A performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado in Sydney prompts a long article on their importance in The Age, 29 May 2004).
Peter Craven writes:

Gilbert and Sullivan were the high watermark of the music of the English-speaking people in that long optimistic stretch of time, the 40 or so years before the First World War.
There’s the parallel with Kipling, but Gilbert and Sullivan, with their dazzling Savoy presentations under D’Oyly Carte’s banner, are the mass dissemination of that spirit of nonsense that runs through Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear and insinuates its way into the comedy of Oscar Wilde (“Mr Worthing, to be born or at any rate bred in a handbag”) and whispers through the stories of Saki, which are a kind of Wildean aftermath.