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Victoria Aschheim
“Staging History: Performing the Past in the Theatres of London and New York” (in other
venues in America as well)
Outline of various works
London operas:
List of operas compiled from Eric Walter White. A History of English Opera. London: Faber
and Faber, 1983, Eric Walter White. A Register of First Performances of English Operas and
Semi-Operas from the 16th Century to 1980, and with some added notes from Victoria
Aschheim’s research.
(Operas in which there is no spoken dialogue are designated with an asterisk* where indicated by
Eric Walter White from A Register of First Performances of English Operas and Semi-Operas
from the 16th Century to 1980). Eric Walter White explains: “where the theatre of production is
an opera-house and no specific mention is made of a presenting company, the home company
should be understood…With some of the earlier entries, an attempt has been made to indicate
where the music, if extant, can be found.”)
1770
John Abraham Fisher. The Court of Alexander.* 5 January. Covent Garden. Burlesque. Text
by George Alexander Stevens. Two acts.
C. Dibdin and others. The School for Fathers, or Lionel and Clarissa. 5 February. Drury Lane.
Pasticcio opera. Text by Isaac Bickerstaffe. Three acts. An alteration of Lionel and Clarissa
(1768).
T.A. Arne and William Bates: The Ladies’ Frolick. 7 May. Drury Lane. An alteration of The
Jovial Crew (1731). The libretto altered by James Love; and three new numbers by T.A. Arne
and W. Bates. About a dozen of the original airs were kept.
C. Dibdin. The Recruiting Serjeant. * 20 July. Ranelagh Gardens. ‘A musical entertainment.’
Text by Isaac Bickerstaffe. One act. The full score was published in 1776. ‘I published the
Music on my own account,’ said Dibdin, ‘and found it unsuccessful.’ (From The Musical Tour of
Mr. Dibdin, 1788.)
S. Arnold. The Revenge.* Marylebone Gardens. ‘A burletta.’ Text by Thomas Chatterton.
Two acts. White notes that “although this work appears to have been put into rehearsal in the
summer of 1770, just before Chatterton’s death there is no record of its actual performance.”
S. Arnold. The Portrait. * 22 November. Covent Garden. Burletta.
Text by George Colman (the elder) after Gretry’s Le Tabeau parlant.
1771
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James Hook. Dido. 24 July. Theatre Royal. Haymarket. Comic opera. Text by Thomas
Bridges. Two acts.
T.A. Arne. The Fairy Prince. * 12 November. Covent Garden. Masque. Text by George
Colman (the elder) after Ben Jonson’s Oberon (1611). Three acts.
T.A. Arne and others. Amelia. 14 December. Drury Lane. White refers this back to The
Summer’s Tale (1765).
1772
T.A. Arne. The Cooper. 10 June. Theatre Royal. Haymarket. ‘A musical entertainment.’ Text
by composer. Two acts.
T.A. Arne. Elfrida. 21 November. Covent Garden. ‘A dramatic poem.’ Text by William
Mason. Five acts.
T.A. Arne. The Rose. 2 December. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text by the composer. Two
acts.
1773
C. Dibdin. The Wedding Ring. 1 February. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text by the composer
after Goldoni’s Il Filosofo di Campagna. Two acts.
T.A. Arne and others. The Golden Pippin. * 6 February. Covent Garden. ‘An English burletta.’
Text by Kane O’Hara. Three acts.
C. Dibdin. The Trip to Portsmouth. 11 August. Theatre Royal. Haymarket. ‘A comic sketch.’
Text by G.A. Stevens. One act.
C. Dibdin. The Deserter. 2 November. Drury Lane. ‘A new musical drama.’ Text by the
composer after Sedaine. Two acts. White notes that his is an adaptation of Monsigny’s Le
Deserteur.
T.A. Arne. Achilles in Petticoats. 16 December. Covent Garden.
‘An opera’ (title pages). Text by George Colman (the elder) after John Gay’s Achilles (1773).
Two acts.
C. Dibdin. A Christmas Tale. 27 December. Drury Lane. ‘A new dramatic entertainment.’
Text by David Garrick. Five parts.
1774
C. Dibdin. The Waterman, or, The First of August. 8 August. Theatre Royal. Haymarket.
‘Ballad opera’ (title page) or ‘ballad farce’ (preface). Text by the composer. Two acts.
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F.H. Barthelemon and others. The Maid of the Oaks. 5 November. Drury Lane. ‘Dramatic
entertainment.’ Text by Lieutenant-General John Burgoyne. Five acts. White notes that “a
shorter version in the form of a masque had been played at The Oaks, Lord Derby’s seat near
Epsom, in June 1774.
C. Dibdin. The Cobbler, or, A Wife of Ten Thousand. 9 December. Drury Lane. Ballad opera.
Text by composer. Two acts.
1775
C. Dibbin and others. The Two Misers. 21 January. Covent Garden. Musical farce. Text by
Kane O’Hara after F. de Falbaire’s es deux avares (music by Gretry). Two acts.
Thomas Carter. The Rival Candidates. 1 February. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text by the Rev.
Henry Bate (later Sir Henry Bate Dudley). Two acts and epilogue.
C. Dibdin. The Quaker. 3 May. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text by the composer. Two acts.
White notes: “The actor Brereton bought this opera, words and music, from Dibdin for 70
pounds and, though he played no part in it, chose it for his benefit night at Drury Lane. He then
sold it for 100 pounds to David Garrick, who forgot about it. After Garrick’s retirement, Linley
(the Elder) revived it at Drury Lane on 7 October 1777).
W. Bates. The Theatrical Candidates. 23 September. Drury Lane. ‘A musical prelude.’ Text by
David Garrick. One act. “This piece was written and performed ‘upon the opening and
alterations of the theatre.’”
T.A. Arne. May-Day, or, The Little Gipsy. 28 October. Drury Lane. ‘A musical farce.’ Text by
David Garrick. One act.
Thomas Linley (the elder and the younger) and others. The Duenna, or, the Double Elopement.
21 November. Covent Garden. Pasticcio comic opera. Text by R.B. Sheridan. Three acts.
White notes that the Linley’s “contributed about fifteen musical numbers; and there were other
numbers by Michael Arne, Galliard, Giordani, William Hayes, Jackson, Rauzzini, and Sacchini.
The manuscript full score of the numbers contributed by T. Linley (the younger) is in the British
Library (Egerton 2493) and of Act III in the Gresham College Library in the City of London
Guildhall. It was revived by Nigel Playfair at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, on 23 October
1924 with the music arranged by Alfred Reynolds. A new edition of the full score was made by
Roger Fiske and presented by Opera da Camera at the Collegiate Theatre, London, on 16 March
1976 as part of the Camden Music Festival.”
1776
C. Dibdin. The Blackamoor wash’d White. 1 February. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text by the
Rev. Henry Bate (later Sir Henry Bate Dudley).
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C. Dibdin. The Metamorphoses. 26 August. Theatre Royal. Haymarket. Comic opera. Text
by the composer.
C. Dibdin and others. The Seraglio. 14 November. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by the
composer. Two acts.
T. Linley (the elder). Selim and Azor. 5 December. Drury Lane.
Translated from the French of Marmontel by Sir George Collier. The original opera by Gretry
appeared in 1771.
1777
T. Carter. The Milesian. 20 March. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text by Isaac Jackman. Two
acts.
S. Arnold. April-Day. 22 August. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Burletta. Text by Kane O’Hara.
Three acts.
T.A. Arne, A.M.G. Sacchini, J.A. Fischer. Love Finds the Way. 18 November. Covent Garden.
Comic opera. Text by Thomas Hull after A. Murphy’s The School for Guardians. Three acts.
1778
C. Dibdin. Poor Vulcan. 4 February. Covent Garden. Burletta. Text by the composer. Two
acts. The score contains one air each by T.A. Arne and S. Arnold.
T. Linley (the Younger). The Cady of Bagdad. 19 February. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text
by Abraham Portal. The manuscript full score is in the British Library (MS. 29297).
Philip Cogan. The Ruling Passion. 24 February. Note this was in Dublin, not London. Capel
Street. Comic opera. Text by Leonard MacNally.
William Shield. The Flitch of Bacon. 17 August. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Comic opera.
Text by the Rev. Henry Bate (later Sir Henry Bate Dudley). Two acts. White writes:
“According to Michael Kelly (Reminiscences, 1826) the rondo ‘Io ti lascio. E questo addio’ from
Schuster’s setting of Metastasio’s La Didone Abbandonata (1776) was introduced by Shield into
this comic opera to the words ‘No, ‘twas neither shape nor feature.’”
C. Dibdin. Rose and Colin. 18 September. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by the composer.
One act. London: Printed for G. Kearsly, No. 46, Fleet-Street. M.DCC.LXXVIII.
C. Dibdin. The Wives Revenged. 18 September. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by the
composer. One act.
C. Dibdin. Annette and Lubin. 2 October. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by the composer.
One act. An alteration of Benoit Blaise’s Anneltte et Lubin (1762).
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T. Linley (the elder). The Camp. 15 October. Drury Lane. ‘A musical entertainment.’ Text
attributed to R.B. Sheridan and Richard Tickell. Many of the numbers in The Camp were taken
from Linleys score for The Royal Merchant (1767).
James Hook: The Lady of the Manor. 23 November. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by
Wiliam Kenrick after Charles Johnson’s Country Lasses. Three acts.
1779
W. Shield and others. The Cobler of Castlebury. 27 April. Covent Garden. ‘A musical
entertainment.’ Text by Charles Stuart. Two acts.
C. Dibdin. The Chelsea Pensioner. 6 May. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by the composer.
Two acts.
S. Arnold and others. Summer Amusement, or, An Adventure at Margate. 1 July. Theatre Royal,
Haymarket. Comic opera. Text by Miles Peter Andrews and William Augustus Miles. Three
acts.
S. Arnold. The Son-in-Law. 14 August. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Comic opera. Text by
John O’Keefe. Two acts.
1780
C. Dibdin. The Shepherdess of the Alps. 18 January. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by
the composer. Two acts.
Thomas Butler. The Widow of Delphi, or. The Descent of the Deities. 1 February. Covent
Garden. ‘A musical drama.’ Text by Richard Cumberland.
M. Arne. The Artifice. 14 April. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text by William Augustus Miles.
Two acts.
W. Shields and others. The Siege of Gibraltar. 25 April. Covent Garden. ‘Musical farce.’ Text
by Frederick Pilon. Two acts.
S. Arnold. Fire and Water! 8 July. Comic opera. Text by Miles Peter Andrews. Two acts.
C. Dibdin. The Islanders. 25 November. Comic opera. Covent Garden. Text by the composer.
Three acts.
W. Jackson. The Lord of the Manor. 27 December. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text by John
Burgoyne, after Marmontel. Three acts. The full score was published.
1781
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S. Arnold. The Dead Alive. 16 June. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Comic opera. Text by John
O’Keefe. Two acts.
S. Arnold. The Agreeable Surprise. 3 September. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Comic opera.
Text by John O’Keefe. Two acts.
C. Dibdin. Jupiter and Alcmena. 27 October. Covent Garden. Burlesque opera. Text by the
composer. Three acts.
S. Arnold. The Banditti, or, Love’s Labyrinth. 28 November. Covent Garden. Comic opera.
Text by John O’Keefe. Two acts. Later revived as The Caste of Andalusia in three acts (1782).
1782
William Beckford. The Arcadian Pastoral. 13 April. London, Queensberry House. Pastoral
opera. Text by Elizabeth Craven. Five acts. (White writes: This pastoral was retitled The
Descent of Belinda when the BBC revived it for a radio broadcast on 13 February 1955. The
date here given for the first performance is that of the dress rehearsal. The spoken dialogue is
lost; but the manuscript score has been preserved with the Hamilton papers in Edinburgh.”)
P. Cogan and Sir John Stevenson. The Contract. 14 May. (This production was in Dublin).
Smock Alley. Comic opera. Text by Robert Houlton.
(Note: there was in 1787 a play by Royall Tyler called The Contract, a Comedy set in New York
City. It satirizes Americans who assume British ways; an evaluation of home-made goods versus
foreign goods; a “Yankee” character, Jonathan. Based on Restoration comedies of the
seventeenth-century in England).
T. Carter. The Fair American. 18 May. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text by Frederick Pilon.
Three acts.
S. Arnold. The Castle of Andalusia. 2 November. Covent Garden. Comic opera. An
alternation of The Banditti (1781).
W. Shield and others. Rosina. 31 December. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by Frances
Brooke, after Favart. Two acts. The manuscript full score is in the British Library (Add. MS.
33815).
1783
W. Shield. The Shamrock, or, The Anniversary of St. Patrick. 7 April. Covent Garden. Comic
opera. Text by John O’Keefe. Two acts. (White writes: “An earlier version was given at Crow
Street Theatre, Dublin, on 15 April 1777, though it is uncertain whether this was presented as an
opera or a straight play.”) Revived at Covent Garden (4 November 1783) in an altered version as
The Poor Soldier.
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S. Arnold and others. The Birth-Day, or, The Prince of Arragon. 12 August. Theatre Royal.
Haymarket. ‘A dramatick piece, with songs.’ Text by John O’Keefe. Two acts.
S. Arnold and others. Gretna Green. 28 August. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Comic opera.
Text by Charles Stuart. Two acts. (White writes: “the music of this pasticcio consists mainly of
‘Italian, French, Irish, English, and Scotch music.’ There are two numbers by Giordani, and only
one number [in addition to the overture] composed by Arnold.”)
W. Jackson. The Metamorphosis. 5 December. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text by the
composer.
1784
W. Shield and others. Robin Hood, or Sherwood Forest. 17 April. Covent Garden. Comic
opera. Text by Leonard MacNally. Three acts.
S. Arnold and others. Two to One. 19 June. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Comic opera. Text by
George Colman (the Younger). Three acts.
W. Shield and others. The Noble Peasant. 2 August. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Comic opera.
Text by Thomas Holcroft. Three acts.
S. Arnold. Peeping Tom of Coventry. 6 September. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Comic Opera.
Text by Thomas Holcroft. Two acts.
T. Linley (the Elder). The Spanish Rivals. 4 November. Drury Lane. Musical farce. Text by
Mark Lonsdale. Two acts.
W. Shield and others. Fontainebleau, or, Our Ways in France. 16 November. Covent Garden.
Comic Opera. Text by John O’Keefe. Three acts.
1785
C. Dibdin. Liberty-Hall. 8 February. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text by composer. Two acts.
W. Shield. The Nunnery. 12 April. Covent Garden. Text by William Pearce. Two acts.
Stephen Storace. Gli Sposi Malcontenti. 1 June. Burgtheater. Italian text by Gaetano Brunati.
Two acts. A manuscript copy of the full score is in the Sachsisches Landeshauptarchiv, Dresden.
(Mus. 4109/F/2). Note this listing is included by Eric White in his Register of Performances of
English Operas, perhaps because of the composer Stephen Storace.
W. Shield. The Choleric Fathers. 10 November. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by
Thomas Holcroft. Three acts.
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T. Linley (the elder). The Strangers at Home. 8 December. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text by
James Cobb. Three acts. An abridged version entitled The Algerine Slaves was produced in
1792.
1786
W. Shield. Patrick in Prussia, or, Love in a Camp. 17 February. Covent Garden. Comic opera.
Text by John O’Keefe. Two acts.
A sequel to The Shamrock (1783) and The Poor Soldier (1783).
J. Hook. The Fair Peruvian. 18 March. Covent Garden. Comic opera. English text adapted
from Favart’s L’amitie a l’epreuve (1770) with music by Gretry. Referred to as well as The
Peruvian.
C. Dibdin. A Match for a Widow, or, The Frolics of Fancy. 17 April. Dublin, Smock Alley.
*Again note this was not in London. After Patrat’s L’heureuse erreur. Three acts. White writes
that this comic opera introduces a Yankee character (Jonathan) who sings a song to the tune of
Yankee Doodle. White also states that it should be noted that the tune of Yankee Doodle had
already been specified for one of the airs (‘O’! how joyful shall I be, when I get de money’) in
Andrew Barton’s American ballad opera The Disappointment (1767) which went into rehearsal
in Philadelphia, but was never performed.
Note of Victoria Aschheim: Elise K. Kirk in her volume, American Opera, refers to the song
“Yankee Doodle” in The Disappointment. Kirk states that the tune did not appear in print until
about 1782. Patricia Virga writes in her 2001 volume American Opera to 1790 “the various
versions indicated with this tune, all published after 1767, contain pre-Revolutionary references
which show that ‘Yankee Doodle’ was in all likelihood a native American ballad associated with
the early militia,” [a fact recorded by Kirk citing Virga]. Kirk writes [citing Carolyn Rabson]
that “Yankee Doodle may have been associated with the battle at Cape Breton in 1758. The song
came to be identified with the figure of the Yankee, Jonathan, in the American author Royall
Tyler’s, The Contrast (1787).
S. Arnold. The Siege of Curzola. 12 August. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Comic opera. Text
by John O’Keefe. Three acts.
S. Storace. Gli Equivoci. 27 December. Vienna, Burgtheater.
‘Dramma buffo.’ Italian text by Lorenzo da Ponte, based on Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors.
Two acts. Copy of the full score in Saachsische Landeshauptarchiv, Dresden (Mus. 4109/f/1).
The first English performance was presented by Opera da Camera on 20 February 1974 at the
Colegiate Theatre,London, but not within our time frame of 1770-1870.
1787
C. Dibdin. Harvest Home. 16 May. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Comic opera. Text by the
composer. Two acts.
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S. Arnold. Inkle and Yarico. 4 August. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Comic Opera. Text by
George Colman (the younger) Three acts.
W. Shield. The Farmer. 31 October. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by John O’Keefe.
Two acts.
1788
Anon. Jamie and Bess, or, The Laird in Disguise. 12 January. Edinburgh. Ballad opera. Text
by Andrew Shirrefs, in imitation of the Gentle Shepherd (1729).
T. Linley (the Elder). Love in the East, or, Adventures of Twelve Hours. 25 February. Drury
Lane. Comic opera. Text by James Cobb. Three acts.
S. Storace. La Cameriera Astuta. 4 March. King’s, Haymarket. Comic opera. Author of the
Italian text unknown. Two acts.
W. Shield. Marian. 22 May. Covent Garden. Comic opera.Text by Frances Brooke. Two acts.
S. Storace and others. The Doctor and the Apothecary. 25 October. Drury Lane. ‘Musical
entertainment.’ Text by J. Cobb Two acts. Adapted by Storace from Ditters von Dittersdorg’s
‘singspiel’ Der Apotheker und der Doktor (Vienna, 1786).
W. Shield. The Highland Reel. 6 November. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by John
O’Keefe. Three acts.
1789
S. Arnold. The Battle of Hexham, or, Days of Old. 11 August. Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
Comic opera. Text by George Colman (the younger). Three acts.
Thomas Shaw and others. The Island of St. Marguerite. 13 November. Drury Lane. ‘An
opera.’ Text by the Hon. John St. John after Voltaire’s story of the Man in the Iron Mask. Two
acts.
S. Storace and others. The Haunted Tower. 24 November. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text by
James Cobb. Three acts. The score included work by Linley, Martini, Paisiello, Pleyel, and
Sarti.
1790
Joseph Quesnel. Colas et Colinette. 14 January. Montreal. Comic opera. Again White
includes this comic opera which was not performed in London. French text of this comic opera
in the style of a ‘comedie melee d’ariettes’ by the composer. Revived in Quebec on 29 January
1805.
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W. Shield. The Czar. 8 March. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by John O’Keefe. Three
acts. Also known as The Czar Peter.
S. Storace and others. No Song, No Supper. 16 April. Drury Lane. An ‘opera.’ Text by Prince
Hoare. Two acts. Storace utilized some of his music from Gli Equivoci (1786) for this opera.
The score included numbers by Grety, Harington, and Pleyel. A copyist’s manuscript of the full
score is in the Library of the Royal College of Music (597).
S. Arnold. New Spain, or, Love in Mexico.
16 July, 1790. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. An opera with Text by John Scawen. Three Acts.
1791
S. Storace and others. The Siege of Belgrade. 1 January 1791. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text
by James Cobb. Three acts. Score included “numbers by Kelly, Paisiello, Salieri, and Martin y
Soler.”
See also Catherine (1830).
W. Shield. The Woodman. 26 February 1791. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by Sir Henry
Bate Dudley. Three acts.
S. Storace and others. The Cave of Trophonius. 3 May 1791. Drury Lane. “An opera.” Text by
Prince Hoare, after Giambattista Casti. Two acts. Adapted from the opera by Salieri.
G. Colman. Music by S. Arnold. The Surrender of Calais. 30 July 1791. Theatre Royal,
Haymarket.
W. Shield and William Reeve. Oscar and Malvina. Eric White describes this as a Ballet
Pantomime. Other sources refer to it as a heroic drama or serious pantomime. No reference to
opera in any of the citations consulted. Based on poem from Ossian. White says that Reeve
completed Shield’s unfinished “score.”
1792
T. Linley (the elder). The Algerine Slaves. 17 March 1792. King’s, Haymarket. An abridged
version of The Strangers at Home (1785). No reference found to any music.
Thomas Carter. Just in Time. 10 May 1792. Comic opera. Text by Thomas Hurlstone. Three
Acts. Thomas Carter, composer, born in Dublin, this was his last operatic work.
S. Storace and others. Dido, Queen of Carthage.*
23 May 1792. King’s, Haymarket. Opera ‘with the Masque of Neptune’s Prophecy.’ Text by
Prince Hoare, after Metastasio. Presented by the Drury Lane Company. Score included
“numbers by Sacchini, Salieri, and Sarti.”
W. Shield and Others. Hartford-Bridge, or, The Skirts of the Camp.
3 November 1792. Covent Garden. “Operatic farce.” Text by William Pearce. Two acts.
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S. Storace and others. The Pirates.
21 November 1792. King’s, Haymarket. “An opera.” Text by James Cobb. Three acts.
Presented by the Drury Lane Company. Score included “numbers by Anfossi, Bianchi, and
Guglielmi. See also Isidore de Merida (1827).
1793
W. Shield and others. The Midnight Wanderers.
25 February 1793. Covent Garden. Comic Opera. Text by W. Pearce. Two acts.
S. Storace and others. Le Nozze di Dorina.
26 February 1793. King’s, Haymarket. “Comic opera.” Italian text after Goldini. Two acts.
White gives an Italian lineage of Guiseppe Sarti’s opera Fra due Litiganti il terzo gode, ossia, I
Pretendenti delusi was first performed at La Scala, Milan in 1782. Performed in England (1784)
as I Rivali delusi. Text altered for this version as titled on first line. Sarti’s score edited by
Storace who added numbers by himself and by Martin y Soler.
Thomas Attwood. Ozmyn and Daraxa.
7 March 1793. Kings, Haymarket. “Musical romance.” Text by James Boaden. Presented by
the Drury Lane Company.
S. Storace. The Prize, or, 2,5,3,8
11 March 1793. King’s, Haymarket. “a musical farce.” Dublin 1793; London 1798. Text by
Prince Hoare. Two acts. Presented by the Drury Lane Company. Additional information from
The New Cambridge Biography of English Literature, 1660-1800. Vol. 2. London: Cambridge
University Press, 1971.
Capt. Warner. The Armourer.
4 April 1793. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by Richard Cumberland.
T. Attwood and others. The Mariners.
10 May 1793. “A musical entertainment.” Text by Samuel Birch. Two acts. Presented by Drury
Lane Company.
W. Shield and others. Sprigs of Laurel.
11 May 1793. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by John O’Keefe. Two acts. (Later revived
in an altered version as The Rival Soldiers, 1797).
S. Arnold. The Mountaineers.
3 August 1793. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. (Note of V.A. Eric White refers to this as ‘a play.’
The Pre-Victorian Drama in Dublin. The Reverend Samuel Carlyle Hughes. Dublin: Hodges,
Figgis, & Co. Ltd. 1904, refers to this as an opera which was performed at Haymarket, 1793;
Crow Street, November 18, 1794. “This opera is not so interesting as the former,” he writes.
The former to which Hughes refers is Inkle and Yarico by George Colman, the Younger with
music by Dr. Samuel Arnold.)
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T. Attwood. Caernarvon Castle, or, The Birth of the Prince of Wales.
12 August 1793. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. “An opera.” Text by the Reverend John Rose.
Two Acts.
S. Arnold. The Children in the Wood.
1 October 1793. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. “A musical piece.” Text by Prince Hoare. Two
acts. Presented by the Drury Lane Company.
S. Storace. My Grandmother.
16 December 1793. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. “A musical farce.” Text by Prince Hoare. Two
acts. Presented by the Drury Lane Theatre.
1794
W. Reeve. The Purse, or, Benevolent Tar.
8 February 1794. Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
“A musical drama.” Text by James C. Cross. One act. Presented by the Drury Lane Theatre.
W. Shield and others. The Travellers in Switzerland. 22 [or 25] February 1794. Covent Garden.
Comic Opera. Text by Sir Henry Bate Dudley. Three acts
W. Shield and others. Netley Abbey.
10 April. Covent Garden. “An operatic farce.” Text by William Pearce. Two acts. Pasticcio.
W. Reeve. British Fortitude, and Hiberian Friendship, or, An Escape from France.
29 April 1794. Covent Garden. “Musical Drama.” Text by James C. Cross. One act.
W. Reeve. The Sicilian Romance, or, The Apparition of the Cliffs.
28 May 1794. Covent Garden. “An opera.” Text by Henry Siddons. Three Acts.
S. Storace and others. Lodoiska.
9 June 1794. Drury Lane. Called at times an opera and other times as a musical romance. Text
by John Philip Kemble. Three acts. Score included numbers by Cherubini, Kreutzer, and
Andreozzi.
S. Storace, Michael Kelly and others. The Glorious First of June.
2 July 1794. Drury Lane. “A new and appropriate entertainment…Given for the benefit of the
Widows and Orphans of the Brave Men who fell in the late Engagements under Lord Howe.”
Michael Kelly says (in his Reminiscences, 1826) “Storace and myself gave it some new songs,
but the music was chiefly old.”
An altered version was produced at Drury Lane in 1797 under the title of Cape St. Vincent, or,
British Valour Triumphant.
S. Arnold. Auld Robin Gray.
29 July 1794. Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
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“A pastoral entertainment.” Text by Samuel James Arnold. Two acts. (note of V.A. University
of Colorado archives “Early American musical theater collection” lists this as a “ballad opera”
in addition to the designation of a “pastoral entertainment.” ).
W. Reeve. The Apparition.
3 September 1794. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. “A musical dramatic romance.” Text by James
C. Cross. Two acts.
W. Shield. Arrived at Portsmouth.
30 October 1794. Covent Garden. “An operatic drama.” Text by William Pearce. Two acts.
S. Storace. The Cherokee.
20 December 1794. Drury Lane. “An opera.” Text by James Cobb. Three acts. A later
adaptation, see Algonah (1802).
1795
J.P. Salomon and R. Spofforth. Windsor Castle, or, The Fair Mail of Kent.
6 April 1795. Covent Garden. “An opera.” Text by William Pearce. Two acts. Performed in
honour of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales. The second act contained a masque
entitled The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis. The overture was composed expressly for the
occasion by Joseph Haydn, who was in London at the time.
W. Shield. The Irish Mimic, or, Blunders at Brighton.
23 April 1795. Covent Garden. “A musical entertainment.” Text by John O’Keefe. Two acts.
T. Attwood. The Adopted Child.
1 May 1795. Drury Lane. “A musical drama.” Text by Samuel Birch. Two acts.
T. Attwood. The Poor Sailor, or, Little Ben and Little Bob.
29 May 1795. Covent Garden. Author of text unknown says Eric White. (Note: V.A.
J. Bernard is the other author. London: printed by Longman & Broderip 1795).
S. Storace. The Three and the Deuce.
2 September 1795. Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
“A comic drama.” Text by Prince Hoare.
(V.A. Elsewhere it is called “a musical entertainment.” “Musical score: Operas. Source: World
Cat.)
1796
W. Shield. Lock and Key.
2 February 1796. Covent Garden. “A musical entertainment.” Text by Prince Hoare. Two acts.
The overture was composed by W.T. Parke.
S. Storace. The Iron Chest.
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12 March 1796. Drury Lane. “A play.” Text by George Colman (the Younger). Three acts.
Note by Victoria Aschheim. Though called “a play,” this production’s music made it “a popular
success,” Sir Sidney Lee wrote in The Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 54. Lee
continued: “but the anxiety and labour attendant on its production at Drury Lane brought to a
climax an illness from which Storace had previously suffered. He died in Percy Street, Rathbone
Place on 19 March 1796…” The London Encyclopaedia: or, Universal Dictionary of Science
refers to this work as “a musical play.”
T. Attwood: The Smugglers. 13 April 1796. “A musical drama.” Text by Samuel Birch.
Two acts.
W. Shield. The Wicklow Gold Mines, or, The Lads of the Hills. 13 April 1796. Covent Garden.
“Opera.” Text by John O’Keefe. Three acts. Eric White reports that later in the year it was
presented under the title, The Wicklow Mountains.
S. Storace and others. Mahmoud. 30 April 1796. Drury Lane. “A musical romance.” Text by
Prince Hoare. Three acts. Music by Paisiello, Haydn, and Sarti included.
Note by Victoria Aschheim. The London Encyclopaedia: or, Universal Dictionary of Science
refers to Mahmoud as “an opera.”
W. Reeve. The Charity Boy. 5 November 1706. Drury Lane. “A musical entertainment.” Text
by James C. Cross.
W.Shield. Abroad and at Home. 19 November 1796. Covent Garden. “Comic opera.” Text by
Joseph George Holman. Three acts.
S. Arnold. The Shipwreck. 19 December 1796. Drury Lane. “Comic opera.” Text by S. J.
Arnold.
1797
William Linley. The Honey Moon. 7 January 1797. Drury Lane. “A comic opera.” Text by the
composer.
Michael Kelly. A Friend in Need. 9 February 1797. Drury Lane. “A musical entertainment.”
Text by Prince Hoare.
S. Storace and others. Cape St. Vincent, or, British Valour Triumphant. March 1797. Drury
Lane. Eric White points out that this is an alteration of The Glorious First of June (1794).
W. Shield. The Italian Villagers. 23 April 1797. Covent Garden.
Note of Victoria Aschheim: The History of English Drama 1660-1900 states that there were
“Airs, Duets, Trios,etc.etc.”
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W. Shield and others. The Rival Soldiers. 17 May 1797. Covent Garden. An alteration of
Sprigs of Laurel (1793).
Note of Victoria Aschheim: Sprigs of Laurel was a comic opera by John O’Keefe with music by
William Shield dedicated by the author the Queen. O’Keefe wrote in the libretto of “the sweet
melodies of Mr. Shield” in the opera.
1798
James Cobb, James Mazzinghi, William Reeve. Ramah Droog, or Wine Does Wonders. 12
November 1798. “A comic opera in three acts.” Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.
M. Kelly. Text by George Colman the Younger. Blue-Beard, or, Female Curiosity!
16 January 1798. Theatre-Royal, Drury Lane.
Details added by Victoria Aschheim about music and text. This was written as a Christmas
pantomime for children in the audience. Michael Kelly was inspired by having seen Gretry’s
opera Barbe Bleue, based on Perrault’s fairy tale, in Paris in 1790. He paid Colman to produce a
libretto and Colman transformed the French villain into a Turkish one.
W. Reeve. Text by James C. Cross. The Raft, or, Both Sides of the Water.
31 March 1798. Covent Garden. “A musical drama.” One act.
S. Arnold. Throw Physic to the Dog! 6 July 1798. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. ‘Musical Farce.’
Text by H. Lee, Two acts.
S. Arnold. Cambro-Britons. 21 July 1798. Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
“Historical play.’ Text by James Boaden. Three acts. The words of two of the songs were
written by George Colman, the Younger.
T. Attwood. The Mouth of the Nile, or, The Glorious First of August.
25 October 1798. Covent Garden. ‘A musical entertainment.’ Text by Thomas J. Dibdin. One
act.
Joseph Mazzinghi and W. Reeve. Ramah Droog, or Wine Does Wonders.
12 November 1798. “A Comic Opera.’ Covent Garden. Text by James Cobb. Three acts.
J.L. Dussek and M. Kelly. The Captive of Spilburg.
14 November 1798. Drury Lane. Text by Prince Hoare. Eric White tells of Michael Kelly’s
reminiscences (1826): “The next musical piece I produced at Drury Lane, was in conjunction
with Mr. Dusseck, the celebrated piano-forte player; he composed the serious part of it – I the
comic.”
1799
Sir John Stevenson. Love in a Blaze. 29 May 1799. Dublin. Crow Street. Comic opera. Text
by Joseph Atkinson.
15
T.Attwood. The Red-Cross Knights. 21 August 1799. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Text by
J.G.Holman, after Die Räuber by Schiller. White writes that the score contained “a number from
Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte.”
John Moorhead. The Naval Pillar. 7 October 1799. Covent Garden. “Musical entertainment.”
Text by T.J. Dibdin.
J. Mazzinghi and W. Reeve. The Turnpike Gate. 14 November 1799. Covent Garden. Text
byThomas Knight. Two acts.
W. Linley. The Pavilion. 16 November 1799. Drury Lane. “Musical entertainment.” Text by
the composer. Eric White states that the manuscript full score is in the British Library (Egerton
2494). White also writes: “Subsequently it seems to have been played under the title of The Ring.
1800
M. Kelly. Of Age Tomorrow. 1 February 1799. Drury Lane. “Operatic farce.” Text by T.J.
Dibdin, “after the German of Kotzebue,” wrote Eric White.
Charles H. Florio. The Egyptian Festival. 11 March 1799. Drury Lane. (Eric White referred to
“Mr. Florio.”) Opera in three acts. Text by Andrew Franklin.
J.Mazzinghi and W. Reeve. Paul and Virginia. 1 May 1800. Covent Garden. “Comic opera.”
Text by J. Cobb. One act.
Earl of Mount Edgcumbe. Zenobia.* 22 May 1800. King’s, Haymarket. Italian text by
Metastasio.
Note of Victoria Aschheim. stanford.edu notes that this was an “opera.” Richard Edgcumbe,
2nd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe PC.
John Davy. What a Blunder! 14 August 1800. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Comic opera. Text
by J.G. Holman. Three acts.
James Hook. Wilmore Castle. 21 October 1800. Drury Lane. Comic opera. Text by R. Houlton.
Two acts.
S. Arnold. Virginia. 30 October 1800. Drury Lane. Text by Mrs. Frances Plowden.
Note of Victoria Aschheim. The Thespian Dictionary; of Dramatic Biography of the Eighteenth
Century, 1802. Under the entry for Mrs. Frances Plowden it is stated that she wrote a comic
opera, called “Virginia,” which was condemned at Drury Lane, 1800, and which she published,
with a preface, setting forth, that it had been mutilated by the manger, and its condemnation
predetermined by a prejudiced party; but her husband, who is a barrister at law, should have
known that if the latter complaint were just, there were legal methods of redress, and more
satisfactory, than an angry preface…”
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T. Attwood and J. Moorhead. Il Bondacani, or, The Caliph Robber. 15 November 1800.
Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by T.J. Dibdin. Three acts. Eric White notes that the score
contained “a number from Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail.
1801
J. Mazzinghi and W. Reeve. The Blind Girl, or, A Receipt for Beauty. 22 April 1801. Covent
Garden. Comic opera. Text by Thomas Morton.
Sir John Stevenson: The Bedouins, or, The Arabs of the Desert. 1 May 1801. Dublin. Crow
Street. Comic opera. Text by Eyles Irwin.
M. Kelly. Adelmorn the Outlaw. 4 May 1801. Drury Lane. Musical drama. Text by Matthew
Gregory Lewis.
T.Attwood. The Sea-Side Story. 12 May 1801. Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by William
Dimond.
M. Kelly. The Gipsey Prince. 24 July 1801. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. “Musical afterpiece.”
Text by Thomas Moore.
J. Mazzinghi and W. Reeve. Chains of the Heart ,or, The Slave by Choice. 9 December 1801.
Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by Prince Hoare.
1802
W. Reeve, J. Moorhead, J. Davy, M. Corri, and J.Braham. The Cabinet. 9 February 1802.
Covent Garden. Comic opera. Text by T.J.Dibdin. Three acts.
M. Kelly. Algonah. 30 April 1802. Drury Lane. Eric White: “Adaptation of his own Cherokee
Thomas Dibdin (text). Eric White also lists W. Reeve, J. Moorhead, J. Davy, M. Corri, and J.
Braham. Family Quarrels; or The Jew and the Gentile. A comic opera in three acts. TheatreRoyal, Covent Garden. 18 December 1802.
Note of Victoria Aschheim: In connection with this “comic opera” there was opposition from the
audience to the song “I Courted Miss Levi” associated with the melody used in a section of this
song which is from the Kaddish prayer, possibly inserted in the song by J. Braham according to
David Conway.
Thomas Dibdin, text. W. Reeve, J. Moorhead, J. Davy, M. Corri, and J. Braham. The Cabinet, a
Comic Opera in Three Acts. First performed on Tuesday, 9 February 1802. Theatre-Royal,
Covent Garden. The dates of performance have to be verified as between 18 December 1802
and 9 February 1802.
Note that David Conway refers to W. Reeve as “the hack composer and serial plagiarist, William
Reeve.
17
M. Kelly. Algohah. 30 April. An adaptation of his own Cherokee (1794) by James Cobb. Note
that music “seems to have been recomposed by Kelly).
J. Davy. The Caffres, or, Buried Alive. 2 June 1802. Text by E.J. Eyre.
1803
Charles Dibdin, the Younger. 25 July 1803. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Love Laughs at
Locksmiths, A Musical Farce in Two Acts.
Note: V.A., not in Eric White’s list. Michael Kelly composer. This work is based on Bouilly’s
Une Folie. An autograph MS copy of the script is in the Princeton Library.
Joseph Mazzinghi. The Wife of Two Husbands. 1 November 1803. Drury Lane. Musical drama.
James Cobb text. Not on Eric White’s list. Songs printed by C. Rickaby, 1803. This is an
adaptation of a French work by Pixercourt with the same title.
M. Kelly. The Hero of the North. 19 February 1803. Drury Lane. “An historical musical
drama.” Text by W. Dimond.
W. Reeve. The Caravan, or, The Driver and his Dog. 5 December 1803. Drury Lane. Text by
Frederick Reynolds.
V.A. – This is described as a serio-comic romance; afterpiece. The score The Caravan printed
for Dale, 1803; Songs printed by C.Lowndes, 1803.
W. Reeve. Edward and Susan, or, The Beauty of Buttermere. 11 April 1803. Sadler’s Wells.
“An operatic piece in rhyme” – Eric White cites Professional and Literary Memoirs of Charles
Dibdin the Younger: Dramatist and Upward of Thirty Years Manager of Minor Theatres.
George Speaight ed. London: Society for Theatre Research, 1956.
J. Braham. The English Fleet in 1342. 13 December 1803. Covent Garden. “An historical
comic opera.” Text by T.J.Dibdin. Three acts.
VA: Songs printed and published by Barker and Son, 1803. The score published by M.P.Corri
and Co. Haymarket, 1803. [New Plays on the London Stage, 46].
1804
J. Braham. The Paragraph. 8 March 1804. Covent Barden. Text by Prince Hoare.
W. Reeve. The Little Gipsies. 2 April 1804. Sadler’s Wells. Text by Charles Dibdin the
younger.
Eric Walter White’s note: “Early in the 19th century Charles Dibdin the Younger became
proprietor of Sadler’s Wells and wrote innumerable pieces, burlettas, pantomimes, spectacles, etc.
for that theatre. In his Professional and Literary Memoires he refers to The Little Gipsies under
the title of The Two Little Gipsies as
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‘an operatic piece, taken from the same Spanish Story on which Preciosa (lately performed at
Covent Garden with Weber’s Music) was founded.’” (Note: Professional and Literary Memoirs
of Charles Dibdin the Younger: Dramatist and Upward of Thirty Years Manager of Minor
Theatres. George Speight, ed. London, Society for Theatre Research, 1956.)
M. Kelly. The Hunter of the Alps. 3 July 1804. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. “A Musical Piece”.
Text, W. Dimond.
J. Braham, J. Davy, and W. Reeve. Thirty Thousand, or , Who’s the Richest? 10 December,
1804. Covent Garden. Text, T.J. Dibdin. (See also 1805].
1805
Thomas Dibdin. Family Quarrels. As performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent-Garden. 1805.
A Comic Opera in three acts. London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.
Paternoster-Row. [See 1802].
Thomas Dibdin. The English Fleet in 1342; An Historical Comic Opera in Three Acts. As
performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent-Garden, 1805. London: Printed for Longman, Hurst,
Rees, and Orme. Paternoster-Row. [See 1803].
Thomas Dibdin. John Braham; Maria Edgeworth. Thirty Thousand, or, Who’s the Richest? A
Comic Opera in Three Acts.
Performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent Garden, 1805. Three editions published in 1806 in
English, including Baltimore (MD); Printed by G. Dobbin & Murphy, 1806. Early American
Imprints. Second series. No. 10291.
M.P. King, James Kenney. Too Many Cooks: A Musical Farce in Two Acts. Performed at the
Theatres, Covent Garden and New York, from the prompt book by permission of the Manager.
Not listed by Eric White.
New York: D. Longworth, 1805.
J. Braham and W. Reeve. Out of Place, or, The Lake of Lausanne. Two Acts. 28 February 1805.
Text, Theodore Edward Hook.
(Note of Victoria Aschheim, see also Reeves and other entries in British Musical Biography:
A Dictionary of Musical Artists, Authors, and Composers. James D. Brown and Stephen S.
Stratton. Birmingham: Chadfield and Son, Ltd., Derby, 1897.
J. Hook. The Soldier’s Return, or What can Beauty Do? Two Acts. 23 April 1805. Drury Lane.
Text, Thedore Edward Hook.
M. Kelly. Youth, Love, and Folly. 24 May 1805. Drury Lane. ‘A Musical Entertainment’
(Kelly). Text. W. Dimond.
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James Kenney. Too Many Cooks. 12 February 1805. Covent Garden. M.P. King,composer.
“Musical farce; afterpiece.” Printed for Longman, Hurst, Reese and Orme, 1805. Not on Eric
White’s list.
1806
Domenico Corri. The Travellers, or, Music’s Fascination. 22 January 1806. Drury Lane.
“An operatic drama.” Text by Andrew Cherry. Five acts.
C.Dibdin. The Broken Gold. 8 February 1806. Drury Lane. Text by the composer.
W. Reeve. The White Plume, or, The Border Chieftains. 10 April 1806. Covent Garden. Text
by T.J.Dibdin.
J. Davy. Spanish Dollars! Or, The Priest of the Parish. 9 May 1806. Covent Garden. “An
Operatic Sketch.” Text by Andrew Cherry. One act.
J.Hook. Catch Him Who Can! 12 June 1806. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Text by T.E. Hook.
V.A.: The Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 27. “Many of Hook’s songs appear in
‘Collections of Songs sung at Vauxhall.’”
Habgood to Houbert. Vol. 7. Southern Illinois University Press. “Most of Hook’s music for the
theatre after 1800 was composed for pieces written by his two sons, James Hook…and Theodore
Edward Hook...” Catch Him Who Can was written by Thomas Edward Hook with music by his
father, J. Hook.
M. Kelly. Adriain and Orrila, or, A Mother’s Vengeance. 15 November 1806. Covent Garden.
“An operatic play.” Text by W. Dimond.
1807
John Braham, M.P. King, James Kenney. (Text, James Kenney). False Alarms, Or My Cousin,
A Comic Opera in Three Acts. Performed at Theatre-Royal, Drury Lane, 12 January, 1807.
London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Reese, and Orme, 1807. English and American drama of
the nineteenth-century.
M. Kelly. The Young Hussar, or Love and Mercy. Two Acts. 12 March 1807.
“Operatic Piece.” Text, W. Dimond.
Drury Lane.
M. Kelly. The Wood Daemon, or, ‘The Clock Has Struck’ 1 April 1807. Drury Lane.
“Romantic Drama” (Kelly). Text M.G. Lewis.
See also subsequent listing, other version: One O’Clock (1811).
W. Shield. Two Faces Under a Hood. 17 November 1807. Covent Garden. Text, T.J. Dibdin.
Victoria Aschheim note: The University of Wisconsin – Madison Libraries lists this as a comic
opera in three acts.
20
1808
Isaac Brandon (text). Kais, or Love in the Deserts: an Opera in Four Acts. 11 February 1808.
Theatre-Royal, Drury Lane. Music by John Braham, William Reeve. London: Printed for J.
Murray, Fleet Street; J. Hardin, Saint James Street, and A. Constable and Co. Edinburgh, 1808.
(Note of Victoria Aschheim: David Conway refers to Isaac Brandon: “The opera…Kais,
for which Braham wrote the music jointly with the composer of Family Quarrel, William
Reeve, is perhaps of interest as the earliest I can identify whose libretto was written by an
English Jew, Isaac Brandon.” Kais, or Love in the Deserts: An Opera in Four Acts (London
1808). Conway writes that the story line is adapted from Isaac D’Israeli’s Miemoun and
Leila. Brandon’s other publications include an imitation of Laurence Sterne (1797) and an
ode to Edward Jenner on vaccination (1807). He is an elusive character, but clearly an
example of an emerging Jewish secular intelligentsia. There seems to be no connection
between his family and that of the Brandons who worked at Covent Garden Theatre, and
who seem to have been Gentile despite the asseverations of Burnim [and here Conway
refers to his footnote 1 in the his article “John Braham – From Meshorrer to Tenor,”1 a
paper expanded from a general survey of Jews at the opera in London, presented to the
Jewish Historical Society of London on 23 March 2006.
Eric White writes that according to W.T. Parke the music was by Henry Bishop.
Also published, New York: D. Longworth, at the Dramatic
Repository, Shakespeare-Gallery, 1809. Early American Imprints. Second Series. No.
17081.
There a total of 23 editions of this opera published between 1806 and 1864.
Michael Kelly. The Jew of Mogadore, A Comic Opera in Three Acts.
3 May 1808. London: Printed for S. Tipper, 1808.
Eric Walter White notes that text is by Richard Cumberland.
J. Hook. The Siege of St. Quintin, or, Spanish Heroism.
10 November1808. Drury Lane. (According to W.T. Parke the date was 26 September).
Text by T.E. Hook (the son of J. Hook as explained above).
1809
H. Bishop. The Circassian Bride. 23 February 1809. Drury Lane. Opera. Text by C.Ward.
Three acts.
H. Bishop. The Vintagers. 1 August 1809. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. A musical romance.
Text by Edmund John Eyre. Two acts.
Kalman A. Burnim, “The Jewish Presence in the London Theatre 1600-1800.” Trans JHSE
XXXIII, 1995.
1
21
Thomas Dibdin. William Reeve; John Braham. The Cabinet, a Comic Opera in Three Acts.
First performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent Garden, Tuesday, 9 February 1802. Published in
many different editions including this one, New York: D. Longworth, 1809.
J. Hook. Safe and Sound. 28 August 1809. London, Lyceum. Comic opera. Text by T.E.
Hook. Three acts. Presented by the Drury Lane Company.
1810
J. Mazzinghi. The Free Knights, or, The Edict of Charlemagne. 8 February 1810. Covent
Garden. Text by F. Reynolds.
Note: V.A.: Called a drama “interspersed with music.”
H. Bishop. The Maniac, or, Swiss Banditti. 13 March. London, Lyceum. Text by S.J. Arnold.
Three acts. Presented by the Drury Lane Company.
Victoria Aschheim note: www.marelibri.com notes that this is a “serio comic opera.”
M.P. King. Oh! This Love! Or, The Masqueraders. 12 June 1810. London, Lyceum. Comic
opera. Text by J. Kenney. Presented by the Drury Lane Company.
Charles Horn and W. Reeve. Tricks Upon Travellers. 9 July 1810. London, Lyceum. Comic
opera. Text by Sir James Bland Burges. Presented by the Drury Lane Company.
M.P. King. Plots! or, The North Tower. 3 September 1810. Text by S.J. Arnold. Presented by
the Drury Lane Company.
Victoria Aschheim note: “Melodramatic opera” says New Plays on the London Stage. 3 acts.
World Cat. Refers to it in the category of “operas.”
M. Kelly. Gustavus Vasa. 29 November 1810. Covent Garden. Musical drama. Text by W.
Dimond.
1811
M. Kelly. The Peasant Boy. 21 January 1811. London, Lyceum. Text by S. J. Arnold.
Presented by the Drury Lane Company.
H. Bishop. The Knight of Snowdoun. 5 February 1811. Covent Garden. Text by Thomas
Morton, after Scott’s The Lady of the Lake. Three acts.
Victoria Aschheim notes: Thomas Morton’s work was called “a musical drama in three acts.”
There have been several productions based on Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Thomas
Dibdin, The Lady of the Lake. A Melo-dramatic Romance in Two Acts. Theatres Royal,
London, 1810. Edmund John Eyre’s The Lady of the Lake with music by James Sanderson and
Dr. John Clarke (1812 in Philadelphia and Baltimore). The song “Hail to the Chief,” from The
Lady of the Lake was written by Englishman James Sanderson, based on the narrative poem of
Sir Walter Scott, set to a Scottish air, and became an iconic American song associated with the
22
American Presidency. For further details on “Hail to the Chief” see Elise K. Kirk. “’Hail to the
Chief’: The Origins and Legacies of an American Ceremonial Tune.” American Music 15
(Summer 1997). VA.
M.P. King and J. Braham. The Americans. 27 April 1811. London, Lyceum. Comic opera.
Text by S.J. Arnold. Presented by the Drury Lane Company.
M. Kelly. The Royal Oak. 10 June 1811. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Musical drama. Text by
W. Dimond.
C. Dibdin. The Round Robin. 21 June 1811. Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Charles Dibdin’s last
piece of the stage. Text by the composer.
M. Kelly and M.P. King. One O’Clock! or, The Knight and the Wood Daemon. 1 August 1811.
London, Lyceum. Eric White adds that this was a new version of The Wood Demon (1807).
Presented by the Drury Lane Company.
T. Welsh. Kkamtschatka, or, The Slave’s Tribute. 16 October 1811. Covent Garden. Text
adapted fro A.F.F. von Kotzebue by Charles Kemble. Eric White notes that the overture was
composed by Ware.
1812 to 1817
See Eric Walter White. A Register of First Performances of English Operas. London: The
Society for Theatre Research, 1983.
1818
M. Kelly. The Bride of Abydos. 5 February 1818. Text by W. Dimond after a poem by Lord
Byron.
J. Braham and H. Bishop. Text by Thomas Dibdin. Zuma, or, The Tree of Health.
Victoria Aschheim note: Eric White does not include one of the authors, Stephanie Felicite
Genlis, comtesse de. Zuma, of The Tree of Health. Based on Zuma, on La decouverte du
quinquina by Mme de Genlis. Performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent Garden, Saturday, 21
February 1818. Published in many editions including, London: Printed for John Miller, 25 Bow
Street, Covent Garden, by B. McMillan, Bow Street, Covent, 1818. Garden.
New York: D. Longworth, 1818. Early American Imprints. No. 43852.
J. Davy. Rob Roy Macgregor, or. Auld Lang Syne! 12 March 1818. Covent Garden.
Text by I. Pocock, after the novel by Sir Walter Scott. Eric White notes that this version
includes songs by Burns and Wordsworth. For the greater part of the music, Davy drew upon
popular Scottish airs.
Victoria Aschheim note: World Cat. Lists this as “a musical drama in three acts founded on the
popular novel of Rob Roy.”
1819-1824
23
See Eric Walter White. A Register of First Performances of English Operas and Semi-Operas
from the 16th century to 1980. London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1983.
1825-1870
See Eric Walter White (as above).
Sir Henry R. Bishop, C.E. Walker, John Howard Payne
Fall of Algiers. Grand Opera in Three Acts as Performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. 19
January 1825.
London: Goulding D’Almaine & Co.
(The Times referred to this opera as Drury Lane’s “new tiresome opera.” V.A. note).
Some notes on London operas follow:
“…Shortly before his death Arne had tried out a new operatic form – the ‘English burletta’ so
called. In The Golden Pippin (1773) he selected and arranged music from thirteen different
composers to form a pasticcio score; and the recitative was probably his too. The Golden Pippin,
to a libretto by Kane O’Hara, was obviously intended to be a close imitation of Midas [Dublin 1762], which had set the fashion of ‘English burlettas’ about ten years previously….”
Midas – performance at the new King Street Theatre (later the Theatre Royal) -11 August 1769.
--The Two Misers (1775) burletta with pasticcio score, libretto by Kane O’Hara.
--April Day (1777) burletta with pasticcio score, libretto by Kane O’Hara
--Poor Vulcan burletta; author of libretto Charles Dibdin, also arranger of the music.
--The Court of Alexander (1770) performed at Covent Garden. Music by J.A. Fisher. Burlesque
opera.
Assessment of English burlettas in preface to The Lord of the Manor by Lieutenant-General John
Burgoyne (1780):
“One branch of comic opera which meets with success on our stage is evidently a graft from the
Burletta of the Italians; and little as I may admire it in general, I will venture to say, respectively
to the writing, it is improved in our soil. Midas, The Golden Pippin, and some others, considered
as pieces of parody and burlesque, are much better than any Italian Burletta I know.”
--The Banditti (the text of this comic opera written in 1781 by John O’Keefe, Irish writer very
active in the London theatre during the latter part of the century). Set by Dr. Samuel Arnold
(who had been appointed musical director at Covent Garden in 1763). Produced at Covent
Garden. It was judged a failure.
--The Duenna – produced at Covent Garden on 21 November 1775 “and enjoyed an even longer
run than The Beggar’s Opera, for it was played seventy-five times during the season, the only
intermissions being a few weeks at Christmas, and on Fridays when Leoni [a Jew thus unable to
24
appear on Friday nights, played the part of Don Carlos in The Duenna] was debarred by his
religion from acting….” Libretto by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Sheridan called in his father-inlaw to help with the music. Thomas Linley (“young Thomas”) was “brought in to collaborate
and, it is said, contributed the overture, the songs ‘Could I each fault remember,’ ‘Friendship is
the bond of reason,’ and ‘Sharp is the woe,’ also the duet ‘Turn thee round, I pray thee,’ and the
trio at the end of the first act.”
--La Cameriera Astuta (4 March 1788) comic opera by Stephen Storace to an Italian text.
Production at the King’s Theatre.
--The Doctor and the Apothecary – (originally presented in Vienna). Text adapted by James
Cobb. Score treated on pasticcio lines (a finale, a trio, two duets, and two airs by von
Dittersdorf; seven airs and the overture by Storace;… and one air by Paisiello with
accompaniment by Storace. Drury Lane first performance on 25 Otober 1788, and “the musical
entertainment” as it was called, ran for thirty-six nights.
--The Haunted Tower – music ‘selected, adapted, and composed’ by Storace. Libretto by Cobb.
Drury Lane, 24 November 1789. Included music by Purcell, Linley, Martin y Soler, Paisiello,
Pleyel, and used two French tunes and one Welsh tune. The opera ran for fifty performances
during its first season.
--No Song, No Supper, Storace’s next English opera. Drury Lane, 16 April 1790. “charming,
popular opera” – Storace provided the overture, two finales, a trio, a duet and five airs; borrowed
two airs from Gretry, one each from Giordani and Dr. Henry Harrington of Bath; altered the last
movement of a string quartet by Pleyel to provide a duet; and used an anonymous French air.
Part of the finale to Act I consists of an English version of the quartet that had already appeared
in both Gli Equivoci and La Cameriaera Astuta….”
--The Siege of Belgrade (Drury Lane, 1 January 1791). “For his next libretto, Storace reverted to
James Cobb, who based the subplot on The Siege of Belgrade (Drury Lane, 1 January 1791) on
Martin y Soler’s Una Cosa Rara, which had been produced in Vienna at the Burgtheater in
1786.” Some music of Martini used. “In the published vocal score of The Siege of Belgrade,
sixteen numbers are expressly attributed to Storace, six to Martini, two are attributed to them
jointly, and one each to Kelly Paisiello, and Salieri. Storace also drew on the music of his friend
Mozart, and at the end of the Overture there is a direct quotation from the Alla Turca movement
of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A (K. 331). Parke considered that this comic opera ‘presented a
marked instance of the rapid transition which the English opera has made, from the simplicity of
the ballad farce to the captivating splendor of the Italian drama. [W.T. Parke, Musical Memoirs].
--The Cave of Trophonius – Drury Lane on 3 May 1791. Storace turned to an opera he had
“probably first heard in Vienna. This was Salieri’s comic opera, La Grotta di Trofonio, which
had received its first performance at the Burgtheater on 12 October 1785. The original libretto
was by Giambattista Casti and was adapted for the English stage by Prince Hoare and Storace
provided the music, which was selected mainly from Salieri’s score….’Though skillfully
dramatized,’ says Kelly, [Reminiscences of Michael Kelly], ‘and the whole strength of the Drury
operatic company in it, did not meet with the reception which I think it deserved.’”
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--Storace’s new opera, Dido, Queen of Carthage, “ a ‘serious English opera’ on the lines of
Artaxerxes, was produced on 23 May 1792.” Presented in the rebuilt King’s Theatre. Score
chiefly composed by Storace, included numbers by Salieri, Sacchini and Sarti. The score of this
pasticcio opera has not survived.
--The Pirates. “After the non-success of his experiment in English ‘serious’ opera, Storace
reverted to hi old comic opera formula.” Cobb, librettist. King’s Theatre by the Drury Lane
company on 21 November 1792. Other composers whose music Storace used in The Pirates
were Anfossi and Bianchi.
--I Rivali delusi. “Stephen Storace compiled the score of an Italian comic opera called La Nozze
di Dorina, based on Giuseppe Srti’s opera Fra due Litiganti iil terzo gode, first performed at the
Scala, Milan, in 1782, and produced in London at the King’s Theatre two years later under the
title I Rivali delusi. For La Nozze di Dorina Storace added to the original score by Sarti numbers
by himself and by Martin y Soler.”
--Lodoiska. Storace’s next opera –a “splendid musical spectacle” [Kelly’s description].
Produced at Drury Lane on 9 June 1794. “A few years previously there had been simultaneous
productions of two different operas called Lodoiska in Paris, one with music by Cherubini, the
other with music by Kreutzer. According to Kelly, they were both: ‘got up with great effect and
care, but the Drury Lane piece surpassed them both. Storace selected the most effective music
from either, and enriched the piece with some charming melodies of his own composition; - the
scenery was picturesque grand and beautiful, the dresses in perfect costume.’”
--The Cherokee. Libretto by Cobb. “…this became the first in a series of operatic ‘westerns,’ of
which perhaps the most distinguished example has been Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West.
Storace’s score included numbers by Anfossi, Mozart, Bianchi, Ditters and Sarti.” Produced at
Drury Lane on 20 December 1794.
--The Iron Chest. First performance, Drury Lane, 12 March 1796.
George Colman, the younger, libretto. The work “saved from disaster by Storace’s music.”
--Mahmoud. One more Storace pasticcio. Libretto by Prince Hoare. Drury Lane, 30 April
1796. Posthumous score prepared for performance by Kelly with music selected from Paisiello,
Haydn, and Sarti, as well as Storace himself [mainly taken from Gli sposo malcontenti]. “The
score of Mahmoud was published by subscription for the benefit of Storace’s widow and son.”
“…the majority of Storace’s operas were written to the pasticcio formula…He certainly carried
out an important service by helping to familiarize English audiences with some of the best
numbers written by contemporary Italian, French, Spanish and German composers[ and his own
compositions were attractive too. He had a knack of handling duets, trios. Quartets, quintets, etc.,
and also finales with choral as well as solo parts, which may have been something he learnt when
he was in touch with Mozart in Vienna; and in the context of English opera at the end of the
eighteenth century this was novel and important. Yet not a single opera with a score entirely
written by Storace established itself in the repertory in England…”
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Some notes on American opera:
Before our timeline begins, it should be noted that American musical theater can be located in
the eighteenth-century where musical entertainments were more prevalent than pure dramas.
Elise K. Kirk. American Opera. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001. “…For the new
nation, the term opera had many meanings. Far from Italian opera, which was sung
throughout…American settlers enjoyed operas that were more in the nature of musical shows,
both with and without spoken dialogue or central plot. Ballad operas, a type of light, satiric play
interspersed with strophic songs set to traditional or popular tunes, were especially enjoyed. But
‘pure’ ballad opera was a sort-lived form. By the time John Gay and Johann Pupusch’s Beggar’s
Opera (1728) was first performed in America nearly a quarter of a century after its London
premiere, tunes from more serious dramatic works were included in ballad operas and sometimes
even newly composed for them. In both England and America by 1800 ‘opera’ could mean
ballad opera, now shortened to an ‘afterpiece’; comic opera, composed largely by one person;
pantomime, using dance and more elaborate staffing; or even melodrama, a play with
background music to underpin the plot and heighten emotions…the word opera bore a mantle of
many hues….What was important about the early operatic works, however, is not what they
were called but what they expressed and not what music was used but how it was used.”
“…although New Orleans opened its first opera house in 1791, the main centers for ballad opera
and its derivatives during the eighteenth century were Philadelphia, New York, Boston,
Baltimore, and Charleston. It was Philadelphia, however, that became the springboard for the
nation’s earliest attempts at opera. But when James Ralph2 , America’s adventurous opera
composer, began his career early in the eighteenth-century, Philadelphia was a city not quite born.
Slightly larger than Boston, it had a population of ten thousand, and artistic expression was
restricted because of Quaker traditions and regulations.”
Quakers were warned not to go or to be in any way concerned with plays, games, lotteries, music,
and dancing.
Later Philadelphia would become the cultural capital of America.
Academy of the College of Philadelphia, (one of whose founders was Benjamin Franklin) where America’s earliest attempt at serious opera, William Smith’s Alfred, was produced in 1757.
Based on Thomas Arne’s masque of the same name. (William Smith, originally from Scotland).
James Ralph went to London for literary challenges…left Philadelphia in 1724, wrote The
Fashionable Lady; or, Harlequin’s Opera, premiere in London on April 2, 1730, Goodman’s
Fields. Not staged on American soil, earliest opera by an American to be published and
produced.
It should be noted that although Ralph was born in America, he went to England and
pursued his literary career in London. Thus his opera while written by one born in
America was not staged on American soil.
2
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Thomas Arne’s (England) Love in a Village (1762) produced in Philadelphia in 1767.
Philadelphia. Chestnut Street Theatre – Susanna Rowson’s3 opera Slaves in Algiers was given
its premiere in 1794. The Chestnut Street Theatre rivaled the major opera houses of Europe both
in size and elegance, notes Elise K. Kirk. Kirk also writes that Rowson4 was a dedicated reformer,
“openly proclaimed equal rights for women and was one of the first to advocate freedom for
slaves. (Note of V.A. – she spoke out in Slaves in Algiers against white slavery in connection
with Barbary pirates. No mention of black slavery in Slaves in Algiers).
Slaves in Algiers was “given its premiere in the same year that Mary Wollstonecraft’s treatise A
Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in Philadelphia.” On the title page of Slaves
in Algiers it was called ‘A Play Interspersed with songs,’ with the score composed by Alexander
Reinagle. Towson played the role of Rebecca, a speaking part she created for herself. Part of
the opera’s story was inspired by Cervantes’ Don Quixote; the rest, according to Rowson, was
“entirely the offspring of fancy.” The immediate setting was based on a current political
situation, the ignominious problems the nation faced because of Algerian pirates who had seized
American ships during the 1790s. Numerous Americans remained prisoners of the Barbary
corsairs, and the matter dragged on for years because John Paul Jones died before he could carry
out his assigned mission to ransom the captives….
“….The Algerian situations is seen through the eyes of women – a feminist approach within
American opera rarely seen before Gertrude Stein 150 years later.” See page 49-50 in Kirk for
story line. The musical score has been lost. “The lyrics of the songs, however indicate potential
for musical characterization that is rare in early American opera. Only four of the twelve
characters have singing roles: Zoriana, Fetnah, Ben Hassan (Fetnah’s father), and Sebastian. But
in giving these characters musical emphasis, Rowson provides each with a special life and
individual personality. Ben Hassan, a Jewish corsair under the Dey of Algiers, sings in the
anapestic meter common in humorous songs of the period. Like many Jews in literature, he is
portrayed as a Shylock-Fagin type of figure…If the opera was not always well received, Rowson,
at least, had the courage to respond to critics,” Kirk writes. “In a lengthy coarse and brutal
diatribe, William Cobbett lashed out against her literary abilities, feminist leanings, and even her
patriotism. Women, he said, would soon be taking over the House of Representatives. In
Cobbett’s mind, Rowson was not only a hypocrite but also a ‘stupidly pretentious writer.’” The
Cobbett matter has further ramifications in regard to Rowson which I have addressed in my
Princeton/Oxford Encounter paper.
Kirk writes that Tammany and Slaves in Algiers “mark a fresh, innovative approach within the
long, variegated skein of American operatic history. Kirks states they were the first American
operas to move awy from pastiche into the single-composer work, an important step toward
Rowson was born in England in 1762, was brought to Massachusetts by her father, a
British naval officer stationed in Boston as a custom’s officer; her father was plaed under
house arrest during the American Revolution; the family was sent back to England as part
of a prisoner exchange of her father; in 1793 Rowson, now married, returned to America
with her husband, as a member of the theatrical company of Thomas Wignell. Thus
Rowson is often referred to as British-American.
3
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modern opera. More important, Kirk argues, Hatton and Rowson found truth and depth in their
characters, and “by placing them within the framework of American social and political ideology
they endowed them with inner dramatic life.” Kirk emphasizes that these two women made
history: “Ann Julia Hatton wrote the libretto for America’s first serious opera on an American
subject, and Susanna Rowson’s feminist-tinged Slaves in Algiers was given its premiere in an
elegant American opera house the size of Covent Garden during its important opening season in
1794. Both operas reflect American social and political thought through skillfully etched
characters that have dramatic truth and inner life,” Kirk writes.
______________________________________________________
After the war of Independence (1776), the growth of imported opera production was
phenomenal. More than a 1000 different musical plays and operas were performed in America
between 1785 and 1815; 100 of these were produced between 1974 and 1815 in Boston alone.
Most were English or adaptation of English operas to suit American audiences, Kirk writes.
John Dizikes writes in his Opera in America: A Cultural History: “The first critical notice of an
opera, Love in a Village by Thomas Arne (171-1778), appeared in the January 1767 issue of the
Pennsylvania Gazette. A few singers became popular favorites. Maria Storer, a soprano,
especially admired as Lucy in The Beggar’s Opera, as well as in popular concerts, was honored
by a volume of music published in Virginia in 1772 called The Storer, or The American Syren.
Beautiful and talented, jealous and capricious, she may lay claim to the title of the first American
prima donna…In the 1760s and after, opera played a much larger part in the theatrical repertory
offered by touring companies and became a lively element in popular culture, ‘comic operas
being printed in American editions, sold at the theatre, sung at home, and used as settings for
patriotic songs.’ New operas came across the Atlantic with remarkable quickness. Arne’s Love
in a Village, produced in London in 1760 and 1762, respectively, were being performed
regularly in American by 1768. Lionel and Clarissa by Charles Dibdin (1743-1814), first
performed in London in 1768, reached America by *1772 (within the dates of the Princeton /
Oxford study). His The Padlock, brought out at Drury Lane in October 1768, was given in New
York in May 1769….These comic operas also continued the ballad opera tradition of social
satire, showing the possibility of love triumphing over social class and including sharp thrusts at
the upper classes. ‘Such works perhaps shaped the political perceptions of Americas who did not
read Locke or Cato’s Letters but who did frequent the theater,’ and may have played a role in the
growing political discontent of the time (Reference to Silverman Cultural History). In these
years the colonists began to think of themselves as something other than English men and
women, as Americans. Reflecting the nationalist sentiment, English operas were often modified
to suit American tastes and values, in plot, subject matter, language, use of local reference.”
Dizikes points out that after the American Revolution, anti-English sentiments had disastrous
consequences for English theatrical companies in America. (i.e., the Douglass theatrical
company broke up). British soldiers brought entertainments with them – dancing, plays, operas,
concerts. Generals Clinton, Burgoyne, and Howe were patrons of the arts. Burgoyne was a
playwright…British troops brought theater to Boston (see P. 23 of Dizikes). American officers
emulated the British example and put on plays and operas for the amusement of the
troops…George Washington believed that the theatrical performances improve army morale.
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Dizikes next describes the development of opera in New Orleans…by 1796 operatic dates can
be securely established. There were performances of operas by Andre Gretry (1741-1813),
Nicolas Dalayrac (1753-1809), and Nicolas Dezede (174?-1792)…John Davis [theatrical
manager] “believed he must expand French opera beyond its local and resources” and recruited
from France singers and dancers…craze for musical adaptations of Sir Walter Scott’s novels;
expanded repertory to include Italian and German opera; in 1827 Davis’s troupe sailed for New
York. French opera not a social success and some of New York’s newspapers were
condescending: “The company is so much better than could have been hoped for, that it would
be ungenerous to quarrel with it for not being as good as we could desire.” In September, Davis’s
company went on to Philadelphia where enthusiasm for them was greater, musically and socially,
Dizikes writes. Dizikes states as well that between 1827 and 1833: “New Orleans provided
northern cities with almost the only opera they were to hear.”
James Caldwell at Camp Street Theatre, “labored to establish opera in English…through the
1820s Caldwell resourcefully struggled to create a new audience out of discordant elements. He
gave his frontiersmen a steady diet of English opera and musical farces, and altered well-known
operas to suit unsophisticated tastes.” P.30.
Dizikes notes “brilliant phase of New Orleans opera” in half-dozen years beginning in
1835…one of the most noteworthy in the history of opera in America, with two established
companies, important productions, loyal audiences.”
Milestones noted by Dizikes:
New Orleans eager to see opera by Meyerbeer (1791-1864) – Robert the Devil (Robert le
diable). The two New Orleans opera companies vying to be the first to produce it in America.
Caldwell opened it on March 30, 1835. Also on the program was Thomas Dartmouth Rice, the
creator of the minstrel figure Jim Crow (Caldwell hedging his bets). Meyerbeer plus “Jump Jim
Jump” – packed the theater. (Camp Street Theatre).
Next milestone: Caldwell built the St. Charles Theatre, largest and grandest in the United
States up to this time.
Third milestone: Caldwell imported two Italian companies:
a. Montresor Company from Havana in March 1836. Opera Il Pirata (The Pirate) by Vincenzo
Bellini (1801-1835). “Italian opera captivated New Orleans.”
Dizikes notes that “New Orleans’s early operatic history illustrated the central importance of
the audience in the evolution of opera in America. Given the absence of state patronage, opera
in America had to compete within the capitalist entertainment marketplace for its
audience…Moreover, as New Orleans also revealed, the opera audence in America was closely
tied to the fluctuating degree to which European immigrants thought of opera as either a means
of assimilating to American society or of maintaining a separate ethnic identity.”
Dizikes moves on to Philadelphia and touches on the subject that is an Ahlquist theme: “Opera
had been intimately associated with aristocratic patronage, which was identified with exclusive
privilege. Why not free art from the patronage of corrupt aristocrats and kings?...Let America
lead the way, in this as in other things, by developing public sponsorship of art, patronage by a
democratic state. Let the people be the patrons!” (P. 55). Dizikes goes on to describe ‘Three
American Theaters”:
a. Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. “Philadelphians called it ‘Old Drury,’ but its
audiences were enthusiastically patriotic, which in these years meant a mixture of admiration and
hostility for things British.” Dizikes tells of the matter of Anne Bingham’s box. She wanted a
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box decorated at her own expense, for her use only in the Theatre…privilege that
Jeffersonianism opposed. Thomas Wignell refused her offer: “The theatre in a country like ours
must depend entirely for permanent success, not upon individuals, however powerful, not upon
clubs, cliques, factions, or parties, but upon the public alone. In a country where the spirit of
liberty is so fierce as in ours, such privilege would excite from an immense class a feeling of
positive hostility.” Wignell staked his theatrical future on the belief that the hatred of privilege
would predominate in the United States. That seemed possible in the early 1800s. A quarter of a
century after Anne Bingham’s offer, for example, the disposition of box seats still remained a
source of contention…P. 63. But what alternative was there in a country where there was no
public sponsorship by city, state, or national government, and no court or aristocracy, what
alternative was there to sponsorship of the arts by the wealthy – if they could be persuaded to
sponsor them? …and what of African-Americans for whom only the twenty-five cent gallery
was available? Ticket buying was democratic but not egalitarian.”
b. THE BOWERY THEATER (New York)
properly the New York Theatre, commonly the Bowery which eventually became its official
name…opened in 1826, burned down in 1828, rebuilt and reopened 85 days after the fire.
Dizikes quotes Walt Whitman as Ahlquist did in her later book as well – the Bowery Theatre
“was packed from ceiling to pit with full-blooded young and middle-aged men, the best average
of American-born mechanics – the emotional nature of the whole mass..bursting forth in one of
those long-kept up tempests of hand-clapping peculiar to the Bowery, no dainty-gloved business,
but electric force and muscle from perhaps two thousand full-sinewed men.” (Note: Dizikes
quotes Walt Whitman: “But for Opera, I could never have written Leaves of Grass. see page 184In 1847, Whitman reviewed opera at Astor Place for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Whitman heard
Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Lucia di Lammermoor. In the following years he heard most of the
standard operas of the day. Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Gounod’s Faust….Opera gave
Whitman part of his vocabulary…romanza, cantabile, finale – he used these terms. He called his
recitatives “chants.” “They were his catalogues, his voiced phrases, declamatory passages that
conveyed a sense of movement. Alternating with this were his songs, long-flowing phrases,
lyrical moments of soaring. Whitman’s arias have an opening melody, a contrasting section,
then a return to the original melody, perhaps somewhat altered…Nature achieved organic
wholeness by the infinite replication of patterns. Opera gave him the analogous means – the
repetition of melody…”).
A contemporary writer emphasized the nativist element in the Bowery Theatre’s success –
quoted by Dizikes: ‘Not English money, not English patronage, for its attractions, name and
money are all American, not English talent, for it has profited wholly by the native genius of our
soil. It is a proud, a glorious feeling, that it is our country, that it is fostering America, which
enables genius and industry to win success.’ Dizikes writes that the implication of such
sentiments “would have seemed severely to restrict the role that opera might play in the
Bowery’s audience’s amusements. But opera was closely identified with nationalist feelings…”
(P. 66).
c.
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St. Charles Theatre in New Orleans. In its day the largest theater for opera in the United
States. Opened in Nov. 1835.
New York’s Italian Opera House, opened in 1833, was the first building in the US designed
exclusively for opera, but was a failure. Pages 78-9.
Dizikes: William Fry and the American Muse (P. 98). Leonora, opera by William Henry Fry,
composer and critic, advocate of American music. Leonora score published in Philadelphia in
1845. Opened on June 4, 1845 at Chestnut Street Theatre. At first seemed a success, writes
Dizikes, but a decade later, production in New York a failure. Its music did not please because it
was “derivative” [under the shadow of Bellini and Donizetti...constantly reminding of
Sonnambula and Norma].
Dizikes takes note of “minstrel opera.” By the 1850’s “minstrel opera had evolved into the
form which endured for four decades. There were three acts. In the first, the entire company
appeared in a semicircle. An interlocutor, seated in the center, acted as master of ceremonies, his
unruffled dignity and decorum contrasting with the jokes and banter and high jinks of the rest of
the performers, especially the two men at either end of the semicircle, the end men, Tambo and
Bones, names for their instruments….Act 3 brought the entire company back on stage, in bright
costumes. It consisted of a sketch or a play, perhaps about plantation life or a parody of a popular
drama or opera, or it might be an original Ethiopian farce opera, Long Island Juba, The Black
Cupid, Bone Squash Diavolo. The Kneass Opera Troupe, a prominent minstrel company,
specialized in parodies of well-known operas. The third act concluded with a vigorous dance,
the ‘walk-around’” – emphasis on dancing…
“African-American dance was already celebrated, [Dizikes writes]. William Henry Lane,
‘Master Juba,’ the greatest African American dancer of the day, seen and much admired by
Charles Dickens on his visit to America, combined European dance with African elements to
produce something unmatched by anyone else. And “Jump Jim Crow” was only the first of
many African American dances to become a world-wide success….p. 106. P. 105-106.
“Minstrel shows were white men’s shows (although African Americans developed their own
minstrel companies in the 1850s)…these white minstrel performances closely imitated African
American culture.” (Note: Minstrel shows began in the 1830s and 1840s).
Dizikes writes also about opera in Chicago within the time frame of the Princeton/Oxford
study. Pages 247-248. Crosby’s Opera House, Chicago, about 1866. Five years later the great
fire put an end to its brief heyday.”
1787 – Royal Tyler’s The Contrast with singing lyrics including “Yankee Doodle.”
Ban on theatrical productions had been lifted. Although the anti-theater law enacted by US
Congress in 1778 as repealed in 1789, it was observed in Boston until 1793. Kirk writes: “To
skirmish around the restrictions, operas were produced throughout the Colonies under various
guises such as ‘lectures,’ ‘recitations,’ or ‘concerts.’ ‘Our stage, one reviewer maintained,
‘should represent to us the superior excellence of those manners which result from strict morality
and the proper exercise of our political principles.’ Perhaps these words explain why the
Philadelphia composer Peter Markoe wrote his comic opera, The Reconciliation (1790) as an
allegory on the virtues of charity, honesty, and repentance. Markoe’s opera…was only a step
away from early –nineteenth century melodrama, which its accent on moral rectitude and the
horrors of sin.” (Note: Patricia Virga presents in her volume, The American Opera Until 1790 a
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complete discussion of The Reconciliation, or the Triumph of Nature, a comic opera in two acts,
written in Philadelphia by Peter Markoe in 1790.)
Peter Markoe matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford. His family moved to Philadelphia in
1771 and remained until the Revolutionary War. Peter was in fact a member of the Light Horse
Brigade. In 1775 he returned to England where he was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in London,
studying law. He settled in Philadelphia and on March 22, 1784 he took an oath of allegiance to
the new republic. Virga provides details on Markoe’s political affiliations, his stance again the
dangers of a strong central government and his advocacy of the protection of individual liberties.
The Reconciliation, as noted before, and Virga notes as well, is an allegory on the moral virtues
of charity, honesty, and repentance. The libretto was published by Prichard and Hall in 1790.
The opera was accepted for rehearsal by the Old American Company, but performance never
came to fruition, notes Virga. However, the opera did receive public attention and lyrics for
“Why Sleeps the Thunder in the skies” (Air 2 and “The Birds, Who Wing their Way through
Air” (Air 3) were printed in the Universal Asylum in Philadelphia. Virga writes that this marks
the first time any music from an American opera appeared in print. Virga provides her extensive
research on The Reconciliation, as well as on other American operas in what was a thesis
revision – Rutgers University, 1981.
1781 - Francis Hopkinson [one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence]. American
Independent, later renamed The Temple of Minerva. Opera/oratorio. One of the first American
oratorios staged in America. A through sung ‘oratorial entertainment,’ it was created to celebrate
the American victory over the British. Premiered in Philadelphia on 21 March 1781, at the home
of the French ambassador to the Continental Congress. Hopkinson wrote the words and arranged
the music pasticcio style, [borrowing from Handel, Arne, and Thomas]. (Source: Ken Wlaschin,
Encyclopedia of American Opera).
Kirk writes: American Independent has virtually no plot, minimal staging, and its protagonists
are allegorical rather than historic. “The beauty in this little work lies primarily in Hopkinson’s
skill in choosing elegant music that captures the poignant moods of America at the close of the
Revolution – moods of struggle, hopes, dreams, and longing.”
1787 – May Day in Town – by Royall Tyler (1757-1826). [American opera cited by Donald Jay
Grout, p. 578]. Note that lyrics to this opera are in Jarvis, Katherine Schall. Harvard Library
Bulletin. Vol.XXIII, No. 2, April 1975. Main theater at University of Vermont named after
Royall Tyler, American jurist and playwright.
http://www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=13439 [accessed November 25, 2012] which states that
performance at John Street Theatre, May Day in Town, or New York in an Uproar. Total
performances, one on 5/19/1787. IBDB Internet Broadway database.
1789 – Darby’s Return – by William Dunlap (1766-1839). New York premiere on November 24,
1789 attended by President George Washington. [American opera reported by Donald Jay Grout,
p. 578]. Grout calls this an opera, but Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick refer to it as “a new
farce.” William Dunlap referred to as first historian of American stage. American born. Darby’s
Return in which Thomas Wignell’s character (taken from Irish-born John O’Keefe’s comic opera
The Poor Soldier) returns “to his native sod of Ireland and comments on his peregrinations in
33
America in good rustic fashion.” Quoted from http://americanartgallery.org/artist/readmore/id/843
[accessed November 25, 2012].
1790 – Peter Markoe (1753-1792). The Reconciliation. Comic opera in two acts. Printed and
sold by Prichard & Hall in Market Street, Philadelphia. 48 pp. Accepted by the Old American
Co. but not performed.
Kirk writes of the English immigrant musicians around the turn of the century including James
Hewitt (1770-1827), Benjamin Carr (1768-1831), John Bray (1782-1822), and Rayner Taylor
(1747-1825). Hewitt worked in NY and Boston, Carr chose Philadelphia. Hewitt became
conductor at the Park Street Theater (in NY) – a theatre that Ahlquist writes about in her volume
in connection with opera). Hewitt wrote and compiled music for 14 operatic works.
1794 - Tammany, or, The Indian Chief (1794), with a libretto by Ann Julia Hatton, appears to be
the earliest American opera with a libretto written by a woman. 1794 Ann Julia Hatton’s
Tammany, or, The Indian Chief, with music by James Hewitt, is the earliest American opera by a
woman librettist; the earliest by one composer (rather than multiple composers); and the first
serious opera on an American subject. Kirk also points out that Hatton was originally from
England but lived most of her professional lives in the New World and she and Susanna Haswell
Rowson (who was also originally from England, writes Kirk) are among America’s earliest
professional librettists. (Source: Kirk)
Wlaschin writes: Ann Julia Kemble Hatton (1764-1838) “was the first woman librettist in
America. A member of the famous Kemble theater family and sister of tragic actress Sarah
Siddons, she came to New York in 1893 with husband William. She collaborated with
singer/composer/actress Mary Ann Pownall on the ballad opera Needs Must: or, The Ballad
Singers which was performed in New York in December 1793. (Kirk also points this out in her
volume). Hatton wrote the libretto of Tammany, or The Indian Chief. The first serious
American opera with an American story, it tells how Indian chief Tammany rescues his lover
from one of Columbus’s explorers who then takes revenge by burning them alive. The opera
premiered at the John Street Theater in New York on March 3, 1794.” (Source: Wlaschin)
Kirk also points out that Hatton’s opera Tammany “is an intriguing work not only because of its
historic importance, but also because of the political controversy that surrounded it. Not long
after [Hatton] came to America, Hatton allied herself with the powerful anti-Federalist Tammany
Society that favored the French Revolution She became known as ‘the poetess of the Tammany
Society’ and ‘bard of American Democracy,’ and her opera provoked much controversy, ranging
from angry sarcasm to ebullient praise. More appeared in the newspapers and journals about
Tammany, in fact, than any other theater work of the time. New York Magazine claimed that it
was ‘one of the finest things of its kind ever seen,’…Tammany also set the tone for operative
staging to come through its lavish, colorful sets by America’s first full-fledged scenic artist,
Charles Ciceri. Its libretto and music may always remain a mystery, however, for only the texts
of the vocal numbers are extant.”
“A study of the song texts that were printed for distribution at the theater can tell much about
the work, however.” Powerful, heroic nature, Kirk writes. “Political messages in American
34
musical theater were mainly either satirical, as in comic opera, or allegorical, as in masque.
Hatton’s opera tells the tragic story of Indian lovers, Tammany and Manana, who are burned in
their cabin by the jealous Ferdinand, a member of Columbus’s exploration team. Produced only
a short time after the French Revolution with its ubiquitous cry of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’
the opera became a strong symbol of Republicanism.” (P, 46-48).
O.G. Sonneck, Chief of the Division of Music, Library of Congress, in his 1915, 1943 [reprinted
in 1963] volume: Early Opera in America wrote: “One of Hodgkinson’s first contributions to
literature was his prologue to Mrs. Anne Julia Hatton’s ‘serious opera,’ ‘Tammany; of The
Indian Chief,’ with music by James Hewitt. Only the lyrics of the libretto seem to have been
preserved, and if the whole book reveled in equally impossible flights of poetic imagination the
loss is not to be regretted. This serious opera as taken seriously only by the Anti-Federalists, and
one critic insisted that Hallam and Henry had put it on the stage only because the powerful
Tammany Society so decreed, being of the opinion that it was ‘one of the finest things of its kind
ever seen. The New York Magazine, on the other hand, called it ‘that wretched thing,’ and
William Dunlap, a Federalist, dubbed it ‘literally a mélange of bombast…’”
1776 – John Leacock The Fall of the British Tyranny: American Liberty Triumphant (Note of
VA: There are the complete verses of a long song, [first line here only] Of St.George,or St.Bute,
let the poet Laureat sing...” to the “Tune. The hounds are all out,…” available on the Project
Gutenberg website).
1794 – The libretto of Slaves in Algiers; or A Struggle for Freedom by Susanna Rowson
illustrates, writes Kirk, a rare feminist approach in early American opera. The opera was given
its premiere to celebrate the opening season of the two thousand seat Chestnut Street Theatre in
Philadelphia. (Source: Kirk).
From http://www.archiv.org/stream/americanplayspri006675mbp/americanplayspri006675mbp_djvu.txt
Susanna Haswell Rowson (1762-1824)
“… Play, interspersed with songs, in three acts. As performed at the new theatres in Philadelphia
and Baltimore. Philadelphia. Printed for the author by Wrigley and Berriman, No. 149 Chestnut
Street. 1794. 72 pp.”
“First played at Chestnut Street Theater, Philadelphia, in 1794. This was Mrs. Rowson’s first
dramatic attempt. It drew forth a severe criticism from ‘Porcupine,’ the celebrated William
Cobbett who jeered at Mrs. Rowson and ridiculed the whole production.”
1796 – Benjamin Carr (1768-1831 -emigrated from London where his first opera had been
staged - to America in 1793; remembered for his American ballad operas, most successful of
which were based on the legend of William Tell.
The Archers, or, Mountaineers of Switzerland. Libretto by William Dunlop. Wlaschin writes it
was the first American opera libretto of a serious nature written by an American. The libretto
has survived. Premiere on 18 April 1796. New Chestnut Street Theater in Philadelphia and The
Patriot, or Liberty Obtained. Premiere on 16 May 1796.
35
1797 – Benjamin Carr. Bourville Castle, of The Gallic Orphans.
Premiered on 16 January 1797. John Street Theatre. Lost as are his other operas [although
Wlaschin says the Dunlop libretto to The Archers survived.
(Source of the 1796 and 1797 entries above: Wlaschin)
1798 – William Dunlop. Sterne’s Maria. Music arranged by Victor Pellisier.
1800 – Pizarro in Peru by William Dunlap, with music composed, selected, or arranged by
James Hewitt, Kirk reports that it appears to be America’s first important operatic melodrama.
(Source: Kirk)
1801 – Federation Triumphant in the Steady Hearts of Connecticut Alone; or, The Turnpike
Road to a Fortune. Premiered in Hartford in 1801 writes Wlaschin.
1803 – William Dunlap and Victor Pelissier’s The Visitor of Nature is the earliest extant
orchestral score of an American opera. (Source: Kirk)
1804 – John Turnbull’s Rudolph, of The Robbers of Calabria, A Melodrama in Three Acts, with
Marches, Combats, and Choruses. Published by B. True in 1808 “as performed at the Boston
Theatre.”
1806 – James Hewitt’s The Tars from Tripoli.
1808 – James Nelson Barker and John Bray’s The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage is the
first full piano-vocal score of an opera published in America that has survived and the first opera
composed in America to receive a performance in England (London, 1820). (Source: Kirk).
Grout refers to this as an “operatic melo-drame” performed at Philadelphia, a play with musical
numbers composed by John Bray (1782-1822) “and including descriptive instrumental pieces,
songs, and choruses.” Grout notes that “the opera is published in Hitchcock, ed. Earlier
American Music Series, vol. 11.
The Indian Princess, or, La Belle Sauvage. “An operatic melo-drame in three acts. Performed at
the Theatre Philadelphia and Baltimore. First Acted April 6, 1808, Philadelphia. Printed by T &
G Palmer, for G.E. Blake, No. 1 South Third Street, 1808, 74 pp.” (From
http://www.archive.org/stream/americanplayspri006675mbp/americanplayspri006675mbp_djvu.txt
Further text from the same source: “New York. Published by David Longworth, at the Dramatic
Repository, Shakespeare Gallery. 1808. 74 pp. 12 mo. H HEH “First played at Chestnut Street
Theater, Philadelphia, April 6, 1808. The Advertisement says, ‘The principal materials that form
this dramatic trifle are extracted from the General History of Virginia, written by captain Smith,
and printed London, folio, 1624.’ It was the first original American play performed in London
(December 15, 1820), after an initial performance in America under the title, Pocahontas-, or,
The Indian Princess, and is the first extant play to treat the Pocahontas story. The attitude of the
audience at its first performance was so hostile that the author, who was on the stage, directed
that the curtain be dropped. The play met with more success at its initial New York performance
36
(June 14, 1809)…” Note of V.A. The Indian Princess was recorded and is available on CD as us
The Aethiop, or, The Child of the Desert.
Wlaschin writes “…published the same year with vocal score and instrumental accompaniment.
1814 – The Aethiop; or, The Child of the Desert. Rayner Taylor. An important early example of
an American romantic grand opera, was especially long-running – from 1814 to the Civil War.
(Source Kirk)
1822 – The Enterprise with music by Arthur Clifton (b. ca. 1784). Grout writes that a work
similar to The Indian Princess (1808), The Enterprise (1822) was performed in Baltimore.
“These are but two examples of many such homemade semi operatic entertainments that dot the
history of the American stage in the early part of the nineteenth-century,” writes Grout, P. 579.
1824 – Micah Hawkins, composer of The Saw Mill; or, A Yankee Trick, appears to be the first
American-born composer to have written both the music and the libretto for an opera. (Source:
Kirk) “With Hawkins, not only the characters and settings of American opera use indigenous
sources but also the music.” (Kirk, P. 72).
1825 – John Davies. The Forest Rose; or, American Farmers. Text by Samuel Woodworth,
contains a role (probably the first, says Kirk) for an African-American woman and places new
emphasis on the singing star. (Source: Kirk). The Stage Yankee was an endearing character on
the American stage.
http://www.archiv, etc as above writes:
“Samuel Woodworth (1785-1842)…The Forest Rose , or American Farmers. A pastoral opera in
two acts as performed at the Chatham Theatre, New York. Music by John Davies. New
York…Hopkins and Morris, printers. 1825.
Kirk: In regard to the “Stage Yankee” – “His most enduring image is found in Samuel
Woodworth’s The Forest Rose; or American Farmers. “A Pastoral Opera” as its title page
indicates, the work is set in rural New Jersey. The opera is a light domestic comedy that pits the
awkward shrewdness of an American farmer with the polished stupidity of an Englishman,”
wrote Kirk [p. 68]. “It owes its highly successful run of more than forty years chiefly to an
earthy Yankee character, Jonathan Ploughboy, who gives the play humor, stability, and
conviction. The Stage Yankee became a stock character for comedians for decades. Another
new twist in casting is the role of a young African American, Rose. Although her part is small,
she achieves prominence in the opera’s title. The score for The Forest Rose was ‘newly
composed’ by John Davies, a prominent New York organist, pianist, and teacher.”
-Importance on the singing star
-New influence of the American earth captured in the instrumental sounds and colors of the score.
Jonathan plays a Jew’s harp and Caesar, a country fiddle.
“Samuel Woodworth is usually credited with founding a new American school of playwriting
with The Forest Rose. But theater historians have often overlooked a significant work that
predated it: The Saw Mill; or A Yankee Trick (1824). Called a ‘comic opera’ in the libretto, The
Saw Mill was both ‘written and composed’ by Micah Hawkins (1777-1825) with the orchestral
37
arrangements by James Hewitt…In Hawkins’s collection of songs are several in black dialect –
among the earliest known to have been sung in blackface on the American stage.”
1840s (and 1830s), the minstrel shows in this period. Performed by white actors with black-face
makeup.
Stephen Foster’s songs: “Swanee River,” “Camptown Races,” “I Dream of Jeannie With the
Light Brown Hair.” Dan Emmett, composer of “Dixie.” Both these composers wrote music for
minstrel shows, Foster: Christy Minstrels; Emmett: Virginia Minstrels.
1840- Charles Edward Horne’s Ahmed al Kamel, from Washington Irving’s Tales of the
Alhambra.
1840- Max Maretzek’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, again inspired by Washington Irving’s
short stories.
1845 – Written in the bel canto tradition (writes Kirk), Leonora. William Henry Fry. First
“grand opera” by an American-born composer to receive wide-ranging publicity and reviews.
(Source: Kirk). See my other notes on Leonora in this document as well. Grout refers to
Leonora as “the first publicly performed opera with continuous music by a native American
composer. Performed in Philadelphia in 1845, and in a revised version at New York, Grout
writes, in 1858 – “a work of considerable competence and musical interest, modeled on the
styles of Donizetti and Meyerbeer.”
1852 – Kirk discusses parody on Italian opera, such as Physiology of Opera by “Scrici.” Several
other burlesques are parodies of Italian opera. Kirk, P. 90. “…Italian opera provided American
composers with a lyrical and dramatic springboard. It became a model to emulate and shape into
their own expressive creations for years to come…” Kirk, P. 90.
1852 – James Gaspard Maeder’s The Peri; or, The Enchanted Fountain from A History of
Columbus. Available through the Library of Congress website as facsimile pate images. Also
referred to as “The grand fairy opera.”
1852- George F. Root. The Flower Queen, or The Coronation of the Rose. “Operatic cantata”
with libretto by Fannie J. Crosby, the blind gospel song-writer. Wlaschin writes that this is
considered “America’s first theatrical cantata. Blind gospel song-writer Fannie J. Crosby wrote
the libretto for what is an opera in everything but name; operas were frowned on in Root’s
Protestant milieu. The cantata was used by Root while teaching classes of young women at the
Normal Musical Institute in New York and became quite popular. It was the first American
cantata published in England.” Root also wrote The Haymakers (1857) “operatic cantata.”
Wlaschin writes that “Root used the secular cantata format so the work could be given in concert
form rather than staged” because of the Protestant community in which he lived which called
opera “decadent.” “The Haymakers has been compared to Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons.”
(Source: Wlaschin)
38
1855 – John Broughman’s Po-Ca-Hon-Tas; or, The Gentle Savage called “An Original
Aboriginal Erratic Operatic Semi-Civilized and Demi-Savage Extravaganza” a burlesque on
Indian subjects.
1855- George Frederick Bristow. Rip Van Winkle. One of the earliest operas to be based on
work by an important contemporaneous American author, Washington Irving. (Source: Kirk)
Hipsher wrote of Bristow’s opera “a grand romantic opera in three acts which had its world
premiere at Niblo’s Garden on Broadway, New York on September 27, 1855…enthusiasm was
riotous. Whether the work merited all this emotional outburst is of small concern. The fact
remains that in those primitive days of the Early-Victorian era both the press and public dared
and were delighted to lend patronage and encouragement to the composer of their own
nationality. By the end of October the opera had seventeen performances – favored by its
superior mounting. It was performed in the Academy of Music, of Philadelphia, November 21,
1870…[the cast is noted in its entirety in Hipsher’s volume reissued 1978 – page 86]…Aside
from developing the original Irving story, it introduces triumphant marches, soldier choruses and
patriotic songs. In general the critics agreed that the composer lacked the power of musical
characterization as well as of variety of emotional expression, the principal merits having been
found in his orchestration…”
Kirk reviews the basics of George Frederick Bristow’s Rip Van Winkle (P. 92-93) noting that
Bristow was barely thirty when it was produced. An avid champion of American music, born in
Brooklyn and a violinist for thirty-six years in the New York Philharmonic, he once stated in
decrying the lack of American works in the Philharmonic’s repertoire: “the Philharmonic Society
has been as anti-American as if it had been located in London during the Revolutionary War, and
composed of native-born British Tories.” Bristow’s Rip Van Winkle was “an immediate success:
“Sebastopol has fallen, and a New American Opera has succeeded in New York!” the Musical
Review wrote (with reference to the concurrent Crimean War, Kirk notes.
Rip Van Winkle provided a “special American flavor” in its main character, “a folklike American
hero – a Catskills farmer, a little tipsy and a little henpecked – who in the end saves the day.
Washington Irving provided Bristow with what Daniel Boorstin calls the ‘comic superman,’”
writes Kirk. “What made the American popular hero heroic also made him comic,’ Boorstin
writes [as Kirk reports]. ‘The pervasive ambiguity of American life, the vagueness which laid
the continent open to adventure, which made the land a rich storehouse of the
unexpected…suffused both the comic and the heroic. Both depended on incongruity: the
incongruity of the laughable and the incongruity of the admirable.’” Daniel Boorstin quote in
Kirk).
Kirk continues: “That incongruity furnishes the interest and color in Bristow’s variegated score.
There are touches of melodrama (with music both accompanying and alternating with the
dialogue); a drinking song; a Morris dance; lyrical parlor ballads; tuneful Protestant hymns;
bouncy comic-opera rhythms; and a shivering finale complete with thunder, dancing spirits, and
the orchestral rumblings of ninepins. Bristow provides a fascinating panorama of mid-century
American culture.” V.A. note: This opera is an expression of historical memory.
39
The critics of Bristow’s time, Waldemer Rieck and John Sullivan Dwight had a mixed reaction
however Dwight wrote: “I rejoice even at the production of works like this, because the public
will learn in time that all inspiration was not given to the Italian and Teutonic races. If we are
ever to have any national operas, they must be based on our own language; the union of
intelligible, vigorous and attractive plays with kindred music.”
1857 – The Elves, a Broadway “musical” with 50 performances. Laura Keene manager/actress
produced this in New York. (Keene is remembered in connection with tragedy because President
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at a performance of hers called Our American Cousin in 1865
at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC).
1860 – The Seven Sisters, a “musical burletta” produced also by Laura Keene with 253
performances in New York. This show included patriotic tableaux with actors portraying George
Washington and Uncle Sam. Minstrel classics such as “Dixie” were incorporated.
1862 – Julius Eichberg. The Doctor of Alcantara. Libretto by Benjamin E. Woolf. Opera
bouffe. Wlaschin writes: “…was the most successful early American comic opera and marked
the beginning of a truly American style. Following its premiere at the Boston Museum on April
7, 1862, it was produced all over America, Britain and Australia. It was also the first American
opera staged by an African American opera company, the Original Colored American Opera
Troupe of Washington, DC, which presented it in Washington and Philadelphia in 1873.”
(Source: Wlaschin)
1864 – William Henry Fry’s next opera, Notre Dame of Paris based on the Victor Hugo story of
1831, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Academy of Music in Philadelphia, May 4, 1864. Joseph
Reese Fry, librettist and composer’s brother.
1866 production. The Black Crook. First melodrama without music begun when a Parisian ballet
troupe joined with a dramatic group in New York City. Because of a fire which destroyed the
New York Academy of Music where they were to perform, they were left without an
engagement and turned to William Wheatley, the Niblo Garden manager. The Niblo Garden had
presented operas. The Black Crook then turned into a musical spectacle. Opened on 12
September 1866 at the 3,200 seat, Niblo Garden on Broadway in New York City was remodeled
to accommodate this greatly expanded production. Book by Charles M. Barras (1828-1873), an
American playwright. Music is mostly by adaptation, but there were new musical numbers
composed for it, “March of the Amazons” by Giusseppe Operti, and “You Naughty, Naughty
Men” by George Bickwell (music) and Theodore Kennick (lyrics). This production is considered
to be the prototype of the American musical. It had a long run of 474 performances and toured
for decades thereafter. Revived on Broadway in 1870-71, 1871-72. There was a British
production of The Black Crook which opened at the Alhambra Theatre on 23 December 1872, an
opera bouffe based on the same French source material with new music by Frederic Clay and
Georges Jacobi.
The Black Domino/Between You and Me and the Post, musical comedy. Lucy Rushton’s New
York Theatre. 30 performances.
40
1867- Offenbach’s La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein premiered in New York City on
September 24, 1867 soon after the Civil War.
American Operetta:
1867- George W. Stratton’s Laila.
1868 – John Thomas Douglas. Virginia’s Ball. Believed to b the earliest opera by a black
composer. (Source: Kirk)
1868 – John Hill Hewitt. The Roll of the Drum, or the Vivandiere of the Potomac. (Later
shortened to The Vivandiere). Military opera. (Note of V.A.: Connected with Civil War history.
The sheet music for the song, Dixie, the Land of Cotton, from this opera [words by Capt. Hughes,
pseudonym of J. Augstine Signalgo], is in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum. Hewitt
became the manager of a concert hall in Augusta, Georgia and was associated with the Waldron
Thespian Family. Details on this aspect of the career of John Hill Hewitt (1801-1890) can be
found in “Augustans in the War – We Remember, Russell Brown. “John Hill Hewitt – Scarlet
O’Hara’s Favorite Songwriter” – http://wwwresearchonline.net/august/hewittjh.htm
1870 – cut off date for “Staging History” – George W. Stratton’s Genevieve.
1874. Evangeline by Edward Rice (1847-1924), an American composer and theater producer,
created also by John Cheever Goodwin, was based on a Longfellow poem, and was said to be the
first billed as a “musical comedy.” Niblo Garden, New York.
1882- Caryl Florio’s opera, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Philadelphia, May 27, 1882. Chestnut Street
Theatre. Only one single performance.
1898 – Although beyond our time-line, A pioneer of American musical theater, Clorindy, or
Origins of the Cakewalk (using the title form of the comic operas of the period of the
Oxford/Princeton study, was introduced to Broadway by African-Americans ,Will Marion Cook
and Paul Laurence Dunbar (lyricist). It illustrated how the cakewalk dance originated in
Louisiana in the early 1880s. Clorindy included blackface minstrel traditions and exemplified
the early style of jazz dance performed by black musical artists. comedy.”
Some other operas performed in America
1767 - Thomas Arne. English. Love in a Village (1762), produced in Philadelphia in 1767.
Pastiche of forty-two pieces, only five of which were composed by Arne himself. (Source: Kirk)
1794 – Tammany; or The Indian Chief (Music of the Colonial and Revolutionary Period by John
Ogasapian. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004): “Hewitt’s anti-Federalist political opera.”
March 3, 1794 premiere. Other notes on this opera in this document as well.
41
1814 - The Aethiop; or, The Child of the Desert by Rayner Taylor, an important early example
of an American romantic grand opera, was especially long-running – from 1814 to the Civil War.
Rayner Taylor came to Philadelphia in his forties. He had been trained at the Chapel Royal and
when he was twelve he sang at the funeral of Handel. In 1765 he was appointed music director
at Sadler’s Wells. In 1793, he settled in Philadelphia; three of his comic operas were produced
in Annapolis, Maryland. Taylor’s most important work was The Aethiop; or, The Child of the
Desert (1813 Kirk writes in the body of her text, although she writes 1814 in a listing in the
volume), “an overwhelmingly successful, spectacular ‘Grand Romantic Drama’ that provided
Americans with an early prototype of modern musical dramaturgy.” (Kirk).
1824 – Micah Hawkins, composer of The Saw Mill, or, A Yankee Trick, appears to be the first
American-born composer to have written both the music and the libretto for an opera.
1825 – John Davies’s The Forest Rose; or, American Farmers, with text by Samuel Woodworth,
contains a role (probably the first) for an African-American woman and places new emphasis on
the singing star.
1840 – see prior 1840 item – where additional notes are located.
1845 – Written in the bel canto tradition, Leonora by William Henry Fry is the first grand opera
by an American-born composer to receive wide-ranging publicity and reviews. “But as Hipsher
points out “In ‘Leonora’ and in ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ [1863] the composer undertook to
harmonize the qualities of the French and Italian schools of opera, in the general form of the
French grand opera as developed by Lulli [as spelled by Hipsher] and Gluck. There was
cantilena after the Italian model; but the dramatic arrangement, orchestration and ensemble
followed French traditions.” Hipsher notes that “on the score of ‘Leonora’ the composer made
the interesting notation that ‘This lyrical drama was produced on the stage with the view of
presenting to the American public, a grand opera originally adapted to English words.’ The
libretto was derived from Bulwer’s ‘Lady of Lyons,’ a play in which our beautiful and supremely
talented Mary Anderson made one of her greatest successes, and which held the boards till well
toward the end of the last century…”
1855 – George Frederick Bristow’s (1825-1898) Rip Van Winkle is one of the earliest operas to
be based on work by an important contemporaneous American author, Washington Irving.
Wlaschin writes: “Washington Irving 1783-1859, has been popular with opera composers for
more than 160 years.” Grout writes: “This opera has some spoken dialogue; the music is
conventional and undistinguished, a lame imitation of the fashionable European light-opera
style.”
1868 – Virginia’s Ball by John Thomas Douglass is believed to be the earliest opera by a black
composer.
1885 - The Joust; or, The Tournament by G. Estabrook is the first complete opera by an
American woman to be published (by the Chicago Music Company).
42
_____________________________________________________
Karen Ahlquist – Democracy at the Opera, Music, Theater, and Culture in New York City, 18151860.
(Chapter headings) English Opera as Popular Culture: The Beggar’s Opera tradition; Nature’s
New Mirror: English Opera and Theatrical Reform; Culture and Commerce: The First Opera
Nights in New York; ‘Directly form the Heart’: English Opera and the Power of Music in the
Age of Sentiment; The Failure that Flourished: Early New York Opera Houses [Max Maretzek, a
prominent conductor and impresario who immigrated to New York in 1848, called Italian opera
during the Jacksonian era ‘an establishment whose ‘failure’ has flourished for the last five and
twenty years” - P.16,Ahlquist]; The New Italian Opera and Its Reception Opera and the ‘Higher
Order of Composition.’”
Ahlquist’s volume: “….beliefs about the sources of music’s meaning and value affected the
reception of Italian and English opera in New York. Italian opera was ‘culture,’ its tasteful
music and polite social setting said to refine and civilize its audience. In English opera, on the
other hand, words revealed the sentiment and allowed the music to serve goodness and virtue.
Both sets of beliefs served the ideals of progress and social and moral reform. The new English
operas of the 1830s took a form the general public could recognize, but with its ‘rational and
refined’ musical style intact. As the city’s [New York] theaters assimilated the genre into their
own tradition, its success increased. English opera at the Park Theatre and later at the National
allowed New Yorkers to have their sentimental ideal, play on Italian opera’s elegant social
setting, and support a genre that could support itself.
“The heyday of English opera in New York extended from the first performances at the Park
Theatre in 1833 of Mary Ann and Joseph Wood, a well-known English soprano and tenor, to the
mid-1840s. Published income records from before the Panic of 1837 show that with an average
weekly income of over $3,000, the Park could easily pay its $18,000 annual rent and turn a profit.
These same records show that the Woods drew as well as the stars of the legitimate drama.
Englis opera also supported the new National Theatre and helped to keep the Park going after the
panic. It eve played at the Olympic, a tiny theater with no social pretentions and known for
burlesque and spoofs of city life. In the late 1830s, observers called the public ‘opera mad.’”
“The repertoire itself was eclectic. It included, first, eighteenth-century comic operas that still
drew an audience, for example, Love in a Village, The Waterman (the New York premiere was in
1793), The Quaker (1794), and The Duenna (1787); second, English melodramatic operas from
the teens and 1820s, such as The Devil’s Bridge and Bishop’s Clari (1823)5 third, new English
operas from continental originals such as Rophino Lacy’s Cinderella (1831, after Rossini’s La
Cenerentola), his Maid of Judah (1832, a Rossini pastiche on Scott’s Ivanhoe), and Bellini’s La
sonnambula (1835) and fourth, peras in Italian style by British composers, for example, Michael
William Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl (1844) and William Michael Rooke’s Amkilie (1838).
“’Englished’ opera (the third category) was the most successful type. These adaptations,
many by Henry Bishop, had played in New York since the teens. Among the most popular early
examples were The Libertine (1817, after Don Giovanni), The Barber of Seville (1819), and The
Marriage of Figaro (1823). Adaptation ‘for the English stage’ consisted of deleting some of the
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music, substituting spoken dialogue for recitative, translating the texts into English, and
sometimes inserting ballads, glees, or dance music. Although Bishop’s Barber of Seville
included some of Rossini’s elaborate ensembles, in general the early adaptations were strippeddown versions of the originals. By the 1830s, however, this was becoming less the case.
Librettos from productions of this period show music directors treating the English arrangements
as loosely as the arrangers had treated the originals. With scores readily available, it was
possible to restore music Bishop and others had omitted. “Englished” opera, along with newly
composed operas by British composers, was beginning to resemble its Italian counterpart in
musical structure and style.
“The new operas served the ideal of edification through musical sentiment. While the plots of
the earlier English pieces had often dealt with conflicts between good and evil men, the operas of
the 1830s often featured female protagonists being tested for purity, virtue, and innocence. For
example, Mary Ann Wood sang title roles in Cinderella, La sonnambula, Clari, The Maid of
Judah , The Mountain Sylph, and The Jewess, the oldest of which (Clari) dated only from 1823.
With narrative emphasis shifted toward women as a force for the good, a female singer could
counter her link with the evils of the stage. Able to confirm a theater’s piece’s moral value by
communicating ‘appropriate thoughts in appropriate dress,’ she could implicitly answer
objections to the theater through a convincing performance of suitable repertoire. Operas such as
Cinderella, La sonnambula, and Amilie all feature leading female characters in serious situations.
If they include comic action (Cinderella is largely comic), the heroine takes no part in it, but
remains above, dignified, idealized, and sentimental. Each of these operas was introduced by a
popular prima donna; all three became the singers’ signature pieces. Enjoyable as they were, all
three were also eminently respectable: Opera, presented in high-quality performances by singers
in didactic roles, gave New Yorkers new ways to understand and value it, along with a new
avenue into the Italian style.
“This change in focus, together with the Italian style’s wider expressive range, allowed all the
opera characters to sing. In fact, music’s growing role in English opera slowly forced characters
to sing. The musical style of the teens had not been varied enough to allow characters like Baron
Toraldi of The Devil’s Bridge to express their villany. (P. 89 Ahlquist)….
Villains were replaced by a variety of singing men, each given his own musical style. Guy
Mannering, for example, a non-singing character in Henry Bishop’s opera after Walter Scott, has
several successors – Alidoro in Cinderella, the counts in La sonnambula and Amilie, and Auber’s
Fra Diavolo….
“Despite music’s increased role, however, English opera of the 1830’s still put the theater first.
These pieces were not ‘in music’ throughout; therefore, they depended on their spoken portions
for dramatic structure and meaning. Because they were performed in English, New Yorkers
could grasp that meaning without filtering it through a foreign language. More important, the
music, no matter how elaborate, nearly always supported an opera’s textual meaning….music
reliably heightened the libretto’s effect.”
More about Italian opera in New York (such as La sonnambula, came from Italy via London
and was still in [New York’s] English opera repertoire as late as the 1870s.) see P. 90 Ahlquist
for more about the Italian or Italianate music in opera in New York.
____________________________________________________
What might also be of interest in the study of opera in London and New York 1770-1870, is the
two-year American tour opened in New York by Jenny Lind in 1850. Although she had given up
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singing opera roles entirely by the time in which she arrived in New York in 1850 [Ahlquist], she
had a repertoire that included opera extracts, and opera took a prominent place in her programs.
Ahlquist writes: “Jenny Lind sang operatic ‘gems’ in their original languages, allowing her
audience to hear ‘music from heaven,’ associated it with the pious Jenny Lind, and ignore (or
remain ignorant of) its original setting. While spreading operative music and reconfirming its
appeal, she helped disassociate it from the theater – from plots and characters her audiences
might find objectionable and from singers who not longer met conventional standards of
feminine virtue. Moreover, in publicly rejecting the stage she told her listeners that the
disassociation was conscious and morally based. In this way, she held up the distinction between
controversial musical drama and inherently moral music.” (Ahlquist “Opera and the ‘Higher
Order of Composition’,” 184-187).
___________________________________________
William Henry Fry. “America’s first distinguished composer-critic, Fry (1813-1864) was music
editor of the New York Tribune from 1852 until his death. His Leonore (1845), though musically
derivative, is notable as the first grand opera by an American. Fry lobbied tirelessly for
America’s musical independence, a position which set him at odds with J.S. Dwight [more about
Dwight coming]. “….So exalted has music become on a grand scale in England, above all other
countries, that on a recent occasion five thousand performers – the body of singers being over
four thousand, executed at the Sydenham Palace choral music, with an effect that all competent
auditors and judges agree in saying was preternatural for its largeness, its immensity – and bore
comparison musically with other performances, as does Niagara with an ordinary little
waterfall…”
John Sullivan Dwight, ‘Mr. Fry and His Critics’ Dwight’s Journal of Music (4 February 1854).
“Arbiter of Boston’s musical tastes for more than three decades, Dwight (1813-1893), was
America’s first music critic of international stature. Conservative by nature, he took issue both
with Wagner and Brahms and with American composers like William Henry Fry who were
struggling to establish a native musical identity. Dwight’s Journal of Music, which he published
from 1852 to 1881, filled his prescription for ‘a great, many-sided, high-toned musical journal.’”
Dwight’s critical article was not directed at Fry’s opera, but at a symphony which Fry composed.
Edward Ellsworth Hipsher. American Opera and its Composers. New York: Da Capo Press,
1978 [an updating of American Opera and its Composers by Edward Ellsworth Hipsher. “A
Complete History of Serious American Opera, with a Summary of the lighter forms which led up
to its birth.” Philadelphia: Theodore Presser Co., 1927.
New introduction by H. Earle Johnson cites some corrections to Hipsher’s previous work, and
provides biographical sketches of American composers, stating the debt owed to Sonneck’s
Early Opera in America and other publications. Johnson pays tribute to Hipsher’s
“comprehensive surveillance” of American opera. Johnson writes: “Yet, one wonders…Does
the forest primeval of American opera from the years 1855 (Bristow’s Rip Van Winkle) to 1927
(first edition of Hipsher) offer worthier examples than we know? There is, as yet, no crusade to
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find out. [Note: This, the Princeton/Oxford project may reveal.]…We note the large tribe of
Indianists, the smaller plantation of Negroists, and an occasional diversion into the land-ofenchantment,” writes Johnson. “Rarely do we encounter the country rustic or venture into the
urbanist’s ghetto. It is sometimes held that John Davies’ Forest Rose (or The American
Farmers) and George F. Root’s The Haymakers qualify as the earliest operas on native themes.
Hipsher mentions neither while offering a broad selection of 18th-century imported ballad operas
plus works by recent Americans, works more difficult to classify but frequently of greater
substance.”
Excerpts from Hipsher’s book
P. 23: “It is not easy to determine just which was the first real opera created in America. In the
earlier operas many or most of the songs had been fitted to melodies already popular as folk
tunes. Not infrequently the work was a genuine pasticcio, the musical numbers having been
borrowed from various composers. But there now had been for some years a tendency toward
works by individual composers and of a better mold. In these there was an almost imperceptible
emerging from the play with incidental music into the opera in which the music became of prime
importance. Perhaps the evolution was consummated about the time that these United States
were in the travail of a national birth.”
Hipsher points to “The Temple of Minerva, an Oratorial Entertainment” by Francis Hopkinson
performed on December 11, 1781 “at the hotel of the Minister of France in Philadelphia, before
His Excellency General Washington and his lady, and a select company. (‘Oratorial, in the usage
of that day, was derived from ‘oratory’ and not from ‘oratorio.’). Research has failed to discover
aught of the musical score, so it cannot be affirmed that this was entirely by Mr. Hopkinson.
However, his libretto gives every structural evidence of having been intended to be sung entire;
and so ‘The Temple of Minerva’ may be said to have been our first sincere attempt at Grand
Opera.” (P. 23)
August 1787 – term “opera-house” was first used in America. (P. 23). This was in connection
with the former Southwark Theater (Philadelphia). “’Reconciliation,’ a comic opera by Peter
Markoe, was accepted in 1790 by the Old American Company, but never performed….”
“’Tammany; or, The Indian Chief,’ a serious opera with its libretto by Mrs. Anne Julia Hatton
and music by James Hewitt, was probably the most earnest effort of its time. In fact it came near
qualifying as our first native real opera; and it certainly was the earliest of American operas on
Indian subjects…The opera was first produced in the John Street Theater, New York, March 3,
1794, and was heard but three times in New York, twice in Philadelphia and once in Boston.
‘Tammany’ contained true Indian themes and was one of the first instances of such use of our
native Indian melodies. The story has certain dramatic possibilities, even though playing rather
freely with history.” Hipsher lists other opera productions on the American scene and directs the
reader to Sonneck’s research of this period.
Hipsher highlights Nelson Barker’s “The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage” produced in
Philadelphia in 1808, Raynor Taylor’s “The American Tar; or The Press Gang Defeated”
appeared in the period of the War of 1812. “The Ballad Opera,” Hipsher writes, “was not at a
low tide of popularity; and no other was yet familiar to the colonial public. Then in the season of
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1817-1818 these English operas entered upon a respite of favor. Half-play and half music as
they were, these served an excellent purpose, adding to the importance of theatrical music,
employing actors with singing voices, and preparing the theater-going public for the imminent
pure opera with its continuous musical speech.”
Hipsher points out “Clari, the Maid of Milan” (1823) with a libretto by “our own” John Howard
Payne, and music by Henry Bishop, the English composer. “Home, Sweet Home” was heard in
this production for the first time in America, still iconic today.
Hipsher notes “The Saw Mill; of, A Yankee Trick,” (1824) produced at the Chatham Theater in
New York. It was called “the first genuine American opera” – (a phrase that is used in similar
language about a number of operas in America, I note, V.A.).
The next spring – New York production of “The Forest Rose; or, The American Farmers,’ a
ballad opera by Samuel Woodworth.
The following autumn, “Italian Opera, sponsored by the gifted Garcia family, appeared in
America,” Hipsher writes, “and for some years there was a struggle between Opera in Italian and
Opera in English, in which, with the gradual ascendancy of the Italian, the feeble flame of
American operatic composition seems to have flickered low.”
In July 1830 “in an effort to quicken the native music,” a notice appeared in Euterpiad
announcing a prize for the best opera, though “there is extant no record of this first offer of its
kind bringing forth any response…”
1844 – the Seguin company gave in New York the first performance in America of Balfe’s
“Bohemian Girl” – “a work which, with its refined melodies, its musicianly harmonies and score,
its skillful plot and a libretto of some real literary merit, was to have no small influence on the
trend of American musical taste and creative activities,” according to Hipsher.
The first tangible achievements in grand opera, says Hipsher, came from George F. Bristow and
William Henry Fry. Then Ole Bull, manager of opera at The Academy of Music of New York in
1855 offered “To American Composers” – a prize of $1,000 “for the best original grand opera,
by an American composer, and upon a strictly American subject.” On March 5, 1855, because of
“insuperable difficulties the American Academy of Music” closed.
Thus no American opera evolved out of this prize.
Ahlquist’s volume provides basic reference material on Italian opera in New York.
“English opera’s success in the 1830s did its Italian competition no good. It must have galled
Italian opera’s supporters who insisted an opera house was essential to New York to watch
English opera’s string of hits in the commercial theater. But the 1830s were not the right time
for a compromise between commerce and culture. Jacksonian social polarities were too strong
for a ‘democratic’ opera house to be anything other than a contradiction in terms. The terms
themselves- social, economic, political, and esthetic – on which an opera house could succeed in
an American city were as yet known.”
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Ahlquist writes that “Max Maretzek, a prominent conductor and impresario who immigrated to
New York inn 1848, called Italian opera during the Jacksonian era ‘an establishment whose
‘failure’ has flourished for the last five and twenty years.” (P. 116 Ahlquist). Ahlquist
propounds that the question of whether Italian opera could maintain its integrity and still be sold
to a sovereign American audience remained open for thirty years. By 1832 “an Italian Opera
Association did better, building an opera house and maintaining it with a resident troupe from
1833 to 1835. Independent of the commercial theaters, the Italian Opera House was built,
supported and managed by a group of New York business and civic leaders.” P. 117. The new
opera house audience “successfully competed for public attention with the performances
themselves.” (P. 118). But some of the practices planned to attract “a respectable clientele were
interpreted as ostentatious and exclusive. Perhaps understandably in Jacksonian America,
‘democratic’ hatred of anything smacking of ‘aristocracy’ hurt opera’s chance at financial
success.”
Ahlquist notes that by the 1830s, “however, it was widely noticed; at times, the Jacksonian press
seemed obsessed with aristocracy and fashion…Finally in 1841, the Herald, the leading paper of
the new and burgeoning penny press, ridiculed the wealthy with a front page cartoon that ‘every
candidate for admission into the new nobles must be dressed and pressed into these forms and
figures.” Ahlquist then reviews “the emblem of theatrical democracy, the Bowery
Theatre…founded in 1826, as an alternative to the Park…the Bowery had presented Maria
Garcia’s successful English opera season in 1827. From 1830, however, under manager Thomas
Hamblin, it began to court what was essentially a pit audience.” Walt Whitman wrote about the
Bowery Theatre (see pages 119-123). The Bowery was a first come first served operation with
the “press of humanity” being very much in evidence. No subscriptions, no reserved seats,
shoving at the door, jostling for a good place “were part of democratic theater…Self-consciously
anti-genteel, the Bowery’s social setting was consonant with the culture of its neighborhood.”
Around 1830 Frances Trollope, “the famous transatlantic observer of American life before
Tocqueville, called the Bowery pretty, perfect as to size and proportion, however, “it is not the
fashion.” Philip Hone agreed. “In 1838 he remarked of his Bowery cornerstone laying of 1826,
‘No act of my public life cost me so many friends.’”
“In 1833 a daily theatrical newsletter, Figaro, pro-Italian opera and pro-opera house,
recommended the Bowery’s legitimate drama over the Park’s, just as it recommended opera at
the Italian Opera House over the Park’s Joseph and Mary Ann Wood.”
Ahlquist reports that the Bowery had declined precipitously in the minds of the city’s leaders;
Hone’s friends (and he had many) found it unfit for their presence. This ill-fitness was proven
literally. In 1832 an Italian opera company under Giocomo Montresor performed a short season
at the Richmond Hill Theatre. In 1833 it moved to the Bowery. Despite the latter’s physical and
acoustic superiority, the season was a failure. By the end, the performers were ‘almost literally
playing to empty benches.’”
This brings the matter to the idea of whether New Yorkers would attend Italian opera
performances at a proper opera house. P. 122 – Ahlquist. This set the stage for the Italian Opera
House, which “linked a performance genre with a new institution, a link seen as necessary to its
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success.” There would be control over opera’s manner of presentation, management policies,
personnel, customs of their own choosing, “no crowding, no impoliteness, and no compromise.”
“They could extend the notion of high culture in the city by patronizing New Yorkers’ access to
European music. Or they could found a business – one that would attract customers as in the
theater and pay its own way.” Ahlquist reviews all the thinking and also the fact that it was
“probably not well thought-out” – but in 1832 an Italian Opera Association was formed to
support the project. P. 123. Chapter 5 (Ahlquist) gives the entire history of the Italian Opera
House and its problems and ultimate failure. Another opera house was not attempted in New
York for nearly a decade, Ahlquist writes (P. 130. “Yet musical growth continued unabated…
The musical growth of the 1840s included Italian opera.” (P. 130).
Italian opera in New York had its revival in 1843 under the leadership of William Niblo,
proprietor of Niblo’s Garden, a theatrical entrepreneur. Three works were performed: Bellini’s
Norma, Donizetti’s Gemma de Vergy and Lucia di Lammermoor. “All three were Italian
premieres; only Norma had been performed in English. A second entrepreneur took on opera in
New York, Ferdinando Palmo, an Italian immigrant and opera lover. His theatre had 800 seats,
with seats numbered, all seats had a good view, all seats were $1, but this was a failure as well.
Palmo’s experiment however led to “practical solutions to opera’s problems….growth in
auditorium size…followed. Palmo’s was even more important in another respect. Unlike at the
Italian Opera House, operas produced at Palmo’s helped establish New York’s standard operatic
repertoire. Audiences were learning opera from Italian originals rather than from English
adaptations. This trend would continue…Opera was being ‘naturalized’ in New York in its
original state.” (P.133).
Opera’s establishment in New York was completed by 1854. The saga of opera in New York as
told by Ahlquist continues to page 159. Very briefly stated, in Chapter 6, “The New Italian
Opera and its Reception” the discussion resumes with the statement, “After years of uncertainty,
the failure had finally flourished. At last, New Yorkers could take a critical look at opera itself.”
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