Mrs. Billington, Banti's contemporary, after singing not only in England, but at all the best theatres of Italy, left the stage in 1809. In 1794, while she was engaged at Naples, at the San Carlo, a violent eruption of Mount Vesuvius took place, which the Neapolitans attributed to the presence of an English heretic on their stage. Mrs. Billington's friends were even alarmed for her personal safety, when, fortunately, the eruption ceased, and the audience, relieved of their superstitious fears, applauded the admirable vocalist in all liberty and confidence. Mrs. Billington was an excellent musician, and before coming out as a singer had distinguished herself in early life (when Miss Weichsell) as a pianoforte player. She appears to have been but an indifferent actress, and, in her singing, to have owed her success less to her expression than to her "agility," which is said to have been marvellous. Her execution was distinguished by the utmost neatness and precision. Her voice was sweet and flexible, but not remarkable for fulness of tone, which formed the great beauty of Banti's singing. Mrs. Billington appeared with particular success in Bach's Clemenza di Scipione, in which the part of the heroine had been originally played in England by Miss Davies (L'Inglesina); Paisiello's Elfrida; Winter's Armida, and Castore e Polluce; and Mozart's Clemenza di Tito—the first of that master's works ever performed in England. At this time, neither the Nozze di Figaro, nor Mozart's other masterpiece, Don Giovanni (produced at Prague in 1787), seem to have been at all known either in England or in France.
After Banti's departure from England, and while Mrs. Billington was still at the King's Theatre, Grassini was engaged to sing alternately with the latter vocalist. She made her first appearance in La Vergine del Sole an opera by Mayer (the future preceptor of Donizetti), but in this work she succeeded more through her acting and her beauty than by her singing. Indeed, so equivocal was her reception, that on the occasion of her benefit, she felt it desirable to ask Mrs. Billington to appear with her. Mrs. Billington consented; and Winter composed an opera called Il Ratto di Proserpina, specially for the rival singers, Mrs. Billington taking the part of "Ceres," and Grassini that of "Proserpine." Now the tide of favour suddenly turned, and we are told that Grassini's performance gained all the applause; and that "her graceful figure, her fine expression of face, together with the sweet manner in which she sang several simple airs, stamped her at once the reigning favourite." Indeed, not only was Grassini rapturously applauded in public, but she was "taken up by the first society, fêted, caressed, and introduced as a regular guest in most of the fashionable assemblies." "Of her private claims to that distinction," adds Lord Mount Edgcumbe, "it is best to be silent; but her manners and exterior behaviour were proper and genteel."
At this period 1804-5, the tenors at the King's Theatre were Viganoni and Braham. Respecting the latter, who, in England, France and Italy, in English and in Italian operas, on the stage and in concert rooms, must have sung altogether for something like half a century, I must again quote the author of "Musical Reminiscences," who heard him in his prime. "All must acknowledge," he says, "that his voice is of the finest quality, of great power and occasional sweetness. It is equally certain that he has great knowledge of music, and can sing extremely well. It is therefore the more to be regretted that he should ever do otherwise; that he should ever quit the natural register of his voice by raising it to an unpleasant falsetto, or force it by too violent exertion; that he should depart from a good style, and correct taste, which he knows and can follow as well as any man, to adopt at times the over-florid and frittered Italian manner; at others, to fall into the coarseness and vulgarity of the English. The fact is, that he can be two distinct singers, according to the audience before whom he performs, and that to gain applause he condescends to sing as ill at the playhouse as he has done well at the Opera. His compositions have the same variety, and he can equally write a popular noisy song for the one, or its very opposite, for the other. A duetto of his, introduced into the opera of Gli Orazj, sung by himself and Grassini, had great beauty, and was in excellent taste. * * * * Braham has done material injury to English singing, by producing a host of imitators. What is in itself not good, but may be endured from a fine performer, becomes insufferable in bad imitation. Catalani has done less mischief, only because her powers are unique, and her astonishing execution unattainable. Many men endeavour to rival Braham, no woman can aspire to being a Catalani."
When both Grassini and Mrs. Billington retired, (1806), the place of both was supplied by the celebrated Catalani, the vocal queen of her time. She made her first appearance in Portogallo's Semiramide, (which is said to have been a very inferior opera to Bianchi's, on the same subject), and, among other works, had to perform in the Clemenza di Tito, of Mozart, whose music she is said to have disliked on the ground that it kept the singer too much under the control of the orchestra. Nevertheless, she introduced the Nozze di Figaro into England, and herself played the part of "Susanna" with admirable success.
"Her voice," says Ferrari (Jacques Godefroi, a pupil of Paisiello), "was sonorous, powerful, and full of charm and suavity. This organ, of so rare a beauty, might be compared for splendour to the voice of Banti; for expression, to that of Grassini; for sweet energy, to that of Pasta; uniting the delicious flexibility of Sontag to the three registers of Malibran. Madame Catalani had formed her style on that of Pacchierotti, Marchesi, Crescentini;[62] her groups, roulades, triplets, and mordenti, were of admirable perfection; her well articulated execution lost nothing of its purity in the most rapid and most difficult passages. She animated the singers, the chorus, the orchestra, even in the finales and concerted pieces. Her beautiful notes rose above and dominated the ensemble of the voices and instruments; nor could Beethoven, Rossini or any other musical Lucifer, have covered this divine voice with the tumult of the orchestra. Our virtuosa was not a profound musician; but, guided by what she did know, and by her practised ear, she could learn in a moment the most complicated pieces."
"Her firm, strong, brilliant, voluminous voice was of a most agreeable timbre," says Castil Blase; "it was an admirable soprano of prodigious compass, from la to the upper sol, marvellous in point of agility, and producing a sensation difficult to describe. Madame Catalani's manner of singing left something to desire in the noble, broad, sustained style. Mesdames Grassini and Barilli surpassed her on this point, but with regard to difficulties of execution and brio, Madame Catalani could ring out one of her favourite airs and exclaim, Son Regina! She was then without a rival. I never heard anything like it. She excelled in chromatic passages, ascending and descending, of extreme rapidity. Her execution, marvellous in audacity, made talents of the first order pale before it, and instrumentalists no longer dared figure by her side. When Tulou, however, presented himself, his flute was applauded with enthusiasm after Madame Catalani's voice. The experiment was a dangerous one, and the victory was only the more brilliant for the adventurous young artist. There was no end to the compliments addressed to him on his success."
On her way to London, in the summer of 1806, Catalani, whose reputation was then at its height, passed through Paris, and sang before the Emperor at St. Cloud. Napoleon gave her 5,000 francs for this performance, besides a pension of 1,200 francs, and the use of the Opera, with all expences paid, for two concerts, of which the receipts amounted to 49,000 francs. The French emperor, during his victorious career, had acquired the habit of carrying off singers as captives, and enrolling them, in spite of themselves, in his musical service. The same dictatorial system, however, failed when applied to Catalani.
"Where are you going, that you wish to leave Paris?" said Napoleon.
"To London, Sire," answered the singer.
"You must remain in Paris," replied Napoleon, "you will be well paid and your talents will be better appreciated here. You will have a hundred thousand francs a year, and two months' leave of absence. That is settled. Adieu, Madame."
Catalani went away without daring to say that she did not mean to break her engagement with the manager of the King's Theatre. In order to keep it she was obliged to embark secretly at Morlaix.
I have spoken of this celebrated vocalist's first appearance in London, and, having given an Italian and a French account of her singing, I may as well complete the description by quoting the remarks made by an Englishman, Lord Mount Edgcumbe, on her voice and style of execution.
"It is well known," he says, "that her voice is of a most uncommon quality, and capable of exertions almost supernatural. Her throat seems endued (as has been remarked by medical men) with a power of expansion and muscular motion by no means usual, and when she throws out all her voice to the utmost, it has a volume and strength that are quite surprising, while its agility in divisions, running up and down the scale in semi-tones, and its compass in jumping over two octaves at once, are equally astonishing. It were to be wished she was less lavish in the display of these wonderful powers, and sought to please more than to surprise; but her taste is vicious, her excessive love of ornament spoiling every simple air, and her greatest delight (indeed her chief merit) being in songs of a bold and spirited character, where much is left to her discretion (or indiscretion) without being confined by accompaniment, but in which she can indulge in ad libitum passages with a luxuriance and redundancy no other singer ever possessed, or if possessing, ever practised, and which she carries to a fantastical excess. She is fond of singing variations on some known simple air, and latterly has pushed this taste to the very height of absurdity, by singing, even without words, variations composed for the fiddle."
Allusion is here doubtless made to the air varié by Pierre Rode, the violinist, which, from Catalani to Alboni and our own Louisa Pyne, has been such a favourite show-piece with all vocalists of brilliant executive powers, more especially in England. The vocal variations on Rode's air, however, were written in London, specially for Catalani, by Drouet the flute-player.
Catalani returned to Paris in October, 1815, when there was no longer any chance of Napoleon reproaching her for her abrupt departure nine years before. She solicited and obtained the "privilege" of the Italian theatre; but here the celebrated system of her husband, M. Valabrèque (in which the best possible operatic company consisted only of ma femme et trois ou quatre poupées) quite broke down. Madame Catalani gave up the theatre, with the subvention of 160,000 francs allowed her by the government, in 1818, M. Valabrèque having previously enunciated in a pamphlet the reasons which led to this abandonment. Great expenses had been incurred in fitting up the theatre, and, moreover, the management had been forced to pay its rent. The pamphlet concluded with a paragraph which was scarcely civil on the part of a foreigner who had been most hospitably received, towards a nation situated as France was just then. It is sufficiently curious to be quoted.
"Consider, moreover," said the discomforted director, or rather the discomforted husband of the directress, "that in the time when several provinces beyond the mountains belonged to France, twenty thousand Italians were constantly attracted to the capital and supplied numerous audiences for the Italian theatre; that, moreover, the artists who were chiefly remarked at the theatres of Milan, Florence, Venice and Genoa, could be engaged for Paris by order of the government, and that in such a case the administration was reimbursed for a portion of the extra engagements."
Catalani had left the King's Theatre in 1813, two years before she assumed the management of the Italian Theatre of Paris. With some brief intervals she had been singing in London since 1806, and after quitting England, she was for many years without appearing on any stage, if we except the short period during which she directed the Théâtre Feydau. Her terms were so inordinate that managers were naturally afraid of them, and Catalani found it more to her advantage to travel about Europe, giving concerts at which she was the sole performer of importance, than to accept such an engagement as could be offered to her at a theatre. She gave several concerts of this kind in England, whither she returned twice after she had ceased to appear at the Opera. She is said to have obtained more success in England than in any other country, and least of all in Italy.
When she appeared at the King's Theatre in 1824, and sang in Mayer's Fanatico per la Musica, the frequenters of the Opera, who remembered her performance in the same work eighteen years before, were surprised that so long an interval had produced so little change in the singer. The success of the first night was prodigious; but Mr. Ebers (in his "Seven Years of the King's Theatre"), tells us that "repetitions of this opera, again and again, diminished the audiences most perceptibly, though some new air was on each performance introduced, to display the power of the Catalani. * * * In this opera the sweet and soothing voice of Caradori was an agreeable relief to the bewildering force of the great wonder."
In one season of four months in London, Madame Catalani, by her system of concerts, gained upwards of ten thousand pounds, and doubled that sum during a subsequent tour in the provinces, in Ireland and Scotland. She sang for the last time in public at Dublin, in 1828.
As to the sort of engagement she approved of, some notion may be formed from the following draft of a contract submitted by her to Mr. Ebers in 1826:——
"Conditions between Mr. Ebers and M. P. de Valabrèque.
"1. Every box and every admission shall be considered as belonging to the management. The free admissions shall be given with paper orders, and differently shaped from the paid tickets. Their number shall be limited. The manager, as well as Madame Catalani, shall each have a good box.
"2. Madame Catalani shall choose and direct the operas in which she is to sing; she shall likewise have the choice of the performers in them; she will have no orders to receive from any one; she will find all her own dresses.
"3. Madame Catalani shall have two benefits, to be divided with the manager; Madame Catalani's share shall be free: she will fix her own days.
"4. Madame Catalani and her husband shall have a right to superintend the receipts.
"5. Every six weeks Madame Catalani shall receive the payment of her share of the receipts, and of the subscription.
"6. Madame Catalani shall sing at no other place but the King's Theatre, during the season; in the concerts or oratorios, where she may sing, she will be entitled to no other share but that specified as under.
"7. During the season, Madame Catalani shall be at liberty to go to Bath, Oxford, or Cambridge.
"8. Madame Catalani shall not sing oftener than her health will allow her. She promises to contribute to the utmost of her power to the good of the theatre. On his side, Mr. Ebers engages to treat Madame Catalani with every possible care.
"9. This engagement, and these conditions, will be binding for this season, which will begin and end and continue during all the seasons that the theatre shall be under the management of Mr. Ebers, unless Madame Catalani's health, or state of her voice, should not allow her to continue.
"10. Madame Catalani, in return for the conditions above mentioned, shall receive the half part of the amount of all the receipts which shall be made in the course of the season, including the subscription to the boxes, the amount of those sold separately, the monies received at the doors of the theatre, and of the concert-room; in short, the said half part of the general receipts of the theatre for the season.
"11. It is well understood that Madame Catalani's share shall be free from every kind of deduction, it being granted her in lieu of salary. It is likewise well understood, that every expense of the theatre during the season shall be Mr. Ebers'; such as the rent of the theatre, the performers' salaries, the tradespeople's bills; in short, every possible expense; and Madame Catalani shall be entirely exonerated from any one charge.
"This engagement shall be translated into English, taking care that the conditions shall remain precisely as in the original, and shall be so worded as to stipulate that Madame Catalani, on receiving her share of the receipts of the theatre, shall in no ways whatever be considered as partner of the manager of the establishment.
"12. The present engagement being made with the full approbation of both parties, Mr. Ebers and M. Valabrèque pledge their word of honour to fulfil it in every one of its parts."
I must now add that Madame Catalani, by all accounts, possessed an excellent disposition, that her private life was irreproachable, and that while gaining immense sums, she also gave immense sums away in charity. Indeed, the proceeds of her concerts, for the benefit of the poor and sick have been estimated at eighty thousand pounds, besides which she performed numerous acts of generosity towards individuals. Nor does she appear to have possessed that excessive and exclusive admiration for Madame Catalani's talent which was certainly entertained by her husband, M. Valabrèque. Otherwise there can be no truth in the well known story of her giving, by way of homage, the shawl which had just been presented to her by the Empress of Russia, to a Moscow gipsey—one of those singing tsigankie who execute with such originality and true expression their own characteristic melodies.
After having delighted the world for thirty-five years, Madame Catalani retired to a charming villa near Florence. The invasion of the cholera made her leave this retreat and go to Paris; where, in 1849, in her seventieth year, she fell a victim to the very scourge she had hoped to avoid.
As for the husband, Valabrèque, he appears to have been mean, officious, conceited (of his wife's talent!) and generally stupid. M. Castil Blaze solemnly affirms, that when Madame Catalani was rehearsing at the Italian Opera of Paris an air which she was to sing in the evening to a pianoforte accompaniment, she found the instrument too high, and told Valabrèque to see that it was lowered; upon which (declares M. Blase) Valabrèque called for a carpenter and caused the unfortunate piano's feet to be amputated!
"Still too high?" cried Madame Catalani's husband, when he was accused in the evening of having neglected her orders. "Why, how much did you lower it, Charles?" addressing the carpenter.
"Two inches, Sir," was the reply.
The historian of the above anecdote calls Tamburini, Lablache, and Tadolini, as well as Rossini and Berryer, the celebrated advocate, to witness that the mutilated instrument had afterward four knobs of wood glued to its legs by the same Charles who executed in so faithful a manner M. Valabrèque's absurd behest. It continued to wear these pattens until its existence was terminated in the fire of 1838—in which by the way, the composer of William Tell, who at that time nominally directed the theatre, and who had apartments on the third floor, would inevitably have perished had he not left Paris for Italy the day before!
Before concluding this chapter, I will refer once more to the "Musical Reminiscences" of Lord Mount Edgcumbe, whose opinions on singers seem to me more valuable than those he has expressed about contemporary composers, and who had frequent and constant opportunities of hearing the five great female vocalists engaged at the King's Theatre, between the years 1786 and 1814.
"They may be divided," he says, "into two classes, of which Madame Mara and Mrs. Billington form the first; and they were in most respects so similar, that the same observations will apply equally to both. Both were excellent musicians, thoroughly skilled in their profession; both had voices of uncommon sweetness and agility, particularly suited to the bravura style, and executed to perfection and with good taste, every thing they sung. But neither was an Italian, and consequently both were deficient in recitative: neither had much feeling or theatrical talent, and they were absolutely null as actresses; therefore they were more calculated to give pleasure in the concert-room than on the stage.
The other three, on the contrary, had great and distinguished dramatic talents, and seemed born for the theatrical profession. They were all likewise but indifferently skilled in music, supplying by genius what they wanted in science, and thereby producing the greatest and most striking effects on the stage: these are their points of resemblance. Their distinctive differences, I should say, were these: Grassini was all grace, Catalani all fire, Banti all feeling."
The composers, in whose music the above singers chiefly excelled, were Gluck, Piccinni, Guglielmi, Cimarosa, and Paisiello. We have seen that "Susanna" in the Nozze di Figaro, was one of Catalani's favourite parts; but as yet Mozart's music was very little known in England, and it was not until 1817 that his Don Giovanni was produced at the King's Theatre.
After Gluck and Piccinni, the most admired composers, and the natural successors of the two great rivals in point of time, were Cimarosa and Paisiello. Guglielmi was considerably their senior, and on returning to Naples in 1777, after having spent fifteen years away from his country, in Vienna, and in London, he found that his two younger competitors had quite supplanted him in public favour. His works, composed between the years 1755 and 1762, had become antiquated, and were no longer performed. All this, instead of discouraging the experienced musician (Guglielmi was then fifty years of age) only inspired him with fresh energy. He found, however, a determined and unscrupulous adversary in Paisiello, who filled the theatre with his partisans the night on which Guglielmi was to produce his Serva innamorata, and occasioned such a disturbance, that for some time it was impossible to attend to the music.
The noise was especially great at the commencement of a certain quintett, on which, it was said, the success of the work depended. Guglielmi was celebrated for the ingenuity and beauty of his concerted pieces, but there did not seem to be much chance, as affairs stood on this particular evening, of his quintett being heard at all. Fortunately, while it was being executed, the door of the royal box opened, and the king appeared. Instantly the most profound silence reigned throughout the theatre, the piece was recommenced, and Guglielmi was saved. More than that, the enthusiasm of the audience was raised, and went on increasing to such a point, that at the end of the performance the composer was taken from his box, and carried home in triumph to his hotel.
From this moment Paisiello, with all his jealousy, was obliged to discontinue his intrigues against a musician, whom Naples had once more adopted. Cimarosa had taken no part in the plot against Guglielmi; but he was by no means delighted with Guglielmi's success. Prince San Severo, who admired the works of all three, invited them to a magnificent banquet where he made them embrace one another, and swear eternal friendship.[63] Let us hope that he was not the cause of either of them committing perjury.
Paisiello seems to have been an intriguer all his life, and to have been constantly in dread of rivals; though he probably had less reason to fear them than any other composer of the period. However, at the age of seventy-five, when he had given up writing altogether, we find him, a few months before his death, getting up a cabal against the youthful Rossini, who was indeed destined to eclipse him, and to efface even the memory of his Barbiere di Siviglia, by his own admirable opera on the same subject. It is as if, painting on the same canvas, he had simply painted out the work of his predecessor.
Cimarosa, though he may have possessed a more dignified sense than Paisiello of what was due to himself, had less vanity. A story is told of a painter wishing to flatter the composer of Il Matrimonio Segretto, and saying that he looked upon him as superior to Mozart.
"Superior to Mozart!" exclaimed Cimarosa. "What should you think, Sir, of a musician, who told you that you were a greater painter than Raphael?"
Among the other composers who adorned the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, may be mentioned Sacchini, the successor of Piccinni in Paris; Salieri, the envious rival of Mozart, and (in Paris) the successor of Gluck; Paer, in whose Camilla Rossini played the child's part at the age of seven (1799); Mayer, the future master of Donizetti; and Zingarelli, the future master of Bellini, one of whose operas was founded on the same libretto which afterwards served the pupil for his Capuletti i Montecchi.
Piccinni is not connected in any direct manner with the present day; but it is nevertheless to Piccinni that we owe the first idea of those magnificent finales which, more than half a century afterwards, contributed so much to the success of Rossini's operas, and of which the first complete specimens, including several movements with changes of key and of rhythm, occur in La Cecchina ossia la Buona Figliuola, produced at Rome in 1760.
Logroscino, who sometimes passes as the inventor of these finales, and who lived a quarter of a century earlier, wrote them only on one theme.
The composer who introduced dramatic finales into serious opera, was Paisiello.
It may interest the reader to know, that the finale of Don Giovanni lasts fifteen minutes.
That of the Barber of Seville lasts twenty-one minutes and a-half.
That of Otello lasts twenty-four minutes.
The quintett of Gazza Ladra lasts twenty-seven minutes.
The finale of Semiramide lasts half an hour—or perhaps a minute or two less, if we allow for the increased velocity at which quick movements are "taken" by the conductors of the present day.
A FEW months before Gluck left Paris for the last time, an insurrection broke out at the Opera. The revolutionary spirit was abroad in Paris. The success of the American War of Independence, the tumultuous meetings of the French Parliament, the increasing resistance to authority which now manifested itself everywhere in France; all these stimulants to revolt seem to have taken effect on the singers and dancers of the Académie. The company resolved to carry on the theatre itself, for its own benefit, and the director, Devismes, was called upon to abdicate. The principal insurgents held what they called "Congress," at the house of Madeleine Guimard, and the God of Dancing, Auguste Vestris, declared loudly that he was the Washington of the affair.
Every day some fresh act of insubordination was committed, and the chiefs of the plot had to be forced to appear on the stage by the direct interference of the police.
"The minister desires me to dance," said Mademoiselle Guimard on one of these occasions; "eh bien qu'il y prenne garde, je pourrais bien le faire sauter."
The influential leader just named conducted the intrigue with great skill and discretion.
"One thing, above all!" she said to her fellow conspirators; "no combined resignations,—that is what ruined the Parliament."
To the minister, Amelot, the destroyer and reconstructor of the Parliament of Dijon, Sophie Arnould observed, in reference to his interference with the affairs of the Académie—-
"You should remember, that it is easier to compose a parliament than to compose an opera."
Auguste Vestris having spoken very insolently to Devismes, the latter said to him—-
"Do you know, sir, to whom you are speaking?"
"To whom? to the farmer of my talent," replied the dancer.
Things were brought to a crisis by the fêtes given to celebrate the birth of Marie Antoinette's first child, December, 1778. The city of Paris proposed to spend enormous sums in festivities and illuminations; but the king and queen benevolently suggested that, instead of being wasted in useless display, the money should be given away in marriage portions to a hundred deserving young girls; and their majesties gave fifty thousand francs themselves for the same object. Losing sight of the Opera for the moment, I must relate, in as few words as possible, a charming little anecdote that is told of one of the applicants for a dowry. Lise was the name of this innocent and naïve young person, who, on being asked some question respecting her lover, replied, that she had none; and that she thought the municipality provided everything! The municipality found the necessary admirer, and could have had no difficulty in doing so, if we may judge from the graceful bust of Lise, executed in marble by the celebrated sculptor, Houdon.
The Académie, which at this time belonged to the city, determined to follow its example, and to give away at least one marriage portion. Twelve hundred francs were subscribed and placed in the hands of Mademoiselle Guimard, the treasurer elect. The nuptial banquet was to take place at the winter Vauxhall (Gallicè "Wauxhall"); and all Paris was in a state of eager excitement to be present at what promised to be a most brilliant and original entertainment. It was not allowed, however, to take place, the authorities choosing to look upon it as a parody of the fête given by the city.
The doors of the "Wauxhall" being closed to the subscribers, Mademoiselle Guimard invited them to meet at her palace, in the Chaussée d'Antin. The municipality again interfered; and in the middle of the banquet Vestris and Dauberval were arrested by lettres de cachet and taken to For-l'Evèque, on the ground that they had refused to dance the Tuesday previous in the divertissement of Armide.
Gaetan Vestris was present at the arrest of his son, and excited the mirth of the assembly by the pompous, though affectionate, manner in which he bade him farewell. After embracing him tenderly, he said—
"Go, Augustus; go to prison. This is the grandest day of your life! Take my carriage, and ask for the room of my friend, the King of Poland; and live magnificently—charge everything to me."
On another occasion, when Gaetan was not so well pleased with his Augustus, he said to him:
"What! the Queen of France does her duty, by requesting you to dance before the King of Sweden, and you do not do yours? You shall no longer bear my name. I will have no misunderstanding between the house of Vestris and the house of Bourbon; they have hitherto always lived on good terms."
For his refusal to dance, Augustus was this time sentenced to six months' imprisonment; but the opera goers were so eager for his re-appearance that he was set free long before the expiration of the appointed term.
He made his rentrée amid the groans and hisses of the audience, who seemed determined to give him a lesson for his impertinence.
Then Gaetan, magnificently attired, appeared on the stage, and addressed the public as follows:—
"You wish my son to go down on his knees. I do not say that he does not deserve your displeasure; but remember, that the dancer whom you have so often applauded has not studied the pose you now require of him."
"Let him speak; let him endeavour to justify himself," cried a voice from the pit.
"He shall speak; he shall justify himself," replied the father. And, turning to his son, he added: "Dance, Auguste!"
Auguste danced; and every one in the theatre applauded.
The orchestra took no part in the operatic insurrection; and we have seen that the musicians were not invited to contribute anything to the dowry, offered by the Académie to virtue in love and in distress. De Vismes proposed to reward his instrumentalists by giving up to them a third of the receipts from some special representation of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride. The band rejected the offer, as not sufficiently liberal, and by refusing to play on the evening in question, made the performance a failure.
The Academic revolt was at last put an end to, by the city of Paris cancelling de Vismes's lease, and taking upon itself the management of the theatre, de Vismes receiving a large sum in compensation, and the appointment of director at a fixed salary.
Beaumarchais, while assisting the national revolution with the Marriage of Figaro, is known to have aided in a more direct manner the revolution which was now imminent at the opera. It is said, that he was anxious to establish an operatic republic in the hope of being made president of it himself. He is known to have been a good musician. I have spoken of his having held the honourable, if not lucrative, post of music-master to the daughters of Louis XV. (by whom he was as well paid as was Piccinni by that monarch's successor);[64] and a better proof of his talent is afforded, by his having composed all the music of his Barber of Seville and Marriage of Figaro, except the air of Malbrook in the latter comedy.
Beaumarchais had been much impressed by the genius of Gluck. He met him one evening in the foyer of the Opera, and spoke to him so clearly and so well about music that the great composer said to him: "You must surely be M. de Beaumarchais." They agreed to write an opera together, and some years afterwards, when Gluck had left Paris for Vienna, the poet sent the composer the libretto of Tarare. Gluck wrote to say that he was delighted with the work, but that he was now too old to undertake the task of setting it to music, and would entrust it to his favourite pupil, Salieri.
Gluck benefited French opera in two ways. He endowed the Académie with several master-pieces, and moreover, destroyed, or was the main instrument in destroying, its old répertoire, which after the works of Gluck and Piccinni was found intolerable. It was now no longer the fashion to exclude foreign composers from the first musical theatre in France, and Gluck and Piccinni were followed by Sacchini and Salieri. Strange to say, Sacchini, when he first made his appearance at the Académie with his Olympiade, was deprived of a hearing through the jealousy of Gluck, who, on being informed, at Vienna, that the work in question was in rehearsal, hurried to Paris and had influence enough to get it withdrawn. Worse than this, when the Olympiade was produced at the Comédie Italienne, with great success, Gluck and his partisans put a stop to the representation by enforcing one of the privileges of the Académie, which rendered it illegal for any other theatre to perform operas with choruses or with more than seven singers on the stage.
No work by Sacchini or Salieri was produced at the Académie until after the theatre in the Palais Royal was burnt down, in 1781. In this fire, which took place about eighteen months after Gluck had retired from Paris, and five months after the production of Piccinni's Iphigenia in Tauris, the old répertoire would seem to have been consumed, for no opera by Lulli was afterwards played in France, and only one by Rameau,—Castor and Pollux, which, revived in 1791, was not favourably received.
It was in June, 1781, after a representation of Gluck's Orphée, that the Académie Royale was burnt to the ground. Coronis (music by Rey, the conductor of the orchestra) was the last piece of the evening, and before it was finished, during the divertissement, one of the scenes caught fire. Dauberval, the principal dancer, had enough presence of mind to order the curtain down at once. The public wanted no more of Coronis, and went quietly away without calling for the conclusion of Rey's opera, and without having the least idea of what was taking place behind the curtain. In the meanwhile the fire had spread on the stage beyond the possibility of extinction. Singers, dancers, musicians, and scene-shifters, rushed in terror from the theatre, and about a dozen persons, who were unable to escape, perished in the conflagration. Madeleine Guimard was nearly burnt to death in her dressing-room, which was surrounded by flames. One of the carpenters, however, penetrated into her loge, wrapped her up in a counterpane (she was entirely undressed), and bore her triumphantly through the fire to a place of safety.
"Save my child! save my child!" cried Rey, in despair; and as soon as he saw the score of Coronis out of danger he went away, giving the flames full permission to burn everything else. All the manuscripts were saved, thanks to the courageous exertions of Lefebrvre, the librarian, who remained below in the music room even while the stage was burning, until the last sheet had been removed.
"The Opera is burnt down," said a Parisian to a Parisian the next morning.
"So much the better," was the reply. "It had been there such a time!"
This remark was ingenious but not true, for the Académie Royale de Musique had only been standing eighteen years. It was burnt down before, in 1768, on which occasion Voltaire, in a letter to M. d'Argental, wrote as follows: "on dit que ce spectacle était si mauvais qu'il fallait tôt ou tard que la vengeance divine éclatât." The theatre destroyed by fire in 1763[65] was in the Palais Royal, and it was reconstructed on the same spot. After the fire of 1781, the Porte St. Martin theatre was built, and the Opera was carried on there ten years, after which it was removed to the opera-house in the Rue Richelieu, which was pulled down after the assassination of the Duc de Berri. But we are advancing beyond the limits of the present chapter.
The new Opera House was built in eighty-six days. The members of the company received orders not to leave Paris, and during the interval were paid their salaries regularly as if for performing. The work began on the 2nd of August, and was finished on the 27th of October. Lenoir, the architect, had told Marie Antoinette that the theatre could be completed in time for the first performance to take place on the 30th of October.
"Say the 31st," replied the queen; "and if on that day I receive the key of my box, I promise you the Order of St. Michael in exchange."
The key was sent to her majesty on the 26th, who not only decorated Lenoir with the cordon of St. Michael, but also conferred on him a pension of six thousand francs; and on the 27th the theatre was opened to the public.
In 1784, Sacchini's Chimène, adapted from Il Gran Cid, an opera he had written for the King's Theatre in 1778, was produced at the Académie with great success. The principal part in this work was sustained by Huberti, a singer much admired by Piccinni, who wrote some airs in the cantabile style specially for her, and said that, without her, his opera of Dido, in which she played the principal part, was "without Dido." M. Castil Blaze tells us that she was the first true singer who appeared at the Académie. Grimm declares, that she sang like Todi and acted like Clairon. Finally, when Madame de Saint Huberti was performing at Strasburgh, in 1787, a young officer of artillery, named Napoleon Bonaparte, addressed the following witty and complimentary verses to her:—
Sacchini's first opera, Œdipe à Colosse, was not produced at the Académie until 1787, a few months after his death. It was now no question, of whether he was a worthy successor of Gluck or a formidable opponent to Piccinni. His opera was admired for itself, and the public applauded it with genuine enthusiasm.
In the meanwhile, Salieri, the direct inheritor of Gluck's mantle (as far as that poetic garment could be transferred by the mere will of the original possessor) had brought out his Danaides—announced at first as the work of Gluck himself and composed under his auspices. Salieri had also set Tarare to music. "This is the first libretto of modern times," says M. Castil Blaze, "in which the author has ventured to join buffoonery to tragedy—a happy alliance, which permits the musician to vary his colours and display all the resources of genius and art." The routine-lovers of the French Académie, the pedants, the blunderers, were indignant with the new work; and its author entrusted Figaro with the task of defending it.
"Either you must write nothing interesting," said Figaro, "or fools will run you down."
The same author then notices, as a remarkable coincidence, that "Beaumarchais and Da Ponte, at four hundred leagues distance from one another, invented, at the same time, the class of opera since known as "romantic." Beaumarchais's Tarare had been intended for Gluck; Da Ponte's Don Giovanni, as every one knows, found its true composer in Mozart.
A COMPLETE history of the French Opera would include something like a history of French society, if not of France generally. It would, at least, show the effect of the great political changes which the country has undergone, and would remind us here and there of her celebrated victories, and occasionally even of her reverses. Under the despotism, we have seen how a simple lettre de cachet sufficed to condemn an abbé with a good voice, or a young girl with a pretty face, to the Opera, just as a person obnoxious to the state or to any very influential personage was sent to the Bastille. During the Regency, half the audience at the Opera went there drunk; and almost until the period of the Revolution the abbés, the mousquetaires, and the grands seigneurs, quarrelled, fought, and behaved in many respects as if the theatre were, not their own private house, but their own particular tap-room. Music profited by the Revolution, in so far that the privileges of the Académie were abolished, and, as a natural consequence, a number of new musical works produced at a variety of theatres which would otherwise never have seen the light; but the position of singers and dancers was by no means a pleasant one under the Convention, and the tyranny of the republican chiefs was far more oppressive, and of a more brutal kind, than any that had been exercised at the Académie in the days of the monarchy. The disobedient daughters, whose admirers got them "inscribed" on the books of the Opera so as to free them from parental control, would, under another system, have run away from home. No one, in practice, was injured very much by the regulation, scandalous and immoral as it undoubtedly was; for, before the name was put down, all the harm, in most cases, was already done. Sophie Arnould, it is true, is said to have been registered at the Opera without the consent of her mother, and, what seems very extraordinary—not at the suggestion of a lover; but Madame Arnould was quite reconciled to her daughter's being upon the stage before she eloped with the Count de Lauragais. To put the case briefly: the académiciens (and above all, the académiciennes) in the immoral atmosphere of the court, were fêted, flattered, and grew rich, though, owing to their boundless extravagance, they often died poor: whereas, during the republic, they met with neither sympathy nor respect, and in the worst days of the Convention lived, in a more literal sense than would be readily imagined, almost beneath the shadow of the guillotine.
In favour of the old French society, when it was at its very worst, that is to say, during the reign of Louis XV., it may be mentioned that the king's mistresses did not venture to brave general opinion, so far as to present themselves publicly at the Opera. Madame Dubarry announced more than once that she intended to visit the Académie, and went so far as to take boxes for herself and suite, but at the last moment her courage (if courage and not shamelessness be the proper word) failed her, and she stayed away. On the other hand, towards the end of this reign, the licentiousness of the court had become so great, that brevets, conferring the rights and privileges of married ladies on ladies unmarried, were introduced. Any young girl who held a "brevet de dame" could present herself at the Opera, which etiquette would otherwise have rendered impossible. "The number of these brevets," says Bachaumont, "increased prodigiously under Louis XVI., and very young persons have been known to obtain them. Freed thus from the modesty, simplicity, and retirement of the virginal state, they give themselves up with impunity to all sorts of scandals. * * * Such disorder has opened the eyes of the government; and this prince, the friend of decency and morality, has at last shown himself very particular on the subject. It is now only by the greatest favour that one of these brevets can be obtained."[66]