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FAULTLESS SYMPATHY

by

David Bamberger

Gilbert’s librettos are faultless, or so I was raised to believe. One must admit that Thespis and The Grand Duke leave much to be desired, but the texts of the "sacred canon" were always, I felt, scrubbed to virtual perfection.

Only one item seemed to deny this claim. In the second act Quintet of Patience, the Duke and his friends sing of the potential consequences of his matrimonial selection with an extraordinarily weak rhyme:

As the various permutations of lovers are reviewed, the "die/sympathy" rhyme is repeated time and time again. If this weren’t bad enough, Gilbert reprises the tune for the finale:

This long-held frustration had been relegated to some remote corner of my mind until I recently picked up a copy of Gilbert’s Bab Ballads. In reading his early verse, two things became clear to me. First, Gilbert’s humor is based on the perfection of his rhymes. He may do bizarre things to create those rhymes, even making up words to achieve them, but the rhymes are there none-the-less. The wit of his topsy-turvy world derives, in part, with inspired nonsense of his tales by contrasting with the perfect order that we find at the end of each verse.

Second, virtually the only exception to this are words ending in "y." This might require a general study, but, for our purposes, the truly relevant item is contained in Baines Carew, Gentleman. Carew is an attorney whose legal activities are described as:

To test the question I turned to the works of Tennyson, poet laureate of the Victorian era. In his long poem In Memoriam A. H. H., a work clearly devoid of any humorous intent, I found:

Prompted by this research, P.K. Saha, Professor of Linguistics at Case Western University, was kind enough to delve into the question, and discovered that the word "sympathy" had come into the English language about the time Shakespeare was born. It was a foreign word taken directly from the Greek word simpathia – pronounced "simpuh-THIGH-uh. Over time, the final "a" was dropped, as usual with weak final vowels in English. The final "i" became a "y", probably for visual reasons (to make it easier to read after the vertical lines of the "h") and to distinguish it from Latin plurals (like "castrati.") The first "i" was also changed to "y", probably for symmetry.

But, as the Tennyson poem proves, the Greek-based pronunciation – sympa-THIGH –survived through the 19th century. The modern pronunciation – SYM -pu-thee – evolved, and both pronunciations existed for a period (just as today we can pronounce "futile" either "FYEW-tuhl" or "FYEW-TILE"). The use of "sympa-THIGH" may have been viewed as poetic by Victorian times; but it was clearly regarded as both comprehensible and normal.

At last, Gilbert’s choices in Patience made perfect sense. In the Quintet, we were meant to hear, and to regard as unremarkable:

There was then real wit in forcing the final rhyme of the operetta:

Well, hardly ever!

© David Bamberger, 1997

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