17 September, 1896
Buda Pest. and Vienna. Very hot.
After breakfast called on the Hawthorn girls.
Bertie, George Arthur & self left Pest at 2. awfully
hot in train. arr: Vienna 6.30 – back to H. Imperial
Had tea & went to see a ballet at The Opera “Robert and
Bertrand” – our old friend R. Macaire – not particularly
good. Mlle: Vergit principal danseuse first rate.
Walked about till 11, then supped at Hotel, and
went to bed. Slept heavily.
On this day we find Sullivan on holiday. But frankly if we turn to any random page in his diary for 1896 we are likely to find him on holiday. Though he spent the first two months of the year working on The Grand Duke—his final collaboration with W. S. Gilbert—and the last few days of the year working on the ballet Victoria and Merrie England, Sullivan dedicated most of 1896 to travel, socializing, gambling, and horse racing.
The Grand Duke opened on 7 March. By 10 March Sullivan was in Paris, en route to Monte Carlo where he spent 5-6 weeks socializing and gambling. In May he returned to England, to attend to his racing duties, joining meets at Ascot, Newmarket, Epsom, and Kempton. This was his last year as a racehorse owner.
On 11 July, The Grand Duke closed, after only 123 performances; it was immediately replaced by a revival of The Mikado. Sullivan does not note this in his diary. He spent most of July at his River House. Then it was off to the continent again, for a two-month odyssey including stops in St Mortiz (in modern day Switzerland, and before skiing), Thusis, Lucerne, Vienna, Budapest, Nuremberg, Mannheim, Kronberg im Taunus, and Paris.
But there was more! On 7 December he was back in Paris, and then spent the rest of December back on the Côte d’Azur, where he rented the Villa Mathilde in Beaulieu-sur-Mer. This is a rare occasion of Sullivan not spending Christmas and New Years at home. The romantic part of me imagines this was Sullivan’s nine months of Absolutely No F***s Given, after having twice unsuccessfully tried to recapture the magic with his ex. In fact in the previous week he had proposed marriage, not to Gilbert but to a twenty-year-old lady.
On this date, 17 September 1896, we are in the Budapest leg of those wanderings. Sullivan spelled it Buda Pesth or Buda Pest, an orthography recalling the city’s origins as two towns on either bank of the Danube. But why was he there? His entry for the previous day gives us a possible attraction:
Found our way to the Exh: and lunched there
Exh: is all he gives us about Budapest’s 1896 Millennial Exhibition, which marked the thousandth anniversary of the crowning of the first Hungarian king. For all I know to the contrary, Sullivan’s presence there was a coincidence; the exhibition spanned the year.
After strolling the exhibition, Sullivan and his nephew Bertie went to an evening entertainment at the Orpheum, where they met the “sisters Hawthorn – nice modest clever girls“. They paid a call to the sisters this morning, but apparently that rendezvous did not go well enough to detain them on their next journey, on to Vienna.
George Arthur was Sullivan friend Sir George Arthur. They were chums from at least 1882. Sir George played poker and owned race horses, so they had plenty in common. He would later be the private secretary to Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener in World War I, and then write a three-volume Life of Lord Kitchener.
The ballet they attended has an interesting history of its own. Robert and Bertrand were two rascal characters from Flemish, French, and English comedies so ubiquitous in the nineteenth century that it’s amazing we no longer remember them. Sullivan wrote “our old friend R. Macaire,” and I’ll admit I first thought he was referring to an actual friend.
