D'Oyly Carte Opera Company - History - Early 20th Century

Early 20th Century

Carte left his theatre, opera company and hotels to his wife, who assumed full control of the family businesses. Her London and touring companies continued to present the Savoy operas in Britain and overseas. She leased the Savoy Theatre to William Greet in 1901 and oversaw his management of the company's revival of Iolanthe and the production of several new comic operas, including The Emerald Isle (1901), Merrie England (1902) and A Princess of Kensington (with music by Edward German, libretto by Basil Hood), which ran for four months in early 1903 and then toured. When A Princess of Kensington closed at the Savoy, Mrs. Carte leased the theatre to other managements until 8 December 1906. The company's fortunes declined for a time, and by 1904 there was only a single touring company wending its way through the British provinces, when it took a seven-month South African tour.

In 1906–07, Mrs. Carte staged a repertory season at the Savoy Theatre, with Gilbert returning to direct. The season, which included Yeomen, The Gondoliers, Patience and Iolanthe, was a sensation and led to another in 1908–09 including The Mikado, Pinafore, Iolanthe, Pirates, The Gondoliers and Yeomen. Afterwards, however, Mrs. Carte's health prevented her from staging more London seasons. She retired and leased the theatre to C. H. Workman, and the company did not perform in London again until 1919, although it continued to tour throughout Britain.

After Gilbert's death in 1911, the company continued to produce productions of the operas in repertory until 1982. In 1911, Helen Carte hired J. M. Gordon as stage manager. Gordon, who was promoted to stage director in 1922, had been a member of the company and a stage manager under Gilbert's direction, and he fiercely preserved the company's performing traditions in exacting detail for 28 years. Except for Ruddigore, which underwent some cuts and received a new overture, very few changes were made to the text and music of the operas as Gilbert and Sullivan had produced them, and the company stayed true to Gilbert's period settings. The traditions evolved over time, after Gordon's death, but many of Gilbert's directorial concepts survived, both in the stage directions printed in the libretti and as preserved in company prompt books from the era. Original choreography was also maintained. In addition, some of the staging added over the years became traditional and was repeated again and again in successive productions. Many of these traditional stagings are imitated today in productions by both amateur and professional companies.

Helen Carte died in 1913, and Carte's son Rupert D'Oyly Carte inherited the company. During World War I, he was away serving in the Royal Navy. According to H. M. Walbrook, "Through the years of the Great War continued to be on tour through the country, drawing large and grateful audiences everywhere. They helped to sustain the spirits of the people during that stern period, and by so doing they helped to win the victory." The company also toured in North America several times, beginning with a Canadian tour in 1927.

Rupert D'Oyly Carte found the company's productions increasingly "dowdy", however, and on his return from the war, he determined to refresh them, bringing in new designers including W. Bridges-Adams for the sets, and, for the costumes, George Sheringham and Hugo Rumbold. He also commissioned new costumes from Percy Anderson who had worked with Gilbert and Richard D'Oyly Carte on the original productions of the later Savoy operas. Charles Ricketts redesigned sets and costumes for The Mikado (1926) and The Gondoliers (1929). His costumes for The Mikado were retained by all subsequent designers until 1982. In an interview in The Observer in August 1919, Carte set out his policy for staging the operas: "They will be played precisely in their original form, without any alteration to the words, or any attempt to bring them up to date." This uncompromising declaration was modified in a later interview in which he said, "the plays are all being restaged. ... Gilbert's words will be unaltered, though there will be some freshness in the method of rendering them. Artists must have scope for their individuality, and new singers cannot be tied down to imitate slavishly those who made successes in the old days."

The main company made a triumphant return to London for the 1919–20 season at the Prince's Theatre, playing most of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas in repertory and showing off the new sets and costumes. The success of this season led to additional London seasons in 1919–20, 1921–22, 1924, and 1926; the company toured the rest of the year. Carte's first London season stimulated renewed interest in the operas, and by 1920 he had established a second, smaller company to tour smaller towns. It was disbanded in 1927, although the company often ran multiple tours simultaneously. For London seasons, Carte engaged guest conductors, first Geoffrey Toye, then Malcolm Sargent, who examined Sullivan's manuscript scores and purged the orchestral parts of accretions. So striking was the orchestral sound produced by Sargent that the press thought he had retouched the scores, and Carte had the pleasant duty of correcting their error. In a letter to The Times, he noted that "the details of the orchestration sounded so fresh that some of the critics thought them actually new... the opera was played last night exactly as written by Sullivan." Carte also hired Harry Norris, who started with the touring company, then was Toye's assistant before becoming musical director.

In 1917, the company made the first complete recording of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Mikado, for the Gramophone Company (later known as His Master's Voice). Rupert D'Oyly Carte supervised the company's recordings, including eight more acoustic recordings by 1924, and a series of complete electrical recordings in the late 1920s and early 1930s. There were additional recordings, in high fidelity, for Decca Records, in the late 1940s and early 1950s and stereo recordings in the late 1950s and early 1960s, all supervised after Rupert's death by his daughter, Bridget D'Oyly Carte.