Born in London on 13 May 1842, Arthur Sullivan was a choirboy of the Chapel Royal. He was the first winner of the Mendelssohn Scholarship, which enabled him to study at the Royal Academy of Music and the Leipzig Conservatory. He returned to England in 1861 and a performance at the Crystal Palace the following year of his incidental music to Shakespeare’s The Tempest made him an overnight celebrity.

Sullivan settled down to the life of a professional musician, teaching, playing the organ, editing and conducting, while at the same time broadening his activities as a composer. The 1860's saw a ballet, a cello concerto, a symphony, choral works, several overtures and a raft of chamber pieces, songs, partsongs and hymns.

Sullivan’s reputation grew steadily, helped by the grand Festival Te Deum and the following year’s massive oratorio The Light of the World. He first worked with W.S. Gilbert in 1871 on a Christmas pantomime, Thespis, which, although successful, did not lead anywhere. Sullivan and Gilbert were re-united in 1875 by Richard D’Oyly Carte for Trial by Jury, a one-act operetta which led to a more-or-less annual sequence of full-length pieces between 1877 and 1889. H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Iolanthe (1882), The Mikado (1885), The Yeomen of the Guard (1888) and The Gondoliers (1889) have proved to be the most enduringly popular.He was knighted in 1883.

Towards the end of his life Sullivan had success with Victoria and Merrie England, a ballet for the Queen’s diamond jubilee and The Absent-minded Beggar, a song for the Boer War wives and children’s fund. He wrote a successful operetta, The Rose of Persia, to a libretto by Basil Hood and was working on a second Hood collaboration when he died on 22 November 1900.