Interpreting Law and Music: Performance Notes on "The Banjo Serenader" and "The Lying Crowd of Jews."

In 1992 Sir Charles Mackerras recorded a new version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado with the Welsh National Opera Orchestra and Chorus.1 Sweeping away the cobwebs of previous tradition, he produced a fresh new version that was immediately hailed by the critics. The authors of The Penguin Guide to Compact Discs (“Penguin Guide”) awarded it not only three stars for “an outstanding performance and recording in every way,”2 but also a “rosette”—their highest recommendation, signifying a performance of special excellence and quality.3 Yet, as the Penguin Guide’s authors noted, Mackerras’s performance was in many ways unusual. Mackerras sought to fit the entire work onto a single compact disc, meaning that the performance had to last less than eighty minutes.4 To this end, he omitted the overture, a choice that might easily enough be defended on the ground that the overture was not in fact by Sullivan himself, but was a pastiche of themes from the operetta strung together by another hand.5 No such defense could be offered of Mackerras’s decision to omit all of W.S. Gilbert’s witty dialogue. One might defend the latter on grounds of the changed context of performance: many people listening at home might