Relics from more than a century of productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operas and the working life of the company for which they were created have been bought by the British Library from the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company.
The collection includes prompt scripts, musical scores, photographs, costume designs, pay lists, reel to reel recordings, a set of clothes-peg dolls dressed as characters from HMS Pinafore and some devastatingly frank comments on auditions.
The library paid £400,000 and Ian Martin, the general manager of D’Oyly Carte, said the sale was good news both for the company and the public, keeping the archive safe in the UK and accessible again to the public.
The D’Oyly Carte was founded in 1879 by theatre manager Richard D’Oyly Carte, who went on to build the Savoy theatre in 1881 to house the shows and, later, the adjoining Savoy hotel to house the audiences. The company maintained strict control over all professional and amateur productions of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas until the copyright expired in 1961.
Rising costs meant the company closed in 1982 – but three years later Richard’s granddaughter Dame Bridget D’Oyly Carte died, leaving a legacy of £1m, helping the company to revive in 1988. It closed for good as a permanent touring company in 2003, though it continued as a music hire business and archive.
It flickered back to life in 2013 in a joint production with Scottish Opera of The Pirates of Penzance. They will team up again when The Mikado, one of the company’s most famous shows, heads out on a UK tour next spring – and there are discussions about future productions.
The young composer Arthur Sullivan and the artist and comic playwright WS Gilbert first worked together on a Christmas entertainment in 1871 but were brought together a few years later by Richard D’Oyly Carte. In 1878 the trio scored a huge hit with HMS Pinafore, which ran for 571 performances and led to the forming of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company to produce their future work.
Hit after hit followed, though they had an often fractious working relationship which was the inspiration for Mike Leigh’s award-winning 1999 film Topsy-Turvy.
The three men are said to have fallen out disastrously over the cost of a new carpet for the Savoy theatre’s lobby, and although Gilbert and Sullivan came together for two last operas in the 1890s, neither achieved anything like the success of their earlier work. Sullivan died in 1900, D’Oyly Carte in 1901 and Gilbert in 1911, but the merriest of their works remain among the most-performed musicals in the world.
Among the star items in the archive sold to the British Library are Sullivan’s manuscript score for their 1882 hit Iolanthe, the last such score in private hands, and Gilbert’s heavily annotated prompt script for the same opera.
Iolanthe, a merciless satire on the House of Lords, reopened the Savoy as the first theatre in the world entirely lit by electricity. In the happy ending all the peers marry fairies, abandon the Palace of Westminster, and trip off to fairyland instead.
The programme boasted: “The arrangement for this lighting, and for the Electric Stars used on the fairies’ heads, are carried out by Messrs Siemens Bros, the Lamps used being Swan’s Incandescent Lamps.”
The archive also includes an audition book from 1905-1910, one of a series of bulky ledgers recording hundreds of hopefuls looking for work, some with brutally frank comments on their appearance and abilities.
Poor May Hessian, height “short”, was described as having a “good voice – upper notes vg – but she has no appearance or presence for principal parts”. Mr Albert Lane, tenor, however, had a “pleasant quality of voice, but not very powerful on top notes. Gentlemanly fellow”. His hopes of stardom would have been dashed by the final comment: “useful for chorus”.
The British Library already holds a wealth of musical archive material, including Gilbert’s papers, and the autograph scores for Patience, The Gondoliers and Ruddigore.
The peg dolls, which will now be catalogued, becoming part of the national collection and available to researchers, were made in the 1970s by Jo Adnam, a devoted fan of the company, and presented to D’Oyly Carte by her husband after her death.
