After the sensational success of H.M.S. Pinafore, many American performing companies presented unauthorized versions of that opera. Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte decided to prevent that from happening again by presenting official versions of their next opera, The Pirates of Penzance, or The Slave of Duty simultaneously in England and America.

Both Gilbert and Sullivan incorporated a small amount of words and music in this opera from their first joint production of 1871, Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old. The music of Thespis, however, was never published. When Sullivan started to compose the music for The Pirates he commenced in the middle of Act II, but had not proceeded far before he was compelled to leave for America with Gilbert to stop the pirating of H.M.S. Pinafore; therefore, with the exception of that portion which he had composed in England Sullivan wrote the whole of the score of The Pirates of Penzance at his hotel in New York.

"I think it will be a great success", he wrote home to his Mother, "for it is exquisitely funny, and the music is strikingly tuneful and catching." The following is an extract from another of Sullivan's letters in which he gives his impressions of The Pirates. "The libretto", he says, "is ingenious, clever, wonderfully funny in parts, and sometimes brilliant in dialogue, beautifully written for music, as is all Gilbert does, and all the action and business perfect. The music is infinitely superior in every way to Pinafore — 'tunier' and more developed, of a higher class altogether. I think in time it will be more popular".

True enough! The Pirates of Penzance was an immediate hit and takes its place today as one of the most popular and enduring works of musical theatre. The music of the opera is as Sullivan described it, "strikingly tuneful and catching." The opera premiered on December 31, 1879 at the Fifth Avenue Theater in New York with Sullivan conducting, but a single performance had been given on the previous day at the Royal Bijou Theatre, Paignton, England, to secure the British copyright. Finally, the opera opened on April 3, 1880, at the Opera Comique in London, where it ran for 363 performances, having already been playing successfully for over three months in New York.

In The Pirates of Penzance, Frederic was as a child apprenticed to a band of tenderhearted, orphaned pirates by his nurse who, being hard of hearing, had mistaken her master's instructions to apprentice the boy to a pilot. Frederic, upon completing his 21st year, rejoices that he has fulfilled his indentures and is now free to return to respectable society. But it turns out that he was born on February 29 in leap year, and he remains apprenticed to the pirates until his 21st birthday.

By the end of the opera, the pirates, a Major General who knows nothing of military strategy, his large family of beautiful but unwed daugters, and the timid constabulary all contribute to a cacophony that can be silenced only by Queen Victoria's name.