Chapters of Opera. Henry Edward Krehbiel
does not understand; but the house is superb, and the decorations of the proprietors' boxes (which occupy the whole of the second tier) are in a style of magnificence which even the extravagance of Europe has not yet equaled. I have one-third of box No. 8; Peter Schermerhorn one-third; James J. Jones one-sixth; William Moore one-sixth. Our box is fitted up with great taste with light blue hangings, gilded panels and cornice, armchairs, and a sofa. Some of the others have rich silk ornaments, some are painted in fresco, and each proprietor seems to have tried to outdo the rest in comfort and magnificence. The scenery is beautiful. The dome and the fronts of the boxes are painted in the most superb classical designs, and the sofa seats are exceedingly commodious. Will this splendid and refined amusement be supported in New York? I am doubtful.
The outcome justified Mr. Hone in his doubts. The season was advertised, to last forty nights. When they were at an end a supplementary season of twenty-eight nights was added, which extended the time to July 21, 1834. Besides "La Gazza ladra," the operas given were "Il Barbiere di Siviglia," "La Donna del Lago," "Il Turco in Italia," "Cenerentola," and "Matilda di Shabran"—all by Rossini; Pacini's "Gli Arabi nelli Gallie," Cimarosa's "II Matrimonio segreto," and "La Casa do Pendere," by the conductor, one Salvioni. The season had been socially and artistically brilliant, but the financial showing at the end was one of disaster. The prices of admission were from $2 down to fifty cents, and when the house was completely sold out the receipts were not more than $1,400. The managers took their patrons into their confidence, Rivafinoli publishing the fact that the receipts for the entire season—including fifteen nights in Philadelphia, for that city's dependence on New York for Italian opera began thus early—were but $51,780.89, which were exceeded by the expenses $29,275.09. For the next season the house was leased by the owners to Signor Sacchi, who had been the treasurer of Rivafinoli and Da Ponte, and Signor Porto, one of the singers. These managers had an experience similar to that which Maretzek declaimed against twenty years later when troubles gathered about the new Academy of Music. Notwithstanding that there had been a startling deficit, though the audiences had been as large as could be accommodated, these underlings of Rivafinoli and Da Ponte, who were at least men of experience in operatic management, took the house, giving the stockholders the free use of their boxes and 116 free admissions every night besides. The second season started brilliantly, but just as financial disaster was preparing to engulf it the performances were abruptly brought to an end by the prima donna, Signora, or Signorina, Fanti, who took French leave—an incident which remains unique in New York's operatic annals, at least in its consequences, I think.
It is evident to a close student of the times that the reasons given were not the only ones to contribute to the downfall of the enterprise. Italian opera had found a vigorous rival in English, or rather in opera in the vernacular, for the old ballad operas were disappearing and German, French, and Italian opera sung in the vernacular, not by actresses who had tolerable voices, but by trained vocalists, was taking its place. The people of New York were not quite so sophisticated as they are to-day, and possibly were dowered with a larger degree of sincerity. Many of them were willing to admit the incongruity of behavior at which Addison made merry when he predicted that the time would come when the descendants of the English people of his day would be curious to know "why their forefathers used to sit together like an audience of foreigners in their own country and to hear whole plays acted before them in a tongue which they did not understand." We know that Addison was a poor prophet, for the people of Great Britain and America are still sitting in the same attitude as their ancestors so far as opera is concerned; but it is plain that arguments like his did reach the consciences of even the stockholders of the Italian Opera House, or at least the one of them who has taken posterity into his confidence. The season under Sacchi and Porto had scarcely begun when Mr. Hone wrote in his diary:
I went to the opera, where I saw the second act of "La Straniera," by Bellini. The house is as pretty as ever, and the same faces were seen in the boxes as formerly; but it is not a popular entertainment, and will not be in our day, I fear. The opera did not please me. There was too much reiteration, and I shall never discipline my taste to like common colloquial expressions of life: "How do you do, madame?" or "Pretty well, I thank you, sir," the better for being given with orchestral accompaniment.
I shrewdly suspect that Mr. Hone had been reading his Spectator. There were three years of opera in London, in Addison's day, when the English and Italian languages were mixed in the operas as German and Italian were in Hamburg when Handel started out on his career. "The king or hero of the play generally spoke in Italian and his slaves answered him in English; the lover frequently made his court and gained the heart of his princess in a language which she did not understand." At length, says Addison, the audience got tired of understanding half the opera, "and to ease themselves entirely of the fatigue of thinking, so ordered it that the whole opera was performed in an unknown tongue." Now listen to our diarist:
The Italian language is among us very little understood, and the genius of it certainly never entered into with spirit. To entertain an audience without reducing it to the necessity of thinking is doubtless a first-rate merit, and it is easier to produce music without sense than with it; but the real charm of the opera is this—it is an exclusive and extravagant recreation, and, above all, it is the fashion.
Italian music's sweet because 'tis dear,
Their vanity is tickled, not their ear;
Their taste would lessen if the prices fell,
And Shakespeare's wretched stuff do quite as well.
The recitative is an affront to common sense, and if there be any spectacle more than another opposed to the genius of the English character and unsuited to its taste it is the ballet of the opera house. Its eternal dumbshow, with its fantastic appeals to sense and to sense only, may be Italian perfection, but here it is in English a tame absurdity. What but fashion could tempt reasonable creatures to sit and applaud—what was really perpetrated—Deshayes dancing "The Death of Nelson"?
After the season of Sacchi and Porto Italian opera went into exile for ten years. Da Ponte pleaded for "the most splendid ornament" of the city in vain. English opera conquered, aided, no doubt, by the fact that the section of the city in which the Italian Opera House was situated was fatally unfashionable, and after standing vacant for a year the house was leased to James W. Wallack, father of John Lester Wallack, who turned it into a home for the spoken drama. In another year it went up in flames.
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST ITALIAN COMPANY
The beginnings of Italian opera in America are intimately associated with two men who form an interesting link connecting the music of the Old World with that of the New. These men were Manuel del Popolo Vicente Garcia and Lorenzo Da Ponte. The opera performed in the Park Theater on November 29, 1825, when the precious exotic first unfolded its petals in the United States, was Rossini's "Il Barbiere di Siviglia." In this opera Garcia, then in his prime, had created, as the French say, the rôle of Almaviva in Rome a little less than ten years before. The performance was one of the most monumental fiascos in Rossini's career, and the story goes that Garcia, hoping to redeem it, introduced a Spanish song to which he himself supplied a guitar accompaniment. The fiasco of the first performance was largely, if not wholly, due to the jealous ill will of the friends of Paisiello, who had written music for an opera on the same story, which was much admired all over Europe, and which in an adapted form had reached America, as had Rossini's, before Garcia came with the original version. But Rossini's music was too fascinating to be kept under a bushel, and in it Garcia won some of his finest triumphs in London and Paris. In the first New York season it was performed twenty-three times. Garcia was also a composer, and had made his mark in this field before he became famous as a singer, having produced at least seventeen Spanish operas, nineteen Italian, and Seven French, most, if not all of them, before he came to America.
Exactly what it was that persuaded Garcia to embark on the career of impresario in a new land does not appear in the story of his enterprise. There are intimations that he had long had the New York project in mind; also it used to