Pursuing post-graduate research into the comic operas of Arthur Sullivan was, in 1975, considered in some academic quarters as frivolous, if not virtually a contradiction of terms. I was fortunate, however, in having been delivered into safe hands. The Professor of Music at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth, Ian Parrott, was himself a pioneering Sullivan scholar – a perceptive article by him on Sullivan had appeared in Music and Letters as early as 1942.With the additional support of Sullivan's biographer, Percy Young, one of the department's external examiners, a provisional title was accepted for a PhD thesis: ‘The Theatre Music of Arthur Sullivan’. Broadened beyond the comic operas so that it could include the music written for the (respectable) Shakespeare plays, the subject was accepted
