Opera Salaries in Eighteenth-Century London

1993 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Milhous ◽  
Robert D. Hume
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Academy ◽  
Star System ◽  
Ballet Dancers ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Opera House ◽  
Napoleonic Era ◽  
Opera Singers ◽  
First Time

Until the last fifteen years, very few salaries have been known for Italian opera singers or ballet dancers in eighteenth-century London. Two major new sources are presented here for the first time: Chancery testimony concerning salaries in the 1780s, and a series of manuscript annotations giving salaries of principals for eight seasons between 1796 and 1808. Added to recent discoveries concerning the first decade of the century, the Royal Academy of Music in the 1720s, and Chancery testimony about the pay scale in the 1760s, this information makes an overview possible. The top and bottom of the salary scale (£1,500 to £100) remained surprisingly stable from the 1720s to the 1790s. During the last third of the century ballet emerges from relative insignificance and attains virtual parity in cost and status with opera itself. The star system was established as early as 1708, and the size of the theater was always a key determinant in limiting salaries. The huge new opera house of 1791, coupled with Napoleonic-era inflation, quickly increased salaries at the top end of the scale, culminating in the £5,250 paid to Catalani in 1808. The gap between top and bottom salaries was always enormous, but in the later years of this survey the gap was widening substantially.

The Short, Lascivious Lives of Two Venetian Theaters, 1580-85

2002 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 936-968 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene J. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
New Information ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opera House ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

The teatro all'italiana, or Italian opera house with boxes, was one of the most successful building types invented during the Renaissance, but fragmentary and ambiguous evidence has made locating its origins difficult. This article proposes that those origins are to be found in two theaters for commedia dell'arte built in Venice in 1580 and destroyed by order of the Council of Ten in 1585 (m.v.). The history of these two theaters is sketched here for the first time by means of documents recently found in the Archivio di Stato, Venice, that also include new information related to Palladia's Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. The role the two Venetian theaters played in the economic, political and social history of the city is suggested.

Haydn’s Judaizing of the apothecary

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 41-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caryl Clark
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Opera Buffa ◽  
Opera House ◽  
Orchestral Musicians

As the first Italian opera to grace the stage of the new opera house at Eszterháza, Lo speziale (1768) afforded Kapellmeister Haydn, and the singers and orchestral musicians under his direction, the opportunity to revel in comedic performance. The revised libretto translated well to the rural court of Prince Nicolaus, whose tastes and cultural patronage extended to opera buffa. As Matthew Head has argued ( Cambridge Companion , 2005), Sempronio, the apothecary of the title whose fascination with the exotic makes him an easy target for duping, is also a harbinger of difference. And this “difference,” I contend, is the sign of Sempronio’s main character flaw — his Jewishness. Like other theatrical stereotypes on the mid-eighteenth-century stage, Jews came with a recognizable set of characteristic traits, all of which could readily be exploited in comedic contexts. How the apothecary’s profession and characterization, including aspects of voice, body and gesture, are linked to Jewish representation, is explored in this article through the analysis of a couple of representative scenes from the opera, among them the final Turkish scene, in which a confrontation between Orientalist Others creates semiotic overload. By characterizing the apothecary as Jewish, Haydn was able to demonstrate his complicity in the ideological agenda operative under the terms of his employment — i.e. that of re-inscribing the needs, desires and dominating authority of Prince Nicolaus. In Lo speziale , the prince’s penchant for theatrical works featuring Jewish characters and caricatures was transferred from Wanderntruppe to Operntruppe .

Italian Opera and Arson in Late Eighteenth-Century London

1989 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Curtis Price
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Information ◽  
Opera Seria ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Opera House ◽  
To Come ◽  
Opera Houses

After the burning of the Haymarket theater in 1789, the Italian opera in London was in chaos. Yet several critics called this a golden age for opera seria, and London continued to attract the greatest singers and dancers. A recently discovered archive-which includes the complete financial and managerial records of two London opera houses-adds considerably to our understanding of this period and provides new information about Haydn, Burney, Sheridan, Turner, the Storaces, and Mozart. The documents also show that the Prince of Wales, the Marquis of Salisbury, and the Duke of Bedford patronized and secretly financed a court opera house at the Pantheon during 1790-92, with Paisiello as house composer in absentia. But faced with crushing competition from Haydn at the new Haymarket theater, Bedford and Salisbury conspired to have the Pantheon burned down, an act which affected the management of Italian opera in London for decades to come.

The Practical and Symbolic Functions of Pre-Rameau Opera at the Paris Opéra before Gluck

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Michel Noiray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter explains how a uniquely long-lived canon evolved in revivals of operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully and his immediate successors—chiefly André Campra and André-Cardinal Destouches—right up to the early 1770s. The Académie Royale de Musique was unique as the only theater to resist Italian repertory, except in two brief controversial periods. A dogmatic commitment to the old style and repertory survived after Lully’s death, quite separate from the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau. Opposition to this unique practice broke out occasionally among the public, but such opinion was not widely supported in the press. It is striking that the main critics of ancienne musique, as it was called—Rousseau, Paul Henri d’Holbach, and Friedrich Melchior von Grimm—all came from outside France. This chapter is paired with Franco Piperno’s “Italian opera and the concept of ‘canon’ in the late eighteenth century.”

“Quelques misérables places à remplir”Locating Shaped Painting in Eighteenth-Century France

2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 544-571
Author(s):  
David Pullins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Field ◽  
Decorative Arts ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article addresses in depth for the first time the irregularly shaped canvases known as tableaux chantournés (cut-out paintings) that were produced in vast numbers by leading academicians between the 1730s and 1750s and occupy a tenuous place between fine and applied or decorative arts. Through an examination of the term’s first uses in regard to painting and eighteenth-century critics’ responses to these works, tableaux chantournés are positioned as a means of rethinking the extraction of painting from a richer visual field and the relationship of this medium-specific agenda to the historiography of the rococo.

Aristotle's Approach to Poetry

1981 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
B. R. Rees
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Structural Pattern ◽  
Classical Text ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
Artistic Representation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western European ◽  
First Time

These are the opening words of Aristotle's Poetics, generally recognized as the most influential work in the history of Western European drama and poetic theory since the Renaissance. The initial statement of the scope of the inquiry is a formidable one; but a reader coming to it for the first time might well be forgiven for concluding that it promises far more than it achieves. Is it possible, he might ask, that all this is contained in a slim volume occupying no more than 47 pages in the Oxford Classical Text and 45 in the Penguin translation? Reading further, he might become even more disillusioned: what he discovers is that, after a very brief and perfunctory introduction on poetry as a form of mimesis or artistic representation, Aristotle limits himself to a discussion of tragedy, a cursory treatment of epic, and a few passing references to comedy, and that, even in the case of tragedy, by far the major part of the argument is devoted to an examination of plot. Can this really be the work which excited scholars in the Renaissance, inspired Milton to write Samson Agonistes, an Aristotelian drama if there ever was one, provided the structural pattern and dramatic conventions for the plays of Racine and Corneille, gave Fielding the principles on which he based his Tom Jones, influenced Goethe and Lessing and, through Lessing, Coleridge, and has won the attention and admiration of critics writing in English from James Harris at the end of the eighteenth century to Richard MacKeon in the second half of the twentieth? And, if so, why?

ON THE VENUES FOR AND DECLINE OF THEACCADEMIESAT ESZTERHÁZA IN HAYDN'S TIME

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
JÁNOS MALINA
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Direct Proof ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Ground Floor ◽  
The Real ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Present Practice ◽  
Domestic Use ◽  
Opera House

ABSTRACTThis article examines various eighteenth-century sources to determine whether they confirm the present practice of calling a first-floor hall of the Fertőd (Eszterháza) palace the ‘music room’. While the answer is essentially negative, we learn that the neighbouring ceremonial hall was used by Empress Maria Theresia for a banquet with some music-making in 1773, and that two more spaces on the ground floor served regularly as the ‘summer music halls’. So where did the ‘real’, quality concerts take place? A whole body of documentary evidence clearly shows that theaccademiestook place in the opera house orGrosses Theater. Much of this evidence refers to the first opera house, which burnt down in 1779. The practice apparently continued in the new, bigger 1781 opera house, but by then the number of concerts would have been reduced substantially, owing to the Prince's growing addiction to opera. A survey of Haydn's last symphonies and concertos composed for domestic use confirms that regular concerts could not have taken place later than 1783 or, possibly, 1784. However, a long-neglected remark in a contemporary witness report provides direct proof of the inclusion of symphonies in the course of opera performances.

Handel’s Transformative Compositional Practices

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-502
Author(s):  
David Ross Hurley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Developing Variation ◽  
Compositional History ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Transformations ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
First Time ◽  
Variation Process

In recent decades singers of Handel’s music have made great strides in recapturing the art of embellishing his music, thus breathing new life into forms such as the da capo aria. Yet Handel’s own “variations”—his development and transformation of musical material in his vocal music, important for understanding his compositional practice with borrowed as well as (presumably) original music—are not yet fully explored or appreciated. Admittedly, scholars have discussed musical procedures such as inserting, deleting, and reordering musical materials, as well as other Baroque combinatorial practices in Handel’s arias, but the musical transformations I discuss here are closer to a specifically Handelian brand of developing variation. To my knowledge, the concept of developing variation has never before been applied to early eighteenth-century music. I explore the relation of developing variation to drama (also rarely done) in two of Handel’s arias, providing a close examination of “Ombre, piante” from the opera Rodelinda and new thoughts about “Lament not thus,” originally intended for the oratorio Belshazzar. Although these arias belong to different genres and different stages of Handel’s career, they both exhibit material that undergoes a kind of progressive variation process that has tangible musical and dramatic ramifications, of interest to opera specialists and performers. Furthermore, both arias have a complicated compositional history; I offer fresh insights into the aesthetic qualities of each version, thereby throwing light on Handel’s possible compositional intentions. This article also discloses for the first time some recurring musical passages shared between “Lament not thus” and other pieces that could influence the listener’s interpretation of certain musico-dramatic gestures.

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