ABSTRACT
Richard D’Oyly Carte was thirty-three years old in 1877. Since the age of twenty-five he had been running his own theatrical and concert agency in London. He organized tours, found work for an impressive list of clients, and occasionally took managerial engagements himself. Carte was a musically well educated man with a lively mind and a quirky sense of humor, who regarded the theatre as a vocation rather than simply a place to earn a living. One of his ambitions was to establish English comic opera as a more decorous but equally viable and popular alternative to French opéra-bouffe. In 1874 he had tried to run a season of works by English composers at London’s Opera Comique Theatre. It failed miserably, but this did not lessen his commitment to homegrown musical theatre. He was now preparing to launch a new comic opera and had engaged Allen as the musical director and Alice to create the principal soprano role.
