The story
Beginnings
By 1874, Richard D'Oyly Carte, a musician and ambitious young impresario, had begun producing operettas in London. He announced his ambitions on the front of the programme for one of his productions that year: "It is my desire to establish in London a permanent abode for light opera." The Observer reported, "Mr D'Oyly Carte is not only a skilful manager, but a trained musician, and he appears to have grasped the fact that the public are beginning to become weary of what is known as a genuine opera bouffe, and are ready to welcome a musical entertainment of a higher order, such as a musician might produce with satisfaction". He wanted to establish a body of tasteful English comic opera that would appeal to families, in contrast to the bawdy burlesques and adaptations of French operettas and opera bouffes that dominated the London musical stage at that time.
In early 1875 Carte was managing London's Royalty Theatre. Needing a short piece to round out an evening's entertainment featuring the popular Offenbach operetta La Périchole he brought W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan together. On tour in 1871, Carte had conducted Sullivan's one-act comic opera Cox and Box, which received an 1874 London revival. In 1873 Gilbert had offered a libretto to Carte about an English courtroom, but at the time Carte knew of no composer available to set it to music. Carte remembered Gilbert's libretto and suggested to Gilbert that Sullivan write the music for a one-act comic opera, Trial by Jury, which was quickly composed and added to the Royalty's bill in March 1875. The witty and "very English" little piece proved even more popular than La Périchole and became the first great success of Carte's scheme to found his school of English comic opera, playing for 300 performances from 1875 to 1877, as well as touring and enjoying many revivals.
At the Theatre Royal, in Dublin, Ireland in September 1875, while managing the first tour of Trial by Jury, Carte met an owner of the theatre, Michael Gunn, who was fascinated by Carte's vision for establishing a company to promote English comic opera. Gunn later joined Carte's management team. Still, Carte continued to produce continental operetta, touring in the summer of 1876 with a repertoire consisting of three English adaptations of French opera bouffe and two one-act English curtain raisers (Happy Hampstead and Trial by Jury). Carte himself was the musical director of this travelling company, which disbanded after the tour.
Carte found four financial backers and formed the Comedy Opera Company in 1876 to produce more works by Gilbert and Sullivan, along with the works of other British lyricist/composer teams. With this theatre company, Carte finally had the financial resources, after many failed attempts, to produce a new full-length Gilbert and Sullivan opera. Carte leased the Opera Comique, a small theatre off The Strand. In February 1877 Carte engaged a novice Scottish actress, Helen Lenoir, for a small role in a touring production. She soon left the tour and obtained a position in Carte's entertainment agency. Lenoir was well-educated, and her grasp of detail and diplomacy, as well as her organisational ability and business acumen, surpassed even Carte's. Frank Desprez, the editor of The Era, wrote: "Her character exactly compensated for the deficiencies in his." She became intensely involved in all of his business affairs and soon managed many of the company's responsibilities, especially concerning touring. She travelled to America numerous times over the years to arrange the details of the company's New York engagements and American tours.
The first comic opera produced by the Comedy Opera Company was Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer, about a tradesmanlike London sorcerer. It opened in November 1877 together with Dora's Dream, a curtain-raiser with music by Sullivan's assistant Alfred Cellier and words by Arthur Cecil, a friend of both Gilbert and Sullivan. Instead of writing a piece for production by a theatre proprietor, as was usual in Victorian theatres, Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte produced the show with their own financial support. They were therefore able to select their own cast of performers, rather than being obliged to use the actors already engaged at the theatre. They chose talented actors, most of whom were not well-known stars and did not command high fees, and to whom they could teach a more naturalistic style of performance than was commonly used at the time. Carte's talent agency provided many of the artists to perform in the new work. They then tailored their work to the particular abilities of these performers. Some of the cast members, including principal comedian George Grossmith, Richard Temple and Rutland Barrington, stayed with the company for almost 15 years. Two other longstanding members of the company were Rosina Brandram, who started in D'Oyly Carte touring companies with The Sorcerer, and Jessie Bond who joined the group for Pinafore at the Opera Comique in 1878. As Grossmith wrote in 1888, "We are all a very happy family."
Knowing that Gilbert and Sullivan shared his vision of broadening the audience for British light opera by increasing its quality and respectability, Carte gave Gilbert wider authority as a director than was customary among Victorian producers, and Gilbert tightly controlled all aspects of production, including staging, design and movement. Gilbert hired the Gaiety Theatre's ballet-master John D'Auban to choreograph most of the Savoy operas. The skill with which Gilbert and Sullivan used their performers had an effect on the audience; as the critic Herman Klein wrote: "we secretly marvelled at the naturalness and ease with which [the Gilbertian quips and absurdities] were said and done. For until then no living soul had seen upon the stage such weird, eccentric, yet intensely human beings.... [They] conjured into existence a hitherto unknown comic world of sheer delight." The Sorcerer ran for 178 performances, a healthy run at the time, making a profit, and Carte sent out a touring company in March 1878. Sheet music from the show sold well, and street musicians played the melodies. The success of The Sorcerer showed Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan that there was a future in family-friendly English comic opera.
Pinafore to Patience
The next Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration, H.M.S. Pinafore, opened in May 1878. The opera's initial slow business was generally ascribed to a heat wave that made the stuffy Opera Comique particularly uncomfortable. Carte's partners in the Comedy Opera Company lost confidence in the show and posted closing notices. After Carte made promotional efforts and Sullivan included some of the Pinafore music in several promenade concerts that he conducted at Covent Garden, Pinafore became a hit. The Opera Comique was required to close at Christmas 1878 for repairs to drainage and sewage under the Public Health Act 1875. Carte used the enforced closure of the theatre to invoke a contract clause reverting the rights of Pinafore and Sorcerer to Gilbert and Sullivan after the initial run of H.M.S. Pinafore. Carte then took a six-month personal lease on the theatre beginning on 1 February 1879. Carte persuaded Gilbert and Sullivan that when their original agreement with the Comedy Opera Company expired in July 1879, a business partnership among the three of them would be to their advantage. The three each put up £1,000 and formed a new partnership under the name "Mr Richard D'Oyly Carte's Opera Company". Under the partnership agreement, once the expenses of mounting the productions had been deducted, each of the three men was entitled to one third of the profits.
On 31 July 1879, the last day of their agreement with Gilbert and Sullivan, the directors of the Comedy Opera Company attempted to repossess the set by force during a performance, causing a celebrated fracas. Carte's stagehands managed to ward off their backstage attackers and protect the scenery. The Comedy Opera Company opened a rival production of H.M.S. Pinafore in London, but it was not as popular as the D'Oyly Carte production, and soon closed. Legal action over the ownership of the rights ended in victory for Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan. From 1 August 1879, the company, later called the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, became the sole authorised producer of the works of Gilbert and Sullivan.
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Pinafore became so successful that the piano score sold 10,000 copies, and Carte soon sent two additional companies out to tour in the provinces. The opera ran for 571 performances in London, the second longest run in musical theatre history up to that time. More than 150 unauthorised productions sprang up in America alone, but because American law then offered no copyright protection to foreigners, Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte had no way to prevent them. To try to make some money from the popularity of their opera in America, Carte travelled to New York with Gilbert, Sullivan and the company to present an "authentic" production of Pinafore on Broadway, beginning in December 1879, also mounting American tours. Beginning with Pinafore, Carte licensed the J. C. Williamson company to produce the works in Australia and New Zealand.
In an effort to head off unauthorised American productions of their next opera, The Pirates of Penzance, Carte and his partners opened it in New York on 31 December 1879, prior to its 1880 London premiere. Pirates was the only Gilbert and Sullivan opera to have its official premiere in America. Carte and his partners hoped to forestall further "piracy" by establishing the authorised production and tours in America before others could copy it and by delaying publication of the score and libretto. They did succeed in keeping for themselves the direct profits of the venture, but they tried without success for many years to control the American performance copyrights over their operas. Pirates was an immediate hit in New York, and later London, becoming one of the most popular Gilbert and Sullivan operas. To secure the British copyright, there was a perfunctory performance the afternoon before the New York premiere, at the Royal Bijou Theatre, Paignton, Devon, organised by Helen Lenoir.
The next Gilbert and Sullivan opera, Patience, opened at the Opera Comique in April 1881 and was another big success, becoming the second longest-running piece in the series and enjoying numerous foreign productions. Patience satirised the self-indulgent Aesthetic movement of the 1870s and '80s in England, part of the 19th-century European movement that emphasised aesthetic values over moral or social themes in literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design. From the beginning, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company established strict rules for its actors and actresses, to avoid any hint of scandal such as performers were accused of in other companies. As Jessie Bond described in her autobiography:
No lingering about was allowed, no gossiping with the other actors; the women’s dressing-rooms were on one side of the stage, the men's on the other, and when we were not actually playing we had to mount at once our respective narrow staircases – sheep rigorously separated from the goats! Once, when my mother came to see me in London, expecting to find me dwelling in haunts of gilded luxury, and far down the road to perdition, I took her behind the scenes and showed her the arrangements for the actors and actresses, conventual in their austerity.... I think there never was a theatre run on lines of such strict propriety; no breath of scandal ever touched it in all the twenty years of my experience. Gilbert would suffer no loose word or gesture either behind the stage or on it, and watched over us young women like a dragon.
With profits from the success of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas and his concert and lecture agency (his talent roster included Adelina Patti, Clara Schumann, Offenbach, Oscar Wilde and Charles Gounod), Carte bought property along the Strand with frontage onto the Thames Embankment, where he built the Savoy Theatre in 1881. He chose the name in honour of the Savoy Palace. The Savoy Theatre was a state-of-the-art facility, setting a new standard for technology, comfort and decor. It was the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electric lights and seated nearly 1,300 people (compared to the Opera Comique's 862).
Patience was the first production at the new theatre, transferring there on 10 October 1881. The first generator proved too small to power the whole building, and though the entire front-of-house was electrically lit, the stage was lit by gas until 28 December 1881. At that performance, Carte stepped on stage and broke a glowing lightbulb before the audience to demonstrate the safety of the new technology. The Times concluded that the theatre "is admirably adapted for its purpose, its acoustic qualities are excellent, and all reasonable demands of comfort and taste are complied with." Carte and his manager, George Edwardes (later famous as manager of the Gaiety Theatre), introduced several innovations at the theatre, including numbered seating, free programme booklets, the "queue" system for the pit and gallery (an American idea) and a policy of no tipping for cloakroom or other services. Daily expenses at the theatre were about half the possible takings from ticket sales. The last eight of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas were premièred at the Savoy.
During the years when the Gilbert and Sullivan operas were being written, the company also produced operas by other composer–librettist teams, either as curtain-raisers to the Gilbert and Sullivan pieces, or as touring productions, as well as other works to fill the Savoy Theatre in between Savoy operas, and Carte also toured the Gilbert and Sullivan operas extensively. For example, a souvenir programme commemorating the 250th performance of Patience in London and its 100th performance in New York shows that, aside from these two productions of Patience, Carte was simultaneously producing two companies touring with Patience, two companies touring with other Gilbert and Sullivan operas, a company touring with Olivette (co-produced with Charles Wyndham) a company touring Claude Duval in America, a production of Youth running at a New York theatre, a lecture tour by Archibald Forbes (a war correspondent) and productions of Patience, Pirates, Claude Duval and Billee Taylor in association with J. C. Williamson in Australia, among other things.
In the 1880s Carte also introduced the practice of licensing amateur theatrical societies to present works for which he held the rights, increasing their popularity and the sales of scores and libretti, as well as the rental of band parts. This had an important influence on amateur theatre in general. Cellier and Bridgeman wrote in 1914 that, prior to the creation of the Savoy operas, amateur actors were treated with contempt by professionals. After the formation of amateur Gilbert and Sullivan companies licensed to perform the operas, professionals recognised that the amateur societies "support the culture of music and the drama. They are now accepted as useful training schools for the legitimate stage, and from the volunteer ranks have sprung many present-day favourites." Cellier and Bridgeman attributed the rise in quality and reputation of the amateur groups largely to "the popularity of, and infectious craze for performing, the Gilbert and Sullivan operas". The National Operatic and Dramatic Association was founded in 1899. It reported, in 1914, that nearly 200 British societies were producing Gilbert and Sullivan operas that year. Carte insisted that amateur companies follow the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company staging, using its prompt books. Even after the copyrights expired at the end of 1961, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Trust continued to, and still does, rent out band parts to companies around the world.
Iolanthe to The Gondoliers
After Patience, the company produced Iolanthe, which opened in 1882. During its run, in February 1883, Carte signed a five-year partnership agreement with Gilbert and Sullivan, obligating them to create new operas for the company upon six months' notice. Sullivan had not intended immediately to write a new work with Gilbert, but he suffered a serious financial loss when his broker went bankrupt in November 1882 and must have felt the long-term contract necessary for his security. But he soon felt trapped. The Gilbert scholar Andrew Crowther comments, regarding the agreement: "Effectively, it made [Gilbert and Sullivan] Carte's employees – a situation which created its own resentments." The partnership's next opera, Princess Ida, opened in January 1884. Carte soon saw that Ida was running weakly at the box office and invoked the agreement to call upon his partners for a new opera to be written. Almost from the beginning of the partnership, the musical establishment put pressure on Sullivan to abandon comic opera, and he soon regretted having signed the five-year contract. In March 1884 Sullivan told Carte that "it is impossible for me to do another piece of the character of those already written by Gilbert and myself."
During this conflict and others during the 1880s, Carte and Helen Lenoir frequently had to smooth over the partners' differences with a mixture of friendship and business acumen. Sullivan asked to be released from the partnership on several occasions. Nevertheless, they coaxed eight comic operas out of Gilbert and Sullivan in the 1880s. When Princess Ida closed after a comparatively short run of nine months, for the first time in the partnership's history, the next opera was not ready. To make matters worse, Gilbert suggested a plot in which people fell in love against their wills after taking a magic lozenge – a scenario that Sullivan had previously rejected, and he now rejected the "lozenge plot" again. Gilbert eventually came up with a new idea and began work in May 1884.
The company produced the first revival of The Sorcerer, together with Trial by Jury, and matinees of The Pirates of Penzance played by a cast of children, while waiting for the new work to be completed. This became the partnership's most successful opera, The Mikado, which opened in March 1885. The piece satirised British institutions by setting them in a fictional Japan. At the same time, it took advantage of the Victorian craze for the exotic Far East using the "picturesque" scenery and costumes of Japan. The Mikado became the partnership's longest-running hit, enjoying 672 performances at the Savoy Theatre, the second longest run for any work of musical theatre up to that time, and it was extraordinarily popular in the U.S. and worldwide. It remains the most frequently performed Savoy opera. Beginning with The Mikado, Hawes Craven, the designer of the sets for Henry Irving's spectacular Shakespeare productions at the Lyceum Theatre, designed all the D'Oyly Carte sets until 1893.
From Wikipedia’s article on D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4