for productions of Shakespeare plays. He also composed a dramatic cantata, On Shore and Sea, for the opening of the London International Exhibition, and the hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers", with words by Sabine Baring-Gould. The Salvation Army adopted the latter as its favoured processional, and it became Sullivan's best-known hymn. At the end of 1871 John Hollingshead, proprietor of London's Gaiety Theatre, commissioned Sullivan to work with Gilbert to create the burlesque-style comic opera Thespis. Played as a Christmas entertainment, it ran through to Easter 1872, a good run for such a piece. Gilbert and Sullivan then went their separate ways until they collaborated on three parlour ballads in late 1874 and early 1875. Sullivan's large-scale works of the early 1870s were the Festival Te Deum (Crystal Palace, 1872) and the oratorio The Light of the World (Birmingham Festival, 1873). He provided incidental music for productions of The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Gaiety in 1874 and Henry VIII at the Theatre Royal, Manchester, in 1877. He continued to compose hymns throughout the decade. In 1873 Sullivan contributed songs to Burnand's Christmas "drawing room extravaganza", The Miller and His Man. In 1875 the manager of the Royalty Theatre, Richard D'Oyly Carte, needed a short piece to fill out a bill with Offenbach's La Périchole. Carte had conducted Sullivan's Cox and Box. Remembering that Gilbert had suggested a libretto to him, Carte engaged Sullivan to set it, and the result was the one-act comic opera Trial by Jury. Trial, starring Sullivan's brother Fred as the Learned Judge, became a surprise hit, earning glowing praise from the critics and playing for 300 performances over its first few seasons. The Daily Telegraph commented that the piece illustrated the composer's "great capacity for dramatic writing of the lighter class", and other reviews emphasised the felicitous combination of Gilbert's words and Sullivan's music. One wrote, "it seems, as in the great Wagnerian operas, as though poem and music had proceeded simultaneously from one and the same brain." A few months later, another Sullivan one-act comic opera opened: The Zoo, with a libretto by B. C. Stephenson. It was less successful than Trial, and for the next 15 years Sullivan's sole operatic collaborator was Gilbert; the partners created a further twelve operas together. Sullivan also turned out more than 80 popular songs and parlour ballads, most of them written before the end of the 1870s.