page_title: The Gondoliers
section_title: The Carpet Quarrel
hierarchical_section_title: The Gondoliers / Background / The Carpet Quarrel
caption_attribution_description: Wallace Brownlow and Decima Moore as Luiz and Casilda in The Gondoliers, 1889
context_page_description: The Gondoliers; or, The King of Barataria is a Savoy Opera, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It premiered at the Savoy Theatre on 7 December 1889 and ran for a very successful 554 performances, closing on 30 June 1891. This was the twelfth comic opera collaboration of fourteen between Gilbert and Sullivan.
  The story of the opera concerns the young bride of the heir to the throne of the fictional kingdom of Barataria who arrives in Venice to join her husband. It turns out, however, that he cannot be identified, since he was entrusted to the care of a drunken gondolier who mixed up the prince with his own son. To complicate matters, the King of Barataria has just been killed. The two young gondoliers must now jointly rule the kingdom until the nurse of the prince can be brought in to determine which of them is the rightful king. Moreover, when the young queen arrives to claim her husband, she finds that the two gondoliers have both recently married local girls. A last complicating factor is that she, herself, is in love with another man.
  The Gondoliers was Gilbert and Sullivan's last great success.
context_section_description: With the exception of their first opera, Richard D'Oyly Carte produced every Gilbert and Sullivan opera and had built the Savoy Theatre specifically for productions of their shows.  However, on several occasions during the 1880s the relationship among Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte had been strained.
  In April 1890, during the run of The Gondoliers, Gilbert discovered that maintenance expenses for the theatre, including a new £500 (equivalent to £55,433 in 2019) carpet for the front lobby of the theatre, were being charged to the partnership instead of borne by Carte.  Gilbert confronted Carte, but the producer refused to reconsider the accounts.  Gilbert stormed out and wrote to Sullivan that "I left him with the remark that it was a mistake to kick down the ladder by which he had risen".  Helen D'Oyly Carte wrote that Gilbert had addressed Carte "in a way that I should not have thought you would have used to an offending menial."  As scholar Andrew Crowther has explained:
  After all, the carpet was only one of a number of disputed items, and the real issue lay not in the mere money value of these things, but in whether Carte could be trusted with the financial affairs of Gilbert and Sullivan. Gilbert contended that Carte had at best made a series of serious blunders in the accounts, and at worst deliberately attempted to swindle the others. It is not easy to settle the rights and wrongs of the issue at this distance, but it does seem fairly clear that there was something very wrong with the accounts at this time. Gilbert wrote to Sullivan on 28 May 1891, a year after the end of the "Quarrel", that Carte had admitted "an unintentional overcharge of nearly £1,000 in the electric lighting accounts alone."
  Sullivan supported Carte, and Gilbert felt betrayed. Sullivan felt that Gilbert was questioning his good faith, and in any event, Sullivan had other reasons to stay in Carte's good graces: Carte was building a new theatre, the Royal English Opera House, to produce Sullivan's only grand opera, Ivanhoe. On 5 May 1890, Gilbert had written to Sullivan: "The time for putting an end to our collaboration has at last arrived."  Gilbert brought suit, and after The Gondoliers closed in 1891, he withdrew the performance rights to his libretti and vowed to write no more operas for the Savoy.
  Gilbert's aggressive, though successful, legal action had embittered Sullivan and Carte.  But the partnership had been so profitable that Carte eventually sought to reunite the dramatist and composer.  After many failed attempts by Carte and his wife, Gilbert and Sullivan reunited through the efforts of Tom Chappell, who published the sheet music to their operas.  In 1893, they produced their penultimate collaboration, Utopia, Limited.  But The Gondoliers would prove to be Gilbert and Sullivan's last big hit.  Utopia was only a modest success, and their final collaboration, The Grand Duke, in 1896, was a failure.  The two would never collaborate again.
caption: Brownlow and Moore as Luiz and Casilda
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