Cups and Saucers
Music by George Grossmith
Cups and Saucers is a one-act "satirical musical sketch" written and composed by George Grossmith. The piece pokes fun at the china collecting craze of the later Victorian era, which was part of the Aesthetic movement later satirised in Patience and The Colonel. The story of the sketch involves an engaged man and woman who each schemes to sell off the other's purportedly valuable china. Cups and Saucers premiered in 1876 as part of an evening of piano sketches by Grossmith and was adopted by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1878 as a curtain raiser to H.M.S. Pinafore and, later, other operas.
Text from the Wikipedia article "Cups and Saucers", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
About the Composer
George Grossmith (9 December 1847 – 1 March 1912) was an English comedian, writer, composer, actor, and singer. His performing career spanned more than four decades. As a writer and composer, he created 18 comic operas, nearly 100 musical sketches, some 600 songs and piano pieces, three books and both serious and comic pieces for newspapers and magazines. Grossmith created a series of nine characters in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan from 1877 to 1889, including Sir Joseph Porter, in H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance (1880) and Ko-Ko in The Mikado (1885–1887). He also wrote, in collaboration with his brother Weedon, the 1892 comic novel The Diary…
Text from the Wikipedia article "George Grossmith", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Other Operas by George Grossmith
- Haste to the Wedding (1873)