A Royal Opera House in Leicester Square (1790)

Abstract

The King's Theatre, Haymarket, was destroyed by fire in June 1789. Shortly thereafter some wealthy and powerful patrons – notably the Prince of Wales (the future George IV), the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury – launched an ambitious scheme to build a fabulously expensive Royal Opera House in Leicester Square. The venture was designed to re-establish London as a major centre for Italian opera and ballet, to reform the wayward financial and artistic management of the King's Theatre and to give the capital city a grand opera house of modern design that would rival any in Europe. Because the royal patent promised for Leicester Square was blocked, the scheme had to be dropped, and the sponsors wound up establishing the ill-fated and short-lived Pantheon Opera instead – but that is another story. Our concern here is with the Leicester Square project which, though never realised, did set in motion many of the changes desired by its backers and helped to return London to the mainstream of opera.