<P> Sullivan was born in London on 13 May 1842 . His father was a military bandmaster, and by the time Arthur had reached the age of eight, he was proficient with all the instruments in the band . In school he began to compose anthems and songs . In 1856, he received the first Mendelssohn Scholarship and studied at the Royal Academy of Music and then at Leipzig, where he also took up conducting . His graduation piece, completed in 1861, was a suite of incidental music to Shakespeare's The Tempest . Revised and expanded, it was performed at the Crystal Palace in 1862 and was an immediate sensation . He began building a reputation as England's most promising young composer, composing a symphony, a concerto, and several overtures, among them the Overture di Ballo, in 1870 . </P> <P> His early major works for the voice included The Masque at Kenilworth (1864); an oratorio, The Prodigal Son (1869); and a dramatic cantata, On Shore and Sea (1871). He composed a ballet, L'Île Enchantée (1864) and incidental music for a number of Shakespeare plays . Other early pieces that were praised were his Symphony in E, Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, and Overture in C (In Memoriam) (all three of which premiered in 1866). These commissions, however, were not sufficient to keep Sullivan afloat . He worked as a church organist and composed numerous hymns, popular songs, and parlour ballads . </P> <P> Sullivan's first foray into comic opera was Cox and Box (1866), written with librettist F.C. Burnand for an informal gathering of friends . Public performance followed, with W.S. Gilbert (then writing dramatic criticism for the magazine Fun) saying that Sullivan's score "is, in many places, of too high a class for the grotesquely absurd plot to which it is wedded ." Nonetheless, it proved highly successful, and is still regularly performed today . Sullivan and Burnand's second opera, The Contrabandista (1867) was not as successful . </P> <P> In 1871, producer John Hollingshead brought Gilbert and Sullivan together to produce a Christmas entertainment, Thespis, at his Gaiety Theatre, a large West End house . The piece was an extravaganza in which the classical Greek gods, grown elderly, are temporarily replaced by a troupe of 19th - century actors and actresses, one of whom is the eponymous Thespis, the Greek father of the drama . Its mixture of political satire and grand opera parody mimicked Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld and La belle Hélène, which (in translation) then dominated the English musical stage . </P>

The two leading composers of early american musical comedy where