The Yeomen of the Guard (Complete 1950 Recording) plus orchestral music (1935)

It ran there for 423 performances and during its first two years of life its name became established on a par with The Mikado and The Gondoliers. A success in the English provinces, it was welcomed overseas in productions by J.C. Williamson in Australia and a hundred-performance run on Broadway, not to mention in certain bowdlerised versions in Vienna and Budapest in 1890 which earned the composer's disapproval.


Having previously mocked time-honoured British institutions, the Navy in HMS Pinafore and the judicature in Trial By Jury, not to mention the newly-ordained Aesthetic Movement in Patience, in The Yeomen of the Guard Gilbert poked gentle fun at the Sovereign's personal Guard. While Yeomen marked a sudden departure from the opéra-bouffe style most recently heard in their 1887 'melodrama burlesque' Ruddigore, towards the more dazzling operetta idiom of The Gondoliers (1889), in dramatic terms it was the team's furthest gravitation towards 'serious' opera. The work has since stayed the course as one of Sullivan's finest scores. A standard in the repertoire of the original D'Oyly Carte Company, it enjoyed frequent revivals during the first half of the last century and was restored to the repertoire by the new Company in 1989. On four separate occasions it was staged within the Tower of London itself, most recently during the Tower's Ninth Centenary celebrations in 1978.