Opera in the 19th century was a far more egalitarian affair than it appears to be today. It was not just for the elite, but for the masses, too, with comic opera and opéra bouffe catering for different audiences, aiming to amuse as well as educate. However, it was arguably the efforts of one man, working with a famous duo, who helped popularise and professionalise comic opera at the same time – and that man was Richard D’Oyly Carte.

The man with the memorable name was born on 3 May 1844 in Soho, the son of a musical instrument maker, also called Richard. Richard Carte and his wife, Eliza, brought up Richard Jr and his siblings Blanche, Viola, Rose, Henry, and Eliza in an artistic environment, playing instruments, learning French, and visiting the theatre. In 1870, at the age of 26, Richard married 17-year-old Blanche Julia Prowse in Kentish Town. Richard gave his occupation as musician, his new father-in-law William Prowse being a music publisher. The couple settled into married life, and the 1871 census for St Martin in the Fields recorded Richard as a musical agent. By 1874, Richard was producing operettas in London, and in 1875, he became the business manager of the Royalty Theatre.

Back in 1871, a man named Arthur Sullivan had been asked by the manager of the Gaiety Theatre to put some music to a Christmas piece written by a WS Gilbert. This followed Gilbert’s writing of Pygmalion and Galatea, which started at the Haymarket Theatre in September 1871. The resulting piece, Thespis (described by Gilbert as a ‘grotesque opera’), took only three weeks to complete, and had run for over 60 performances, starting from 26 December 1871. The burlesque-style opera used the Greek legend of Thespis as its basis, and was commended by reviewers for its ‘spirit of caricature’ that made fun of subjects without being either ‘vulgar or sacrilegious’ – although some of the actresses’ dresses were regarded as being rather indecent.

The two men had subsequently gone their own way, but now, four years later, at the Royalty Theatre, D’Oyly Carte remembered both the men and Thespis, and brought Gilbert and Sullivan back together to create a piece – a curtain-raiser – to precede the Royalty’s production of Offenbach’s opéra bouffe, La Périchole. The resulting one-act satirical operetta, Trial by Jury – which took as its subject a lawsuit relating to a breach of promise of marriage – was performed for the first time at the Royalty on 25 March 1875, and was a hit with audiences, running for over 130 performances.

In 1877, D’Oyly Carte leased the seven-year-old Opera Comique, off the top end of the Strand, and put on a production of the two-act The Sorcerer – Gilbert and Sullivan’s first full opera written together. The opera, which ran for six months from mid-November and focused on Victorian class distinctions, saw the debut of two actors who would become well-known to Victorian audiences – George Grossmith and Rutland Barrington. Gilbert and Sullivan had been allowed most of the control over both the production and the choice of performers.

HMS Pinafore followed in 1878, and it was so successful (as it still is today) that Gilbert, Sullivan and D’Oyly Carte decided to form a new working partnership – one that eventually became known as the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. The company put on its first American tour, and premiered The Pirates of Penzance in New York in 1879. A further operetta, Patience, followed at the Opera Comique in April 1881, again including Grossmith and Barrington in the cast, and produced by Gilbert and Sullivan.

1881 was a significant year for D’Oyly Carte, as it was in this year that he built the Savoy Theatre, the theatre still associated with his name. Ever the showman, D’Oyly Carte proudly announced that his was the first attempt to ‘light a public building by electricity’ – and when it opened in October 1881, it was noted that ‘the auditorium was thus illuminated, and with a success almost perfect. The lamps burnt steadily, and it was only found necessary on two or three occasions so perceptibly to strengthen the illuminating power as to direct attention to the turning on of the light’. The theatre’s colour scheme of white, yellow and gold, with touches of Venetian red for the boxes and corridors, was ‘rich and pleasing’, but it was the absence of gas lighting that drew the most comment, for it made the building both cooler and quieter. Several Gilbert and Sullivan operas – including The Mikado (1885), The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), and The Gondoliers (1889) – were premiered at the Savoy Theatre, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s work became known as ‘the Savoy Operas’. However, it was Patience that was the debut production at the new Savoy, with the first performance conducted by Sullivan himself, thus starting the theatre on what the Evening Standard predicted to be a ‘highly prosperous career’.

The show must go on
In 1881, the year of the Savoy, the census recorded Richard not with his wife Blanche, but as being back at his parents’ home, with his two sons – Lucas D’Oyly Carte, aged nine, and Rupert D’Oyly Carte, aged four. His wife Blanche’s absence was prophetic. She died on 31 August 1885, aged just 32. In early September of that year, just a week after his wife’s untimely death, D’Oyly Carte arrived in New York, and on being interviewed there, said, ‘I can hardly believe we’re all here in America – it’s all been so sudden and so secret.’ His company had travelled under assumed names, to avoid any gossip, for their first performances of The Mikado in the States – at New York’s Fifth Avenue Theatre – were designed to be a surprise (although the press had actually been speculating about this possibility since at least June). D’Oyly Carte was clearly thrilled at the subterfuge and the interest it generated (as planned), and his interviews with the media appear jovial and high-spirited. He also had a good awareness of why Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera had been such a hit in London: ‘You know what originated The Mikado? It was a Japanese craze in London. London always has some sort of a craze [and]… last year it was remote Japan.’ Gilbert exploited this with The Mikado, and D’Oyly Carte helped by ‘acquiring the Japanese wriggle and the Japanese giggle and other commodities of an equally fragile but desirable nature’.

There had been copyright issues over bringing the opera to the US, and in the event, September saw two different productions advertised to American theatre-goers: one produced by John Stetson, featuring the D’Oyly Carte company, which was ‘down for a long run’, and seen as a ‘triumph – the house was simply packed and the opera was received with the utmost enthusiasm’ – and a competing one put on at the Standard Theatre by James Duff, which the British press were dismissive of: ‘He has already announced three separate opening nights, and changed each one’. They stressed that he would have to work hard to ‘beat’ John Stetson’s production.

The D’Oyly Carte Company performed not only in London and New York, but also in the provinces. For example, in March 1885, the company was in Dundee, and in November, Cirencester, where Princess Ida, or Castle Adamant, was followed by The Sorcerer. Alongside this professional success, Richard’s personal life thrived, too. Three years after being widowed, he remarried, his second wife being Helen Couper-Black, 14 years his junior, and also known as Helen Lenoir. The couple had known each other since 1875, when they met in Dublin. D’Oyle Carte had been overseeing a tour of Trial by Jury, while Helen had been working as an actress. She came back to England to help him establish a permanent home for comic opera there, and continued to work alongside him. A rather tongue-in-cheek item in the newspapers relating to the wedding, in April 1888, noted:

‘Mr D’Oyly Carte, the popular and energetic manager of the Savoy Theatre, has varied the monotony of a rather laborious existence by taking to himself a wife. As soon as he was married, Mr D’Oyly Carte remembered that it was years since he had taken a holiday, and at the same time his medical adviser assured him that his health required one; so he and his bride are now in the South of France, where they will remain for some weeks.’

The marriage took place in the Chapel Royal at the Savoy Hotel – and this unusual location led The Era, the main theatrical newspaper, to comment: ‘Now that Mr Richard D’Oyly Carte and Mr Cyril Francis Maude [the actor and, later, joint manager of the Haymarket Theatre, who married actress Winifred Emery at Kensington Record Office in April 1888, followed by a second ceremony at the Savoy two months later] have set the fashion of getting “spliced at the Savoy”, perhaps the chapel will become the recognised building for theatrical unions.’

For some involved with the D’Oyly Carte, their success was fleeting. Effie Mason, for example, who had previously played Little Buttercup in HMS Pinafore, and Petti-Sing in The Mikado, performing in the provinces, was, by the age of 18, complaining that she had only received a small salary for her work, out of which she could only save a ‘trifling amount, which was exhausted long ago’. She was, by November 1887, unemployed, and living in a single room with her mother, with no carpet and few bedclothes – she said that she had written to over 40 London and provincial theatre managers for work, but with no joy, so that she had ‘nothing but starvation staring me in the face’.

In 1890, Arthur Sullivan – by now Sir Arthur – broke with his long-standing professional relationship with WS Gilbert and D’Oyly Carte, following arguments about money. This did not affect the popularity of the D’Oyly Carte Company, however, and in September 1891, a production of The Gondoliers saw Her Majesty’s Theatre ‘crammed’, although the ‘division in the Gilbert-Sullivan-Carte camp’ was commented on and lamented. In March 1901, the final census listing D’Oyly Carte was taken. He was a man at the peak of his career, a 56-year-old theatre proprietor and manager, living with Helen and his younger son by his first wife, Rupert, now aged 23 and director of the nearby Savoy Hotel.

D’Oyly Carte died at his home – 4 Adelphi Terrace, at the back of the Strand, in the heart of London’s theatre district – on 3 April 1901, exactly a month short of his 57th birthday, and only four months after the death of Sir Arthur Sullivan. His widow, Helen, leased the Savoy Theatre out that year, although she continued to oversee productions there. The following year, she married barrister Stanley Carr Boulter; in 1906, she leased the theatre back to herself, putting on repertory seasons until her death in 1913, aged 55. Richard’s elder son Lucas had died, aged just 35, back in 1907, the year after WS Gilbert’s own death. However, the second D’Oyly Carte son, Rupert, lived far longer, dying aged 71 in 1948. It was to Rupert that Helen had left the touring repertory company and the Savoy buildings to – he had the theatre rebuilt, and continued to run it until his death, when his daughter Bridget (later Dame Bridget) took on her family’s business. The D’Oyly Carte family continued to run the company until 1982, when it closed due to a lack of funding; after Dame Bridget died in 1985, a legacy in her will enabled the formation of a new D’Oyly Carte Opera Company.

Richard D’Oyly Carte had the foresight to recognise how the separate talents of Gilbert and Sullivan would work well together, and the showmanship to delight theatre audiences with entertaining comic opera productions. He knew what audiences would enjoy, and he gave it to them – ensuring his own long-term reputation, as well as those of his famous librettist and composing duo.