Richard D'Oyly Carte ( ; 3 May 1844 – 3 April 1901) was an English talent agent, theatrical impresario, composer, and hotelier during the latter half of the Victorian era. He built two of London's theatres and a hotel empire, while also establishing an opera company that ran continuously for over a hundred years and a management agency representing some of the most important artists of the day.
Carte started his career working for his father, Richard Carte, in the music publishing and musical instrument manufacturing business. As a young man he conducted and composed music, but he soon turned to promoting the entertainment careers of others through his management agency. Carte believed that a school of wholesome, well-crafted, family-friendly, English comic opera could be as popular as the risqué French works dominating the London musical stage in the 1870s. To that end he brought together the dramatist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan and nurtured their collaboration on a series of thirteen Savoy operas. He founded the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and built the state-of-the-art Savoy Theatre to host the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.
Eight years after opening the Savoy Theatre, Carte built the Savoy Hotel next to it, and later acquired other luxury hotels. In 1891 he erected the Palace Theatre, London (originally called the Royal English Opera House), which he intended to be the home of a new school of English grand opera, but this ambition was not realised beyond the production of a single work by Sullivan, Ivanhoe. Nevertheless, his partnership with Gilbert and Sullivan, and his careful management of their operas and relationship, created a series of works whose success was unprecedented in the history of musical theatre. His opera company, later run by his widow Helen and then by his son, Rupert, and granddaughter, Bridget, promoted those works for more than a century, and they are still performed regularly today.
Carte was born at his parents' house in Greek Street, Soho, in the West End of London on 3 May 1844; he was the eldest of six children. His father, Richard Carte, was a flautist, and his mother was the former Eliza Jones (1814–1885); they had eloped, to the disappointment of her father, Thomas Jones, a clergyman. Carte was of Welsh and probably Norman ancestry; D'Oyly is a Norman French name which the biographer Arthur Jacobs emphasises was in this case "a forename (not part of a double surname)". To supplement his income as a performer, Carte's father joined the firm of Rudall, Rose & Co., musical instrument makers and music publishers, in 1850. After he became a partner in the business, it changed its name to Rudall, Rose, Carte and Co. and later to Rudall, Carte & Co. The family moved away from Soho when Carte was a boy. He was brought up in their large detached house in Dartmouth Park in north London. His cultured mother exposed her family to art, music and poetry, and young Carte studied the violin and then the flute at an early age. The family spoke French at home two days a week, and his parents often took their children to the theatre.
He was educated at University College School from 1856 to 1860. In January 1861, he achieved First Class level in the matriculation examination for University College London, but did not take up the place; in deference to his parents' wishes he joined his father's business, along with his brother, Henry. As the name Richard Carte was by now well known in, and beyond, the musical profession, Carte dropped the use of his own first name and styled himself "D'Oyly Carte" or, more formally, "R. D'Oyly Carte". He studied music and composed some pieces, which he dedicated to the actress Kate Terry. He also acted in amateur theatricals.
Between 1868 and 1877, Carte wrote and published the music for several of his own songs and instrumental works, as well as three short comic operas: Doctor Ambrosias – His Secret (1868), Marie (1871), and Happy Hampstead (1876). On tour in 1871 he conducted Cox and Box by Arthur Sullivan and F. C. Burnand, in tandem with English adaptations of two one-act pieces by Offenbach, The Rose of Auvergne and Breaking the Spell, in which Carte's client Selina Dolaro starred. Carte's musical talent would be helpful later in his career, as he was able to audition singers himself from the piano.
During the late 1860s and early 1870s, from within his father's firm in Charing Cross and, by late 1874, from a nearby address in Craig's Court, Carte began to build an operatic, concert and lecture management agency. His two hundred clients eventually included Charles Gounod, Jacques Offenbach, Adelina Patti, Mario, Clara Schumann, Antoinette Sterling, Edward Lloyd, Mr. and Mrs. German Reed, George Grossmith, Matthew Arnold, James McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde. Hesketh Pearson said of Carte: "His acute business sense was aided by a frank and agreeable manner: he could not only see where money was to be made but how to make it. He took what other people thought were risks, but he felt were certainties. ... He knew everyone worth knowing ... and his practical judgement was as sure as his sense of artistry."
In 1874, Carte leased the Opera Comique, a theatre off the Strand, where he presented Charles Lecocq's new opéra bouffe Giroflé-Girofla, given in French by the company who had premiered the work three months earlier in Brussels. It did poor box-office business, and had to be closed after two weeks. He followed it with a modest success, The Broken Branch, an English adaptation of Gaston Serpette's La branche cassée. Carte announced his ambitions on the front of the programme for the latter: "It is my desire to establish in London a permanent abode for light Opera." The Observer commented, "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 opéra bouffe, and are ready to welcome a musical entertainment of a higher order, such as a musician might produce with satisfaction".
Carte later said it was "the scheme of my life" to found a school of high-quality, family-friendly English comic opera, in contrast to the crude burlesques and adaptations of French operettas that dominated the London musical stage at that time. His experience in writing operettas had convinced him that his own creative talents were inadequate for the task. He later wrote to the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, "I envy your position but I could never attain it. If I could be an author like you I would certainly not be a manager. I am simply the tradesman who sells your works of art". Furthermore, in 1874 Carte did not yet have the resources to make his idea into reality, and after his season at the Opera Comique, he terminated his lease.
In 1875 Carte became the business manager of the Royalty Theatre, under the direction of his client, the popular singing actress Selina Dolaro who was the licensee of the theatre and star of its production of Offenbach's La Périchole. To fill out the evening (as long programmes were the fashion in Victorian theatre), he needed another piece. He remembered a libretto for a one-act comic opera that W. S. Gilbert had written and shown to him in 1873, called Trial by Jury. Meanwhile, Sullivan's popular 1867 opera, Cox and Box, had been revived at the Gaiety Theatre in 1874, and Carte had already asked him to write a piece for the Royalty. Carte knew that Gilbert had worked with Sullivan to create Thespis in 1871, and he now suggested that Sullivan could write the music for Trial by Jury. Trial by Jury, a comic treatment of an English courtroom, was an unexpected hit, outrunning La Périchole, and becoming the first step in Carte's scheme to establish a new genre of English comic opera.
In June 1875 the Royalty closed for the summer, and Dolaro took her company on tour. While Trial by Jury and La Périchole were playing at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin in September, Carte met Michael Gunn, a co-owner of the Gaiety. Gunn became a close friend of Carte's, later served as a manager in his theatrical company and was a shareholder and director in his hotel business. Even after the initial production of Trial by Jury Carte continued to produce continental operetta, touring in the summer of 1876 with a repertoire consisting of English adaptations of French opéra bouffe (Offenbach's La Périchole, and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, Lecocq's La fille de Madame Angot and Léon Vasseur's La Timbale d'argent), paired with two one-act English after-pieces (Happy Hampstead and Trial by Jury). Carte was the musical director of this travelling company.