The D’Oyly Carte Opera Company

The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company was a professional British light opera company that, from the 1870s until 1982, staged Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas nearly year-round in the UK and sometimes toured in Europe, North America and elsewhere. The company was revived for short seasons and tours from 1988 to 2003. In 1875, Richard D'Oyly Carte asked the dramatist W. S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan to collaborate on a short comic opera to round out an evening's entertainment. When that work, Trial by Jury, became a success, Carte put together a syndicate to produce a full-length Gilbert and Sullivan work, The Sorcerer (1877), followed by H.M.S. Pinafore (1878). After Pinafore became an international sensation, Carte jettisoned his difficult investors and formed a new partnership with Gilbert and Sullivan that became the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. The company produced the succeeding ten Gilbert and Sullivan operas and many other operas and companion pieces, mostly at the Savoy Theatre in London, which Carte built in 1881 for that purpose. The company also mounted tours in Britain, New York and elsewhere, usually running several companies simultaneously. Carte's able assistant, Helen Lenoir, became his wife in 1888 and, after his death in 1901, she ran the company until her own death in 1913. By this time, it had become a year-round Gilbert and Sullivan touring repertory company. Carte's son Rupert inherited the company. Beginning in 1919, he mounted new seasons in London with new set and costume designs, while continuing the year-round tours in Britain and abroad. With the help of the director J. M. Gordon and the conductor Isidore Godfrey, Carte ran the company for 35 years. He redesigned the Savoy Theatre in 1928 and sponsored a series of recordings over the years that helped to keep the operas popular. After Rupert's death in 1948, his daughter Bridget inherited the company and hired Frederic Lloyd as general manager. The company continued to tour for 35 weeks each year, issue new recordings and play London seasons of Gilbert and Sullivan. In 1961 the last copyright on the Gilbert and Sullivan operas expired, and Bridget set up and endowed a charitable trust that presented the operas until mounting costs and a lack of public funding forced the closure of the company in 1982. It re-formed in 1988 with a legacy left by Bridget D'Oyly Carte, played short tours and London seasons, and issued some popular recordings. Denied significant funding from the English Arts Council, it ended productions in 2003. Bridget D'Oyly Carte formed The D'Oyly Carte Opera Trust which, since the closing of the company, has co-produced, with Scottish Opera, The Pirates of Penzance in 2013, The Mikado in 2016 and The Gondoliers and Utopia, Limited in 2021–22. Some of the company's performers, over the decades, became stars of their day and often moved on to careers in musical theatre or grand opera. The company licensed the operas for performance in Australasia and to numerous amateur troupes in Britain and elsewhere, providing orchestra parts and prompt books for hire. The company kept the Savoy operas in the public eye for over a century and left an enduring legacy of production styles and stage business that continue to be emulated in new productions, as well as recordings. 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,