Producer Richard D ' Oyly Carte brought Gilbert and Sullivan together and nurtured their collaboration.

He built the Savoy Theatre in 1881 to present their joint works ( which came to be known as the Savoy Operas ) and founded the D ' Oyly Carte Opera Company, which performed and promoted Gilbert and Sullivan's works for over a century.

Gilbert already had available the libretto he had written for Rosa, and Carte suggested that Sullivan write the score.

Carte proposed a revival of Thespis for the 1875 Christmas season, which Gilbert and Sullivan would have revised, but he was unable to obtain financing for the project.

In early 1876, Carte requested that Gilbert and Sullivan create another one-act opera on the theme of burglars, but this was never completed.

This event cleared the way for Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan to form the D ' Oyly Carte Opera Company, which then produced all of their succeeding operas.

Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte tried for many years to control the American performance copyrights over their operas, without success.

But paradoxically, in February 1883, just after Iolanthe opened, Sullivan had signed a five-year agreement with Gilbert and Carte requiring him to produce a new comic opera on six months ' notice.

Sullivan had been satisfied with the libretto, but two months after Ida opened, Sullivan told Carte that " it is impossible for me to do another piece of the character of those already written by Gilbert and myself.

Sullivan and Gilbert and their producer Richard D ' Oyly Carte themselves call their joint works comic operas to distinguish this family-friendly fare from the risqué French operettas of the 1850s and 1860s.

In 1875, however, producer Richard D ' Oyly Carte reunited Gilbert and Sullivan to create a one-act piece, Trial by Jury, which became a surprise hit.

Carte used his profits from the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership to build the Savoy Theatre in 1881, and their joint works then became known as the Savoy operas.

Remembering Thespis, Carte reunited Gilbert and Sullivan, and the result was the one-act comic opera Trial by Jury.

To that end, he brought together dramatist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan and, together with his wife Helen Carte, he 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.

Because Gilbert and Sullivan shared his vision of increasing the quality and respectability of English musical theatre, and so broadening its audience through the promotion of well-crafted English light operas, Carte gave them wider authority as director and music director than was customary at that time.

This allowed Carte to lease the Opera Comique and to give Gilbert and Sullivan firm terms for a new opera.

Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte were able to select their own cast, instead of using the players under contract to the theatre where the work was produced, as had been the case with their earlier works.

Carte persuaded Gilbert and Sullivan that when their original agreement with the Comedy Opera Company expired in July 1879, a business partnership among the three of them would be to their advantage.

Legal action over the ownership of the rights ended in victory for Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan.

From 1 August 1879, the new company, later called the D ' Oyly Carte Opera Company, became the sole authorised producer of the works of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Over 150 unauthorised productions sprang up in America alone, but because American law then offered no copyright protection to foreigners, Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan were not able to demand royalties from, or to control the artistic content of, these productions.

Carte had been planning to build a new theatre for several years to promote English comic opera and, in particular, the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

Carte had conducted Sullivan's Cox and Box.

His father, Richard Carte ( 1808 – 1891 ), 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.

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.

The reception of the piece showed that Carte had been right: there was a promising future in family-friendly English comic opera.

Carte told an interviewer at that time that he had fifteen theatrical companies and performers touring simultaneously in Europe, America and Australia.

Carte chose the name in honour of the Savoy Palace, which had been built on the site in the thirteenth century by Peter, Count of Savoy.

Iolanthe had the distinction of being the first Gilbert and Sullivan opera performed professionally in London by a non-D ' Oyly Carte company.

" The interval was long ( a half hour ) as the elaborate picture gallery needed to be set up, but D ' Oyly Carte had anticipated this and had printed indulgence slips which were distributed.

With this theatre company, Carte finally had the financial resources, after many failed attempts, to produce a new full-length Gilbert and Sullivan opera.

In Pinafore, Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte used several of the principal cast members that they had assembled for The Sorcerer.

Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan now had the financial resources to produce shows themselves, without outside backers.

At the end of the six months, Carte planned to give notice to the Comedy Opera Company that its rights in the show and the theatre had ended.

Sullivan, as had been arranged with Carte and Gilbert, gave notice to the partners of the Comedy Opera Company in early July 1879 that he, Gilbert and Carte would not be renewing the contract to produce Pinafore with them and that he would be withdrawing his music from the Comedy Opera Company on 31 July.

Gilbert directed all the revivals during his lifetime, and after his death, the D ' Oyly Carte Opera Company had exclusive performing rights to the Savoy operas until 1962.

Carte bought the freehold of the site, then known as " Beaufort Buildings ", early in 1880 for £ 11, 000, but had begun planning his theatre several years before.

During this conflict and others during the 1880s, Carte and Helen Lenoir frequently worked to smooth over the partners ' differences using a mixture of friendship and business acumen.

He worked on the aberration of light, asteroids, lunar dynamics and, in collaboration with Maurice Loewy, the ill-fated Carte du Ciel project.

Over the next two years, Richard D ' Oyly Carte and Carl Rosa were two of several theatrical managers who negotiated with the team but were unable to come to terms.

During the run of Pinafore, Richard D ' Oyly Carte split up with his former investors.

Richard D ' Oyly Carte was the booking manager for Oscar Wilde, a then lesser-known proponent of aestheticism, and dispatched Wilde on an American lecture tour in conjunction with the opera's U. S. run, so that American audiences might better understand what the satire was all about.

In 1875, the manager of the Royalty Theatre, Richard D ' Oyly Carte, needed a short piece to fill out a bill with Offenbach's La Périchole.

Between 1868 and 1877, Carte wrote and published the music for a number of his own songs and instrumental works, as well as several comic operas: Doctor Ambrosias – His Secret, at St. George's Hall ( 1868 ); Marie, with librettist E. Spencer Mott, at London's Opera Comique in 1871 ; and Happy Hampstead, with librettist Frank Desprez, which debuted on an 1876 provincial tour and then played at the Royalty Theatre in 1877.

On tour in 1871, Carte conducted Cox and Box by composer Arthur Sullivan and dramatist F. C. Burnand, in tandem with English adaptations of two Offenbach pieces, called Rose of Auvergne and Breaking the Spell, in which Carte's client Selina Dolaro appeared.

" The Observer reported, " 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 opera bouffe, and are ready to welcome a musical entertainment of a higher order, such as a musician might produce with satisfaction ".

Even after the initial production of Trial by Jury, however, Carte continued to produce continental operetta, touring in the summer of 1876 with a repertoire consisting of English adaptations of French opera 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 ).

On 31 July 1879, the last day of their agreement with Carte, the directors of the Comedy Opera Company attempted to repossess the Pinafore set by force during a performance, causing a celebrated fracas.

To try to counter this copyright piracy and make some money from the popularity of their opera in America, Carte travelled to New York with the authors and the company to present an " authentic " production of Pinafore there, beginning in December 1879, as well as American tours.

Beginning with Pinafore, Carte licensed the J. C. Williamson company to produce the works in Australia and New Zealand.

" Carte and his manager, George Edwardes ( later famous as manager of the Gaiety Theatre ), introduced several innovations at the theatre including free programme booklets, the orderly " queue " system with numbered tickets for the pit and gallery ( an American idea ), tea served at the interval and a policy of no tipping for cloakroom or other services.

During its run, in February 1883, Carte signed a five-year partnership agreement with Gilbert and Sullivan, obliging them to create new operas for him upon six months ' notice.

A revised version of their 1877 work, The Sorcerer, coupled with their one-act Trial by Jury ( 1875 ), played at the Savoy while Carte and their audiences awaited their next work.

After the expiration of the copyright on Gilbert and Sullivan works in 1961, and especially since the Sadler's Wells production and recording, various directors have experimented with restoring some or all of the cut material in place of the 1920s D ' Oyly Carte version.

A production in New York with D ' Oyly Carte personnel ran for 53 performances.

Instead of writing a piece for production by a theatre proprietor, as was usual in Victorian theatres, Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte produced the show with their own financial support.