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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of musical examples
- Acknowledgements
- A note on conventions
- Introduction
- 1 The Hobart management
- 2 The new managers take control
- 3 Sacchini and the revival of opera seria
- 4 Recruitment procedures and artistic policy
- 5 The King's Theatre in crisis
- 6 The recruitment of Lovattini
- 7 The English community in Rome
- 8 Lucrezia Agujari at the Pantheon
- 9 Caterina Gabrielli
- 10 Rauzzini's last season
- 11 The King's Theatre flourishes
- 12 The Queen of Quavers satire
- 13 Financial management
- 14 Opera salaries
- 15 The sale of 1778
- Appendices
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The King's Theatre in crisis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of musical examples
- Acknowledgements
- A note on conventions
- Introduction
- 1 The Hobart management
- 2 The new managers take control
- 3 Sacchini and the revival of opera seria
- 4 Recruitment procedures and artistic policy
- 5 The King's Theatre in crisis
- 6 The recruitment of Lovattini
- 7 The English community in Rome
- 8 Lucrezia Agujari at the Pantheon
- 9 Caterina Gabrielli
- 10 Rauzzini's last season
- 11 The King's Theatre flourishes
- 12 The Queen of Quavers satire
- 13 Financial management
- 14 Opera salaries
- 15 The sale of 1778
- Appendices
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Probably no quality was more necessary for an opera impresario than the ability to cope with a crisis. Between 1774 and 1776, Brooke had to contend with a whole series of interlocking problems involving the irreconcilable demands of her leading singers, litigation over a broken contract and competition from a rival promoter of Italian opera stars. These were just the kinds of difficulties that had engulfed Hobart in 1771. The forceful and clear-sighted manner with which she surmounted the problems amounts to an impressive example of crisis management.
The new season began with Sacchini's Lucio vero, and on 29 January Perseo received its première. Both were successful, receiving sixteen and seventeen performances respectively. A reviewer in the Public Advertiser thought the music of Perseo up to Sacchini's usual standard, having ‘all the fire, all the elegance, all the pathos of that celebrated composer’. The choruses were still attracting favourable comment, being deemed ‘pleasing’ and one in particular ‘beautifully pathetic’. High-profile theatrical spectacle, prominent in Sacchini's first London operas, is still much in evidence. A lavish production meant lavish expenditure, and whatever his own inclinations, the composer could not have taken this course without the support of the opera management. Reviewers had remarked on the studied magnificence of the costumes and the elegance of the scenery in Il Cid, and Burney later praised the ‘knowledge of stage effects’ shown in this opera and in Tamerlano.
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- Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century LondonThe King's Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance, pp. 60 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001