THE EARLY YEARS OF THE FIRST ENGLISH OPERA HOUSE

Abstract

THE story of the slow, laborious emersion of Italian Opera in England, of its struggles to displace the hybrid monstrosity which for over a lustrum flaunted itself in its name, this, as it has been written piecemeal by various hands, is a tangled skein before whose complexities even the keenest expert might well stand aghast. Error crept insidiously into the tale at its first telling, and subsequent historians, in striving to dislodge it, have only succeeded in rendering confusion the more confounded. When one finds an alert mind like that which was labelled Colley Cibber blundering over dates and circumstances well within its individual observation and experience, confidence is shaken and it is difficult to know on whom to place dependence. To-day, despite our scientific methods of attack, we are too remote from events of a painfully evanescent order to be able always to arrest their flight and so fully to restore order out of chaos. But the more difficult the task the greater its fascination for the researcher; and it may not be wholly presumptuous for a lifelong delver into both the virgin soil and the well-tilled fields of English musicodramatic history to attempt the blazing of a trail. Accustomed as we are to speak of that landmark of the Augustan age, the old Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket, as England's first Italian Opera House, we are apt to forget that initially the term does not apply, and that in it for long opera was, in drummer's phrase, nothing more than an occasionally useful side-line. Built in 1705 by Sir John Vanbrugh, architect by profession and dramatist by choice, the Queen's was primarily intended as habitat for the veteran tragedian, Betterton, and his associates of the little theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, who had found that their bandbox of a house hopelessly handicapped them in their uphill fight with the players of Drury Lane. Each camp in its endeavour to best the enemy had already fallen back on occasion on the adventitous aid of musical spectacle; and Vanbrugh as controller of the new house clearly foresaw that the same expedient would have to be resorted to. There was no idea in the beginning of the Queen's eventually becoming a substantive opera-house, and its ultimate transmutation was due, curiously enough, to a