With the success of H.M.S Pinafore, Gilbert and Sullivan had a problem. Pinafore had been so popular that, before the official version appeared in the United States , many people there had pirated it, i.e. produced unauthorized versions. At one time, there were eight of these running at once in the United States, possibly because the British copyright was not honored there, and Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan received not a penny in royalties from any of these. They sued but lost, so they decided to open Pirates in the United States first and copyright it there. Then they would get the American royalties. However, they found out they could not then copyright it in Britain. While the others were not very concerned about this, Gilbert resolved that this not happen with The Pirates of Penzance.

An elaborate scheme was devised. Pirates would open in Britain for one performance a few days before it was scheduled to open in New York. This would secure the British copyright and, since the piece was carefully guarded, there would be no chance, before the age of the computer, television and airplanes, for copies of it to reach New York immediately. Thus the official version would be the first in America and would secure the United States copyright for the D'Oyly Carte Company.

Gilbert and Sullivan arrived in New York on November 5, 1879 to prepare for the official Pinafore opening on December 1, long after the pirated versions had already appeared there. The libretto and melodies for Pirates had been completed and Act I scored with Act II still to do, and they brought their work with them, expecting to have plenty of time to finish it before it opened in New York. However, because of all the pirated versions of Pinafore which had been shown, many people had already seen it, and attendance at their official version quickly fell off. As a result they decided to push the opening of Pirates to an earlier date, December 31st. On December 6, Sullivan discovered he had left his musical sketches for Act I behind in London and would have to reconstruct it all from scratch! He had brought the completed Act II with him, although it still had to be scored, so the staging rehearsals could begin with that. The whole company, including Gilbert who had always claimed a complete lack of musical knowledge, fell to work in Sullivan's hotel room making copies of the music as fast as Sullivan could complete it. They managed to do this in time for the orchestra to start rehearsals by December 15th but they were still working on it on the 16th. Sullivan was sick during most of this time. The new score and libretto for the one day English performance left on a ship for England on the 17th. Sullivan began scoring the entire work on December 18 and was still sick and "more dead than alive" as he conducted the opening New York performance on December 31st. There had been some problem with getting this on stage. At first the members of the orchestra went on strike, claiming it had so much music that it was more like and opera and they demanded more money.

Allowing a week for the ship to cross the Atlantic, the English had only about another week to prepare for the performance there before the New York opening! Luckily a D'Oyly Carte touring production was performing Pinafore in Southwest England. The cast and crew were assembled in Paignton, Devonshire, to give the "copyright performance" in which a placard is placed in the box office, one customer is allowed to pay (although his money is returned at the end), and the piece is produced with minimum effort. In this case, the cast was still wearing their Pinafore costumes, only exchanging kerchiefs for their sailors' caps. They read their parts and improvised the action, but this was enough to establish the legal basis for a British copyright.

The London opening was several months later, on April 2, 1880. However, all the scheming had not helped. Pirates was pirated. Gilbert sued again but lost.

Twenty-one years later, Gilbert wrote a letter describing the above events. Some of his details contradict others, but this can be accounted for by the lapse in time. "When [Sullivan and I] arrived [in New York]... he found to his consternation that he had left nearly all of the score of Act I in his London chambers. It became necessary to rewrite so much of the Act as was missing; and his marvelous memory enabled him to reproduce a considerable part of it — almost note for note. ... Almost the only "number"that he could not recall was the chorus that accompanies the entrance of the Major General's daughters in Act I, and as the situation was practically identical with the entrance of the troupe of Greek comedians in Thespis [I] suggested that he should transfer the music and words, as they stood, from one piece to the other."

What was the now almost forgotten Thespis score doing in New York? We do not know, but it is possible they were thinking of giving it a New York production. At any rate, there has been a vigorous debate over whether they had thought to transfer Climbing over Rocky Mountain in Pirates from the start or whether the events Gilbert describes actually occurred. For more on this debate and on the whole copyright debacle, see http://math.boisestate.edu/GaS/pirates/discussion/discuss_home.html

Pirates continues to be one of the most popular, and with the best known songs, of all the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. In 1980, Joseph Papp staged it in New York with Linda Ronstadt as Mabel and Angela Lansbury as Ruth. It was a version with much more swashbuckling and a broader muusical comedy style of humor than usual. This version was later made into a movie.

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Revised February 2010
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