User blog comment:TDIwriter/I Don't Usually Do This/@comment-1874924-20110803014458/@comment-1874924-20110803021013

My understanding is that Gilbert and Sullivan's professional relations were generally cordial, and they had high professional opinions of each other, although they did have some celebrated quarrels. The most famous and important of these was the "carpet quarrel", relating to expenses for refurbishing the Savoy Theater, which led to the end of their partnership. (They did reconcile after a couple of years, give or take, and went on to write two more operettas together--Utopia, Limited and The Grand Duke, but the magic was gone and popular tastes were changing, so neither were hits, and The Grand Duke was their only actual failure.)

G&S surely talked to each other during rehearsals and suchlike, but it's entirely possible that they communicated only in writing outside the theater. For one thing, Gilbert was, by all accounts, not very likeable. For another, telephones didn't exist during the early years of their collaboration and still weren't common in the later years, so people in those days communicated by letter to a far greater degree then than they do today.