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Amateur performances are the backbone and bedrock of Gilbert and Sullivan's enduring popularity. They have been around for a long time — the first performance took place on April 30, 1879, when the Harmonists Choral Society performed HMS Pinafore in the Drill Hall, Kingston-Upon-Thames. Since then, church halls and schoolrooms across the English-speaking world have resounded on winter evenings to the strains of would-be pirates, policemen, fairies, and bridesmaids. The G & S Archive on the internet lists 126 amateur groups in the United Kingdom ranging in order alphabetical, rather than categorical, from the Aberdeen Opera Company to the Zodiac Amateur Operatic Society in Frodsham, Cheshire. This list omits many societies and includes several, including the two just mentioned, whose repertoire is now much wider than the Savoy operas.

This chapter focuses on Johann Georg Rapp, who persuaded nearly a thousand of his followers to leave Germany for America, where they would build three towns in the wilderness, and in the process renounce private property, personal ambition, and even sexual relations. These towns he named Harmony (1804), New Harmony (1814), and Economy (1824); all remain intact today to an unusual degree. They reveal Rapp's ever more imaginative use of architecture as an instrument of religious expression and of social cohesion. Rapp's towns are the most important and influential of all cities of refuge, which would not only shape other separatist societies but also—as later reformers looked more at the communism of the Harmonists than their architecture—a substantial portion of the world itself.

This chapter describes Robert Owen (1771–1858), a Welsh industrialist and social reformer, and Johann Georg Rapp's equal as a utopian visionary. In the summer of 1824, Rapp bought three thousand acres on the Ohio River, twenty-four miles downriver of Pittsburgh, and sent his advance party of builders ahead to erect the first houses. There they would be joined by the rest of the Harmonists in the summer of 1825. In the meantime, Rapp put New Harmony and its thirty thousand acres on the market, and only one buyer was ever seriously considered, Owen. Owen was one of the most complicated and ambitious personalities of the Industrial Revolution who saw no reason why the principles of running a rational and efficient cotton mill could not be applied to all of human society. He sought to create a visionary town, to which he gave the stirring and poignantly hopeful name Village of Unity and Mutual Co-operation.