legitimate stage, and from the volunteer ranks have sprung many present-day favourites." Cellier and Bridgeman attributed the rise in quality and reputation of the amateur groups largely to "the popularity of, and infectious craze for performing, the Gilbert and Sullivan operas". The National Operatic and Dramatic Association was founded in 1899. It reported, in 1914, that nearly 200 British societies were producing Gilbert and Sullivan operas that year. After Patience, Carte produced Iolanthe, which opened in 1882. During its run, in February 1883, he signed a five-year partnership agreement with Gilbert and Sullivan, obliging them to create new operas for him upon six months' notice. Sullivan had not intended to immediately write a new work with Gilbert, but he suffered a serious financial loss when his stockbroker went bankrupt in November 1882 and felt the long-term contract necessary for his security. The Gilbert scholar Andrew Crowther comments, "Effectively, [the contract] made [Gilbert and Sullivan] Carte's employees – a situation which created its own resentments." The partnership's next opera, Princess Ida, opened in January 1884. Carte soon saw that it was running weakly at the box office and invoked the agreement to call upon his partners to write a new opera. The musical establishment was continually exhorting Sullivan to abandon comic opera in favour of serious music, and after he was knighted in 1883, the pressure increased. He soon regretted signing the five-year contract. In March 1884, Sullivan told Carte that "it is impossible for me to do another piece of the character of those already written by Gilbert and myself." 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. Sullivan asked to be released from the partnership on several occasions. Nevertheless, Carte was able to coax eight comic operas out of his partners between 1879 and 1896. When Princess Ida closed after a comparatively short run of nine months, for the first time in the partnership's history, a new opera was not ready. Gilbert first suggested a plot in which people fell in love against their wills after taking a magic lozenge – a scenario that Sullivan had previously rejected. Gilbert eventually came up with a new idea and began work in May 1884. Carte produced the first revival of The Sorcerer, together with Trial by Jury, and matinees of The