Rupert D'Oyly Carte

The Gilbert and Sullivan operas, nurtured by Carte and his family for over a century, continue to be produced frequently today throughout the English-speaking world and beyond.

In a newspaper interview given in the year of his death, Rupert recalled that as a young man he was entrusted, during his father's illness, with helping W. S. Gilbert with the first revival of The Yeomen of the Guard at the Savoy Theatre.

He joined with other London theatre managers, including Herbert Beerbohm Tree, George Edwardes and Arthur Bourchier in signing a petition for the retention of censorship.

[13] In the same year, together with Herbert Sullivan and theatre managers including Beerbohm Tree and Squire Bancroft, Carte was an instigator of a memorial to W. S. Gilbert at Charing Cross.

[n 5] According to the theatre writer H. M. Walbrook, "Through the years of the Great War they continued to be on tour through the country, drawing large and grateful audiences everywhere.

I formed the view that new productions should be prepared, with scenery and dresses to the design of first class artists who understood the operas but who would produce a décor attractive to the new generation.

[20] During the First World War Carte served in the Royal Navy, and his plans for reviving the operas in London proceeded slowly.

In an interview in The Observer in August 1919 he 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.

"[25] Carte's first London season, at the Prince's Theatre, 1919–20, featured ten of the thirteen extant Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

In 1921 Cox and Box was produced in an extensively cut-down version, to allow it to be played as a companion piece with the shortest of the two-act Savoy operas.

He also authorised changes to Gilbert's text: he wrote to The Times in 1948: "We found recently in America that much objection was taken by coloured persons to a word used twice in The Mikado."

The word in question was Gilbert's reference to "nigger" (blackface) minstrels, and Carte asked A. P. Herbert to suggest an acceptable revision.

Other redesigns were by Percy Anderson, George Sheringham, Hugo Rumbold and Peter Goffin, a protégé of Carte's daughter, Bridget.

For London seasons, Carte often 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.

[46] The critic Ernest Newman wrote, "I can imagine no gayer or more exhilarating frame for the Gilbert and Sullivan operas than the Savoy as it is now.

"[47] Despite its historical connection with Gilbert and Sullivan, most of Carte's London seasons were staged not at the Savoy but at two larger houses: the Prince's (now the Shaftesbury) Theatre (1919–20, 1921–22, 1924, 1926, 1942 and Sadler's Wells (1935, 1936, 1937, 1939, 1947 and 1948).

"[51] Nevertheless, in 1934 the company made a highly successful eight-month North American tour with Green as its new principal comedian, replacing Lytton.

[52] Carte gave approval for, and was closely consulted about, a 1938 film version of The Mikado produced and conducted by Geoffrey Toye, starring Green and released by Universal Pictures,[53][54] but his only new stage production after 1932 was of The Yeomen of the Guard designed in 1939 by Peter Goffin.

The re-staging was regarded as radical, but when Goffin took fright at the storm of controversy, Carte told him, "I don't care what they say about the production.

[n 9] Peter Goffin designed and directed the new production of The Yeomen of the Guard first seen in January 1940, and his new Ruddigore debuted in 1948, shortly after Carte's death.

[52][61] From the beginning of his career, Carte maintained the Savoy group in London, disposing in 1919 of the Grand Hotel, Rome, which his father had acquired in 1896.

[63] In 1927 Carte appointed his opera company's general manager, Richard Collet, to run the cabaret at the Savoy, which began in April 1929.

[68] After her parents' divorce, Bridget D'Oyly Carte took over the house, which her father, who lived in London, would visit for long weekends.

[74] Lady Dorothy moved to the island of Tobago and married St Yves de Verteuil, who had been the co-respondent in the divorce case.

[75][n 10] P. G. Wodehouse based the character Psmith, seen in several of his comic novels, on either Rupert D'Oyly Carte or his elder brother Lucas.

"[n 11] Bridget D'Oyly Carte, however, believed that the Wykehamist schoolboy described to Wodehouse was not her father but his brother Lucas, who was also at Winchester College.

[86] The Gilbert and Sullivan operas, nurtured by Carte and his family for over a century, continue to be produced frequently today throughout the English-speaking world and beyond.

[87][88] By keeping the Savoy operas popular throughout the mid-20th century, Carte continued to influence the course of the development of modern musical theatre.