Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth Century London. Volume I: The King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1778-1791 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth Century London. Volume I: The King’s Theatre, Haymarket, 1778–1791 Byron Nelson Italian Opera In Late Eighteenth Century London. Volume I: The King’S Theatre, Haymarket, 1778–1791. Curtis Price, Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995; pp. xxv + 698. $85.00 cloth. Although the title announces a narrow topic, this study of the production of Italian opera in the space of a dozen years at one theatre in late eighteenth-century London proves richly rewarding. The product of immense scholarly labor, the book provides a meticulous reconstruction of the financial, legal and artistic milieu in which the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, presented opera and ballet from June 1778, when the playwright Richard B. Sheridan acquired the company, through the fire which gutted the theatre in June 1789. The trio of authors present “a full-dress account” (viii) of the company’s fortunes simply because (as they state with needless modesty) the King’s Theatre “housed an ambitious and interesting company in the 1780s” (vii). Although the figures at the center of their study are scarcely towering presences now—such as Giovanni Andrea Gallini, William Taylor and Gasparo Paccheriotti—numerous great figures do appear, if only fleetingly in these pages—Luigi Cherubini, Haydn, the “London” Bach and Sir John Soane among them. Had Mozart accepted the company’s invitation to come to London in 1791, he might have been spared his early death and enjoyed a long career like Handel’s. This was a transitional period, between the death of Handel and the rise of Romantic opera; none of the operas presented by the company remains in the repertory, and even the idea of a canon of operas had not yet come into existence. In this era, the repertory was determined by the singers, among whom the leading castrati, such as Paccherotti, Rubinelli and Marchesi, drew the crowds. We are told that the audiences came to hear the “primo uomo,” who then was a castrato, not a tenor, and that they enjoyed hearing a variety of singers and watching a generous share of dances, which followed each act of the operas. Far from presenting the latest Italian operatic hits in reasonable facimiles of their European originals, the King’s Theatre favored “pasticcios,” in which the scores were cobbled together from many different composers and operas. The notion of the pre-eminence of the composer and the autonomy of the operatic score lay in the future, and the concept of a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk would have baffled the King’s team. In the 1780s, the operas usually had to be new; Gallini justified his 1783 revival of Handel’s Giulio Cesare by pronouncing it “ancient music but tolerably good” (373). The King’s Theatre in Sheridan’s first season boasted the services of both the estimable Antonio Sacchini and Johann Christian Bach, whose La clemenza di Scipione is properly hailed by the authors as “the high-water mark of Italian opera in London” in the period of this study (195). But even the best operas often left little impression on the fickle audiences. Cherubini’s impressive Giulio Sabio was yanked after a single performance, and Haydn’s long-awaited L’anima del philosofo was never completed or staged, for reasons the authors ponder at some length. One area which could have been further explored is the composition of the King’s audience: who attended, and how much did they pay? One of the book’s most valuable features is its examination of the season-by-season repertory. The reader will find generous discussions of the plots, singers, and performance history and several valuable (but frustratingly brief) musical illustrations. There are intriguing discussions of forgotten operas which seem worthy of rediscovery, such as Sacchini’s Enea e Lavinia, which might be paired profitably with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. But often only the “favorite airs” of these operas survive, with the manuscripts having been casually plundered to serve other pasticcios. While theatre buffs will enjoy the season-by-season glimpses at the repertory, they will find the chronicle of the daily squabbles among the managers, singers, creditors, and lawyers all too drearily...