D'Oyly Carte

The Decline and Fall of an Opera Company

Paul Seeley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000487343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

This book considers and discusses aspects of the management of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the twentieth century since the death of its founder Richard D'Oyly Carte, and concentrates on key events that contributed to its demise in 1982.

In this book, Paul Seeley follows the analytical model that proposes no single factor triggered the collapse, but rather several, both external and internal. In the case of an opera company the external factors may include public taste and market forces, but more significant are the internal factors such as the management decisions taken in response to external factors and how these compare with the original artistic aims, aspirations and business models of the founder. This is a study by someone with close observation of the administration; at the 1982 demise, Seeley was assistant to the company manager, having earlier served on the music staff.

The book is a must-read for music historians, theatre historians and arts-management professionals; as an uncompromisingly critical history of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company it is designed to serve a wider public, not just the Gilbert and Sullivan opera specialist, but anyone keen to debate the desirability of private or public sponsorship of the performing arts.

1 The making of D'Oyly Carte

DOI: 10.4324/9781003103059-1

Saturday 30 December 1961 was one of several momentous dates in the history of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. On that evening the company performed Princess Ida at the Savoy Theatre with a stellar cast including Jean Hindmarsh, Jennifer Toye, Philip Potter, Thomas Round, John Reed, Donald Adams and Kenneth Sandford. The date had historic importance because ever afterwards the company would no longer hold its monopoly on the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Copyright in Sullivan’s published works had lapsed a decade earlier, but now, with the dawning of the year 1962, the Gilbert copyright lapsed too, and with it would come a new age when other companies could freely perform the Savoy Operas.

General manager Frederic Lloyd optimistically predicted that this was not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning as he addressed the audience from the stage. Music critic David Cairns was there that night, observing an audience complacently comfortable, having been spirited away to a bygone age of British Empire, confident that their almost religious devotion would keep the Savoyard flame aglow within a D’Oyly Carte tradition of stylized productions with variable standards of orchestral accompaniment.¹ And yet this confidence was misplaced, for while the popularity of the Savoy Operas was assured for years to come, this was indeed the beginning of the end for the D’Oyly Carte.

So confident were the Trustees who now presided over the opera company that in 1975 they even published a booklet of over 100 pages bearing the title D’Oyly Carte Centenary 1875-1975: 100 years of D’Oyly Carte and Gilbert and Sullivan. The title was both bewilderingly inaccurate and inept, describable perhaps as an innocent fiction because in 1875 there was as yet no established D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. In 1875 Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated on three things, the parlour ballads ‘The love that loves me not’ and ‘Sweethearts’ and, most significantly, the operetta dubbed a “dramatic cantata”, Trial by Jury, performed by members of a company managed, but not owned, by Richard D’Oyly Carte. Although Trial by Jury was an overnight success for all concerned it did not bring about an immediate change in the destiny of Richard D’Oyly Carte, but it was a further inspiration, a further step in the direction towards what he called “the scheme of my life”.

Richard D’Oyly Carte had an unbounded passion for musical theatre with a desire not just to manage but also to own his own theatrical company. It was an obsession that had taken hold since he had started in the music business as an agency assistant in his father’s publishing and instrument retail establishment in Charing Cross. Through his work there he had got to know professional singers and theatre managers, and in 1869, when only twenty-five years of age, he was raising funds with a view to hiring a London theatre and engaging a troupe of singers and orchestral musicians, but for some reason, he could not go ahead. This first hurdle did not deter him. The 1870s were a time for him to survey, assess and experience the business of musical theatre as a composer, conductor and manager, booking theatres and engaging singers for short seasons of French operetta, and even inviting companies from abroad to perform in London. From these experiments and from his observation of the theatrical scene in London he concluded that what was on offer was directed either towards the highbrow audiences enjoying grand opera in Italian at Covent Garden or lowbrow audiences attending burlesques and musical comedies at the Gaiety Theatre and elsewhere. Theatres were not universally popular, as there were sections of the population in Victorian Britain who regarded a theatre as an improper place of entertainment and theatre people as the scum of society. Catering for anyone with such an attitude there was the Royal Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street run by husband and wife Thomas German Reed and Priscilla Horton. On a small stage, the couple produced comedies and operettas, and engaged writers such as F.C. Burnand whose Cox and Box was staged there with music by Sullivan, and W.S. Gilbert whose Ages Ago was performed with music by Frederic Clay.

As the Gallery closed in 1873 here was a niche market for Carte to consider. Inspired by the success of Trial by Jury, he drafted a business plan in which he proposed to produce “a series of light and amusing but interesting ‘comedy operas’” beginning with a work by Gilbert and Sullivan.² He maintained that the tide of public opinion had swung against the more daring productions of French operetta and that it was high time that people could be entertained by good comedy with good music without risk of being offended. In his productions, there would be no place for ‘trouser roles’ (in which women played male characters) nor for any form of scanty or revealing costume. This was musical theatre specifically targeted towards a respectable middlebrow audience drawn from the financially secure, well-educated middle classes.

Carte now had the concept, the business plan, the product and the customer base in mind but there was no guaranteed easy road map to success. He needed funds as a backup. While the next Gilbert and Sullivan opera, The Sorcerer, was assigned to the Comedy Opera Company, a production company in which Carte was a shareholder and employed as manager, he applied himself at the same time to other activities as a safeguard against possible failure of The Sorcerer, the first new opera designed for his niche market. He maintained his agency work for concert artists and recitalists but also extended this area to include series of celebrity lectures by war correspondent Archibald Forbes, journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley, and the American short story writer and poet Bret Harte. Coincidentally he was also managing a theatre in Islington and staging French operettas there.

Fortunately, he need not have worried. His experiment with Gilbert and Sullivan opera was working although the chosen theatre, the Opera Comique, was far from ideal. Together with the author and composer Carte had created a theatrical company of top-class artists and a product that was a genre of entertainment unmatched in quality by anything elsewhere. Carte was also fortunate in administrative matters. While he was commuting between the Islington and West End theatres his office at Charing Cross was in the capable hands of his loyal staff, Helen Black (a former actress known as Helen Lenoir) and Frank Desprez, and he could also seek advice on management issues as well as financial sponsorship from his good friend, Michael Gunn, proprietor of the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. Buoyed by the initial success of The Sorcerer a second opera, H.M.S. Pinafore was so successful that it attracted worldwide attention, and unauthorized copycat productions were staged in America.

Successive years were dogged by one legal dispute after another, not just over international copyright matters but also closer to home where Carte needed to employ a degree of cunning skulduggery to free himself from the Comedy Opera Company in a bid to become an independent operator. He won in the end, and from 1 August 1879, he was both owner and manager of an opera company to which he proudly attached his name. Two years later he had his own theatre too, the Savoy Theatre, where those “light and amusing but interesting ‘comedy operas’” would forever be known as the Savoy Operas.

Here then were the makings of a successful business: a concept followed by a business plan, a product of high quality targeted at a bourgeois middlebrow niche market – and the glue that held all this together was the passion, devotion and critical awareness of its creative team. When Carte first conceived his plans for an opera company he had been prepared to include in his provisional repertoire any suitable works of French operetta, but his general feeling was that their heyday was long past. Nor was he thinking of repertoire exclusively by Gilbert and Sullivan, but for the present, he was satisfied that the fusion of their talents created a product outclassing all others and perfectly formulated for his target audience.

Indeed, both Gilbert and Sullivan in their own way did more than satisfy the criteria set by Carte. Sullivan, being well known both as composer and conductor, had a personal following of serious music lovers, and so his music in these operas drew upon a lingua franca of styles with which habitués of the concert hall or opera house were familiar, and sometimes he would take delight in a less cultivated style. Sullivan was a musical mimic who understood and absorbed the musical mannerisms of his contemporaries and forebears, adapting these in response to whatever dramatic situation was presented by Gilbert. There was Handelian grandeur from the chorus in anticipation of the entrance of the Judge in Trial by Jury, a mock grandeur as it transpires as the Judge’s song which followed was pure music hall. Sullivan liked to tease his listeners with hints of Gounod, Berlioz, Verdi and Balfe in his arias and ensembles. A fine example from Trial by Jury is ‘A nice dilemma’ which has solo voices soaring over a pulsating rhythm from the chorus which recalls ‘D’un pensiero e d’un accento’ from the first act finale of Bellini’s La sonnambula. Actual deliberate quotes from other composers are few in number: there is the coloratura cadenza in ‘Poor wand’ring one’ from The Pirates of Penzance matching one preceding ‘Sempre libera’ in Verdi’s La traviata; and when the Mikado sings of “Bach interwoven with Spohr and Beethoven” lower woodwind instruments counter with the fugal subject from Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor for organ, BWV542. And there are unintended close matches, as with Molloy’s ‘Loves old sweet song’ and Sullivan’s ‘When a merry maiden marries’ from The Gondoliers, and perhaps even between the Lazarillo romance, ‘Alas, those chimes so sweetly stealing’ from Wallace’s Maritana and ‘Twenty lovesick maidens’ in Patience.

To the unschooled and unsophisticated theatregoer, the stories presented in the libretti may have been little more than romantic comedies, but Gilbert too could tease the intellects of the more erudite patrons. He knew the popular grand opera repertoire thoroughly, and some of his earlier comedies parodied these with absurdly punning titles such as Dulcamara! or, The Little Duck and the Great Quack (after Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore) and The Merry Zingara or, The Tipsy Gipsy and the Pipsy Wipsy (after Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl). Gilbert was in serious mode when he wrote The Yeomen of the Guard which opens with a domestic scene as a young lovesick girl sits at her spinning wheel, thinking of Fairfax, a prisoner in the Tower who has been accused of sorcery. This scene and the subject of sorcery is a very obvious reference to the legend of Faust, recalling the moment where Marguerite (in Gounod’s opera) or Gretchen (in Goethe’s drama) is observed spinning. Just as Schubert incorporated a spinning motif in the piano accompaniment for his setting of Goethe’s ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ Sullivan did likewise with the viola figuration in his orchestral setting of Phoebe’s ‘When maiden loves’.

The orchestration of the operas was conservative, conditioned in part by Sullivan’s training in Leipzig and the influence of Mendelssohn, and constricted too by a theatre’s limitations. Yet within these confines, there was nothing commonplace in the accompaniments but, on the contrary, some highly imaginative use of woodwind instruments, and there is no reason to disagree with one early commentator who wrote that “the chief characteristic of Sullivan’s orchestration may be summed up in three words – clarity, picturesqueness and refinement”.³ The earliest work for the Comedy Opera Company, The Sorcerer, inherited characteristics of the previous century’s pastoral ballad operas with orchestrated settings of gentle arias (such as Dr Daly’s ‘Time was’) which would not have been out of place in a Victorian parlour, while Aline’s ‘O, happy young heart’ recalls the waltz songs of Gounod’s operas. In the next works, H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance, the opera style tended more towards French operetta albeit in an English setting. As the Savoy Operas progressed from Patience onwards there was an enrichment of the orchestral sound as extra instrumentation was introduced. Some writing became more symphonic as in the through-composed opening to The Gondoliers and the masterly overtures for Iolanthe and The Yeomen of the Guard. Some of the later Savoy Operas by other authors followed Gilbert’s lead in The Gondoliers by using spectacular stage settings, and even when Gilbert chose an exotic location for Utopia, Limited, Sullivan’s music was still grounded in the familiar styles of the past. However, in his last Gilbert collaboration, The Grand Duke, Sullivan the musical mimic allowed himself some moments of more adventurous orchestral effects.

The influence of the Greek and Latin classics is evident not only in Gilbert’s first and last collaborative works with Sullivan, Thespis in 1871 and The Grand Duke in 1896 but also in numerous textual references elsewhere in other operas, as when a common sailor in H.M.S. Pinafore reveals his Classical education (and thereby his higher class) when describing to his beloved Josephine how he has been “plunged into the Cimmerian darkness of tangible despair”. In any of these passing references Gilbert’s choices were entirely appropriate, although in some instances quite obscure to a non-specialist.⁴

The most inspired influence of the classics was in the function of the chorus which Gilbert used in a revolutionary manner. In his Poetics Aristotle had recommended that the chorus should form a key component of the action following the model of Sophocles who used the chorus to express the conscience of the ordinary Joe. The Gilbertian chorus likewise formed an integral part of the action, commenting on and reacting to whatever was spoken or sung by the principal actors. The early G&S operas had choruses of lowly folk. In the middle-period operas, however, the choruses typified and expressed the self-interestedness of a significantly higher social class – dragoon officers, members of the House of Lords, and so on – as the Savoy Theatre was attracting more people from this section of society. Nevertheless, in all the operas the chorus formed a highly disciplined squad, moving and behaving uniformly as one body, sometimes in straight lines, sometimes in a semicircle to encompass and focus attention upon the action in a symmetrical stage setting.

Gilbert had devised for the chorus a carefully coordinated system of gestures, a sort of sign language or body language which was intended to show what people were, or what they pretended to be. A pose with arms crossed over the chest was suggestive of piety or purity, as in Trial by Jury at the entrance of the bridesmaids where Gilbert’s original promptbook notes how they come forward “each with bouquet, their arms crossed on their bosoms, and rose wreaths on their arms”, and when the ladies’ chorus in The Sorcerer sings ‘Heaven bless our Aline’ as they kneel it is noted that they are “with hands crossed and kneel thus”. This same arms-crossed gesture is applied in The Pirates of Penzance when Edith sings ‘Propriety, we know, says we ought to stay’ and later when the chorus sing of ‘a doctor of divinity who resides in this vicinity’.

Some gestures are also used to illustrate a choral reaction, as for example from the crew of H.M.S. Pinafore: at the first verse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• 1 The making of D'Oyly Carte
• 2 Helen D'Oyly Carte
• 3 The birth of a tradition
• 4 On radio and on record
• 5 On film and television
• Illustrations
• 6 The D'Oyly Carte Opera Trust
• 7 The last Savoyards
• 8 D'Oyly Carte and the Arts Council
• 9 A ‘new’ D'Oyly Carte?
• Appendix 1 The Sullivan manuscript sale
• Appendix 2 Who was who in the D’Oyly Carte Opera Trust
• Select bibliography
• Index