Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T07:20:05.845Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

14 - Opera in the London theatres

from Part IV - Places of Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2009

Daniel O'Quinn
Affiliation:
University of Guelph, Ontario
Jane Moody
Affiliation:
University of York
Get access

Summary

To say that the greater part of the English audience was suspicious of continental opera is an understatement. They found an entirely sung 'play' difficult to accept, disliked recitative, thought the plots ludicrous and treated opera with suspicion because it was 'foreign'. To such an audience, a genre with spoken dialogue called 'English Opera' (as opposed to opera in English) was decidedly preferable. Nevertheless, the arrival of Italian opera early in the eighteenth century was welcomed by that part of the public keen for something exotic and prepared to be charmed by the music, captivated by the stagings and scandalised by the singers. That these types of opera were used for different types of critical discourse emphasises the fact that Italian opera remained a separate and distinct force and indeed came to delineate a binary opposition in eighteenth-century culture.

This binary opposition manifested itself most obviously in the division of the repertoire between the London theatres. On the one hand, Drury Lane and Covent Garden put on mainly spoken plays; the all-sung operas staged there were usually afterpieces in English, though operas with spoken dialogue also appeared among the mainpieces in various guises, including ballad opera and burletta. There were three other venues for opera in English. The oldest of these was the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. Opened in 1720, it was an occasional venue for opera performances, including those in the summer under Samuel Foote from 1747 and George Colman the Elder's seasons from 1777. The English Opera House, later the Lyceum, which opened in 1772 and was first able to function as a proper theatre in 1809, was restricted to performing opera; not until the Licensing Act of 1843 was it allowed to present spoken drama. There was, lastly, the Olympic Theatre, which, for a short period in the 1830s under Eliza Vestris, was licensed to produce 'entertainments of music, dancing, burlettas, spectacle, pantomime, and horsemanship': the meaning of the term 'burletta' came to encompass almost any musical entertainment other than all-sung opera.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×