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The ultimately operatic comedy – the patter song

“This particularly rapid

Unintelligible patter

Isn’t generally heard

And if it is it doesn’t matter!”


“Suo madre?” “Suo madre!”

Yes, it’s Gilbert and Sullivan, at their best. There’s a wonderful Youtube with the voice of the famous Martyn Green and text here and an even more wonderful film of a classic performance here .

But patter preceded G&S by centuries, even in Greek theatre, but more recently notably by Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti. Sometimes these are “list songs” (think Leporello’s list of Don G’s conquests) and sometimes multi-voiced chaos (as in Mozart’s infamous sextets), A list of the most famous patter songs is here.

It’s arguably the ultimately operatic humour, since it always requires both brilliant libretto and brilliant, often multi-part, music.

The libretto is typically witty, very fast and with rapid rhythmic patterns for the syllables. In the hands of many librettists, and notoriously Gilbert, it also is marked by atrocious rhymes! The New Grove Dictionary of Music definition: ‘A comic song in which the humour derives from having the greatest number of words uttered in the shortest possible time’.

The music is of course how this happens. An actor reciting those words on the stage would be merely puzzling. Both the words and the music have humour but it’s the combination that works wonders.

The Cambridge guide to G&S offers this insight: “Gilbert once said of Sullivan, ‘He used to maintain, oddly enough, that there was no such thing as humour in music, but in my humble judgment he was, himself, a musical humourist of the very highest order’. To be sure, words and music each have humour, but there is a third kind of humour at work in Gilbert and Sullivan, as is most vividly shown in their patter songs. This humour stems from the formal relationship between words and music. In patter songs, consonants and vowels tumble over each other in sheer sonic joy, careering at the absolute edge of intelligibility. The question of intelligibility that these songs raise forces a re-evaluation of the boundaries between words and music. It then seems necessary to ask how this effect is produced and why the patter song's status on the border of intelligibility is funny…. A patter song is not defined by its structure at the level of bars or sections (like a blues or a symphony), but by a much smaller unit of measure: the relationship between words and time.”

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