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The English Trade in Nightingales Ingeborg Zechner The English Trade in Nightingales Italian Opera in Nineteenth-Century London Ingeborg Zechner Translated from the German by Rosie Ward Published with the support from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF):PUB 390-G26 Open access: Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Cataloging-in-publication data: http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2017 by Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Wien Köln Weimar Wiesingerstraße 1, A-1010 Wien, www.boehlau-verlag.com Translation: Rosie Ward Cover design: Michael Haderer, Wien Layout: Bettina Waringer, Wien Printing and binding: Prime Rate, Budapest Printed on acid-free and chlorine-free bleached paper Printed in the EU ISBN 978-3-205-20554-8 Acknowledgements I would like to thank all those who have enabled and supported the writing of this book, which originated as a PhD dissertation completed at the University of Graz in 2014 and was published as a German monograph by Böhlau Verlag in Vienna in 2017. I therefore owe the deepest gratitude to Rosie Ward, who undertook the translation of the German version with impressive thoroughness and professionalism. In the earlier stages, a John M. Ward Fellowship from Harvard University’s Houghton Library enabled me to access essential sources. I am equally indebted to the ever-helpful Antonella Imolesi of the Biblioteca Forlì, particularly for allowing me to reproduce archival materials. I thank Gabriella Dideriksen, Jennifer Hall-Witt, Roger Parker, Curtis Price and Sven Oliver Müller for their advice and their readiness to share their research experience. Klaus Dieter Ertler provided invaluable help with the transcription of the French-language singers’ contracts. I am particularly grateful to Michael Walter, who advised and assisted me constantly throughout the research and writing process, and for the support of Kordula Knaus and Anselm Gerhard. Finally, I thank my family, without whose financial support I could not have undertaken this project. Contents Acknowledgements 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1 2 The Landscape of Italian Opera in Nineteenth-Century London .......................................... 11 3 London Audiences ................................................................................................................. 23 4 The Singers ............................................................................................................................ 46 4.1 British and Irish singers and Italian opera: A search for identity ................................... 49 5 Singers’ Contracts in London ................................................................................................ 67 5.1 Exceptional contracts from early nineteenth-century London ....................................... 67 5.2 Pierre François Laporte’s 1834 and 1835 contracts with Giulia Grisi and Antonio Tamburini ............................................................................................................................. 91 5.3 Court proceedings in London’s opera industry in the mid-nineteenth century ............ 109 5.4 Pauline Viardot-García’s contracts with the Royal Italian Opera, 1847–1855 ............ 129 5.5 Contracts in the 1860s: Frederick Gye and Mario ....................................................... 157 6 Italian Operas for London ................................................................................................... 173 6.1 Adaptations ................................................................................................................... 175 6.2 Aria insertion ................................................................................................................ 197 7 Concluding Remarks ........................................................................................................... 231 8 Appendices .......................................................................................................................... 235 8.1 Transcriptions of singers’ contracts ............................................................................. 235 8.2 Sample season programme overviews ......................................................................... 256 9 List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................................... 261 10 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 262 Index of Names ...................................................................................................................... 273 1 Introduction Der Frühling ist zwar hier noch nicht in voller Blüthe, aber die Nachtigallen sind trotzdem schon wieder da, und die meisten haben wieder aus Deutschland und Italien ihren Flug über’s Meer genommen, um in den goldenen Hainen der britischen Insel zu flöten und zu trillern. Die Unternehmer der beiden italiänischen Opern […] machen ihre jährlichen Reisen nach dem Continente und suchen […] die besten Vögel einzufangen.1 In the nineteenth century, London’s Italian opera stages were the international opera world’s most prominent and most important marketplace. The international star singers engaged by the London opera managers at their respective houses formed the cornerstones of the system. The incentive for singers to take on an engagement in London was considerable: because of the star-centred nature of the city’s Italian operatic culture, leading singers of the time could often attract exorbitant fees, and so frequently used the London season as a lucrative source of income. The prospect of drawing financial gain from London’s opera industry also attracted the hopes of composers, such as Giuseppe Verdi, whose 1847 I masnadieri was a commission for Her Majesty’s Theatre – although the work did not appeal to the conservative tastes of London audiences. But from a financial point of view, I masnadieri cannot be considered a complete failure, even if one voice in the English press characterised it as ‘one of the worst operas ever written’.2 Her Majesty’s Theatre was completely sold out; even the Queen and Prince Albert made sure not to miss the event. The reason for the rush on tickets was in fact not Verdi’s new opera, but the ‘Swedish Nightingale’ Jenny Lind, who created the part of Amalia: ‘It was, however, the fifth part essayed by Jenny Lind in this country – a fact which brought many persons to hear it, who would otherwise have been scared away by the mere name of Verdi’.3 The star singers on London’s stages clearly held stronger powers of attraction than did the works they performed. This was all the more true because of the lack of state subsidy for London theatres and opera houses: a financial situation which meant that the city’s Italian opera houses were more closely aligned with the market economy than were their continental European counterparts. Competition in the London opera market intensified still further in 1847, when a second Italian opera house opened in the city, significantly reconfiguring the 1 Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung für Kunstfreunde und Künstler 14 (1866), p. 133. 2 Musical World 22 (1847), p. 566. 3 Ibid. 1 structure of operatic life. It was this atmosphere of intense competition that international observers found most extraordinary about London’s opera scene. ‘Eine so unerhörte Ausdehnung italienischer Opernmusik in fremdem Land muß heutzutage nicht wenig auffallen’, declared Eduard Hanslick, describing Italian opera’s prestigious status, far above any other forms of opera, in the English capital.4 Strikingly in this context, at no point during the nineteenth century – despite intensive efforts by English composers – did a native English tradition of opera composition develop. Italian opera – always closely associated with the epithet ‘fashionable’ – certainly played a decisive role in this: the lack of English works reinforced the position of Italian opera as the market leader; this state of affairs, in turn, left little space for non-Italian operatic ventures to find a foothold in the fiercely competitive market. 5 It can therefore be argued that Italian opera specifically was fundamental to nineteenth-century English audiences’ aesthetic ideals surrounding opera more generally. This primacy of the Italian was reflected in all aspects of operatic life, and ultimately led to a process of globalisation of Italian opera, through American tours by Italian opera companies departing from England. Opera in this context was less a pure artistic ideal than a means to fulfilling economic objectives; in this respect, the development’s roots lay in London’s opera industry. This financial orientation of London’s theatre and opera industry is especially pronounced from the middle of the nineteenth century, because of the increased degree of competition at that time. The Theatre Regulation Act of 1843 ended a monopoly dating from the eighteenth century, which had restricted the right to perform spoken drama to the two ‘patent houses’ (Drury Lane and Covent Garden), and the right to perform Italian opera to the King’s Theatre (renamed Her Majesty’s Theatre in 1837). To some extent, of course, there had been theatre performances beyond these legal restrictions before 1843. But official direct competition could only be
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