Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado opens at the Savoy Theatre

Background. The Mikado followed Princess Ida, which ran for nine months, a short duration by Savoy opera standards. On 22 March 1884, Richard D'Oyly Carte gave Gilbert and Sullivan contractual notice that a new opera would be required within six months. The parties reached a stalemate, which was broken when Gilbert offered a consistent plot free from anachronisms and no supernatural element; on 20 May 1884 he sent Sullivan a sketch of the plot to The Mikado.

Creative Development. Although the 1885–87 Japanese exhibition in Knightsbridge had not yet opened when Gilbert conceived The Mikado, European trade with Japan had increased in recent decades, and an English craze for all things Japanese had built through the 1860s and 1870s. In an 1885 interview with the New-York Daily Tribune, Gilbert said the short stature of Leonora Braham, Jessie Bond and Sybil Grey suggested grouping them as three Japanese school-girls, the opera's "three little maids". Gilbert also related that he and Sullivan had decided to cut the only solo sung by the opera's title character, played by Savoy veteran Richard Temple, but that members of the company and others who had witnessed the dress rehearsal came to them in a body and begged them to restore the excised number.

Premiere and Run. The Mikado opened on 14 March 1885 at the Savoy Theatre. It ran for 672 performances, the second-longest run for any musical theatre work at that time. The opera made fun of English bureaucracy, thinly disguised by a Japanese setting, and became the most successful of the Savoy Operas.