As the little steamer brought him into New York Harbor one July day in 1879, Richard D'Oyly Carte nervously paced the narrow deck with many a grave misgiving. H. M. S. Pinafore, of which he was impresario, was being widely pirated in the U. S. Without recourse to any international copyright law, he was determined to give Manhattan a production of H. M. S. Pinafore which would rout his unscrupulous competitors. Then he was to plunge into rehearsals for the premiere of The Pirates of Penzance, whose production was impeded at the start by the absentmindedness of pious Arthur Sullivan. In his haste to make a later boat, Composer Sullivan had left behind in his London flat the entire score for Act I.
The temperaments of his composer and his ebullient librettist, William Schwenck Gilbert, were the greatest burdens of Manager Carte's harassed life. He had brought them together four years before, had helped them make the biggest names in Victorian theatrical history. But all his vast reserves of tact and persuasion could not prevent the immensely successful but entirely antipodal collaborators from a ruinous breach over £140 worth of carpet eleven years later.
Last week another boat hove into New York and another D'Oyly Carte shared a 55-year-old apprehension. Unlike his father, however, Rupert D'Oyly Carte remained in London, while the 54 members of the venerable D'Oyly Carte Opera Company made their first appearance in Manhattan. By the divine right of apostolic succession, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company is to Gilbert & Sullivan what Comedie Franchise is to Moliere, what Bayreuth is to Wagner, what the Moscow Art Theatre is to Chekov, what the Abbey Theatre is to Synge. But any number of things could turn the Savoyards' invasion of New York into a hopeless dispersion: overbilling, overconfidence or just plain cussedness on the part of U. S. critics and spectators.
None of these unhappy possibilities occurred. When the week ended, audiences' palms were red and sore and every critical cap was high in the air. Son, like Father D'Oyly Carte, could count New York his.