiere in October 1886, and during Sullivan's lifetime it was widely considered his greatest and most successful work of serious music. Indeed, outside of the comic operas with W. S. Gilbert, this cantata was widely regarded as Sullivan's most successful large-scale composition.

A few days after the first performance, Gilbert wrote to Sullivan, "I congratulate you heartily on the success of the Cantata which appears from all accounts to be the biggest thing you've done." In May 1888, there was a performance of the work at the Royal Albert Hall by command of Queen Victoria. She sent for Sullivan after the performance and said, "At last I have heard The Golden Legend, Sir Arthur ... You ought to write a grand opera – you would do it so well."

Numerous amateur choral societies performed the work, and at one point the composer declared a moratorium on its performance, fearing that it was becoming over-exposed. After Sullivan's death there was a steady decline in the frequency of performances of The Golden Legend, in common with all of his serious compositions, and the arrival of a new generation of composers, beginning with Edward Elgar, brought fresh new choral and symphonic works to the British musical scene that crowded out Romantic music. In recent decades, however, there has been a significant revival of interest in Sullivan's compositions, including The Golden Legend.

Sullivan had been associated with the prestigious triennial Leeds Music Festival, both as conductor and composer, since 1880, when his choral work The Martyr of Antioch had its premiere at Leeds Town Hall. By 1886, Sullivan was serving as the Leeds Festival's musical director for the third time, and the Festival Committee had commissioned him to compose a new choral work. In January 1886, having settled on his subject, but having tried and failed to arrange a libretto himself, he asked Joseph Bennett to prepare the libretto based on Longfellow's epic poem The Golden Legend.

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