italian opera and arson in late eighteenth-century london

Italian Opera and Arson in Late Eighteenth-Century LondonAuthor(s): Curtis PriceSource: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 55-107Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/831418 .

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Italian Opera and Arson in Late Eighteenth-Century London

By CURTIS PRICE

URING THE LAST QUARTER of the eighteenth century, the Italian Sopera in London seemed impervious to change. It simply

ignored the reforms of Gluck and, like Venice, refused to acknowl-

edge the decline of opera seria. Infighting and intrigue were rife; bankrupt theaters burned down under suspicious circumstances. Haydn's last opera, L'anima delfilosofo, written for the King's Theatre in the Haymarket in 1791, was not performed, though the composer himself never fully understood why. During his stay in London, Da Ponte squandered his gifts on pasticcios, translations, and substitute arias, finally being driven away to America by debt and imagined cabals. Yet Burney, Mount Edgcumbe, and other English critics hailed this the golden age of Italian opera in London. The Haymarket, for a time the most prestigious house in Europe, was a magnet for the finest singers and composers of the age. Even Mozart came within an inch of writing an opera for the London stage.

Documents recently discovered in the Bedford Estates Office in London add considerably to our understanding of this period and alter the received notion of how Italian opera was managed in late eighteenth-century England., They provide fresh information about such figures as Haydn, Burney, Da Ponte, the Prince of Wales, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Sir John Soane, and Nancy Storace, and they offer a new perspective on the negotiations to bring Mozart to London in 1790. The Bedford collection includes the artistic and managerial records of the King's Theatre at the Pantheon, i790-92, and the private legal papers of the New Haymarket opera house,

I am grateful to the Marquess of Tavistock and the Trustees of the Bedford Estates for permission to quote from the Bedford Opera Papers and should like to thank Robert D. Hume and Mrs. M.P.G. Draper for bringing the documents to my attention. Professor Hume and I have catalogued the papers and devised the identification system cited hereinafter. They form the basis of a larger study of Italian opera in late eighteenth-century London that we are writing in collaboration with Judith Milhous.



56 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

1792-1815. Among the most important documents are contracts of singers, dancers, composer, librettist, choreographers, designers, machinist, and orchestra players; also included are comprehensive financial statements, bundles of bills and receipts, cancelled checks, records of box attendance, and private correspondence, much of it dealing with music. The wealth of detail is unparalleled in the annals of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London stage, and the collection rivals in sheer volume the major archives of the contemporaneous Italian theaters.

On 17 June 1789 the King's Theatre in the Haymarket burned down. The main venue for Italian opera in London since 1708, it had changed little physically or institutionally since Handel's time. Under the terms of the Licensing Act of i737, the Haymarket enjoyed a monopoly on Italian opera but, with the theater's destruction in 1789, the Royal Patent was thrown into limbo. The ensuing lawsuits, shady business deals, and cut-throat competition to re-establish the opera could have been avoided had King George III acted quickly to reaffirm the patent. But while he struggled with bouts of porphyria and quarrelled with the Prince of Wales (who took a great interest in music and theater), several rival schemes were allowed to go forward.2 The one with the greatest claim of legitimacy was a plan to rebuild on the old site, which was in the possession of the lawyer and impresario William Taylor. Taylor had acquired the theater in 1782 but was forced by debts and general misconduct to assign it to a group of trustees in 1785. Their manager was Giovanni Andrea Gallini, a wealthy dancing master who, though careless in business, took a keen interest in the artistic affairs of the theater. For instance, he tried (unsuccessfully) to recruit Haydn as house composer in 1787. Because

2 There is no coherent account of the contest for the opera patent in 1789-91. Taylor 1791 prints relevant letters and documents, but is inevitably biased. His main opponent for the patent (see below) produced a similarly polemical prospectus (O'Reilly 1791). A later anonymous pamphlet (Opera House 1815) is well informed but seeks to discredit Taylor. An official account of the dispute prepared for the Lord Chamberlain's Office, "Deed for regulating the Conduct and management of the King's theatre or Opera House in the Haymarket" of i August 1792 (PRO LC 7/88), seriously misrepresents O'Reilly's role. Nalbach 1972 is based mainly on Taylor and O'Reilly. The best modern account of the dispute is found in Survey of London, 29: 228-38, though its authors did not have access to the Bedford Opera Papers. For an overview of the critical reception of opera during this period and a season-by-season account of the repertoire, see Petty I980.



ITALIAN OPERA AND ARSON 57

the theater was at the center of several protracted lawsuits and was perpetually liable to bankruptcy, the Court of Chancery put it into receivership, ordering Gallini not to exceed an annual expenditure of ?i8,ooo and requiring him to submit the books to a court-appointed accountant (or "master") for periodic inspection. 3 After the 1789 fire, Taylor, seeing his chance to regain control of Italian opera in London, got up a subscription among influential nobles and commissioned Michael Novosielski, a respected architect cum scene painter and former Haymarket trustee, to design a new theater along the lines of Piermarini's La Scala in Milan. Work began within months of the fire.4

To assure continuity and thus reinforce his own claim to the patent, Gallini mounted a makeshift season of Italian opera in 1789- 90 at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, just across the road from the burned out shell. His singers included the celebrated castrato Luigi Marchesi, the Irish tenor Michael Kelly, and Nancy Storace as prima buffa. Undaunted by the cramped and shabby Little Haymar- ket, the company offered a full range of opera seria, opera buffa, and ballet. Sometime during this season Gallini settled his bitter differ- ences with Taylor and the two men formed a partnership to consol- idate control of the new Haymarket. With Novosielski's theater rapidly rising from the ruins, a fine troupe of singers and dancers temporarily housed nearby, and the likely prospect of finally engaging Haydn as house composer for the i790-91 season, their position seemed unassailable.

Within weeks of the fire, a committee of powerful nobles, believing the Haymarket to be too encumbered by litigation ever to run smoothly, proposed to build a new opera house in Leicester Square. The prime movers were the Duke of Bedford, the Marquis of Salisbury, and the Prince of Wales. In a departure from the market economy in which all London theaters had been forced to exist since

i66o, they aimed to establish a court opera house. Bedford and Salisbury were prepared to invest heavily in the project but, because

3 Surviving Master's Exhibits are in PRO CI07/201. A survey of the voluminous testimony sworn in the case of Gallini vs. Crawford (PRO C3 i) is beyond the scope of the present study.

4 Pietro Carnevale, Gallini's deputy manager, was suspected of setting the fire in revenge for being dismissed. He was said to have confessed on his deathbed a year later: see Opera House 1815, 3, and Brayley 1826, 26. But testimony in a Chancery lawsuit (O'Reilly and Vanbrugh vs. Taylor, PRO C12/958/64) shows that Carnevale was still employed by Taylor at the Haymarket in July 1790, more than a year after the fire.




Salisbury was also the Lord Chamberlain and thus controlled the licensing of all public theaters, a way had to be found to conceal his flagrant conflict of interest, especially because he was prepared to suppress the Haymarket. The noble committee set up a dummy board of trustees headed by William Sheldon, an experienced solicitor and loyal servant of the rich and powerful who also held a small share in the Covent Garden playhouse.s Always working discreetly behind the scenes, Sheldon was to have effective control of Italian opera in London for more than two decades. To insulate the committee even further from the plan to build a new opera house, Sheldon appointed as manager and director-in-chief a gullible young Irishman, Robert Bray O'Reilly, whose only qualifications for the job were limited legal training, an amateur interest in theater design, and a brief stint as a foreign recruiting agent; after the Haymarket fire, Gallini had hired him to travel to Italy to sign up minor singers for the

i789-1790 season, though O'Reilly probably did little more than follow the instructions of Lord Cowper, long resident in Florence and Gallini's trusted scout (see Gibson 1987, 235-52, and O'Reilly 1791, 57).

With the full backing of the noble opera committee but officially acting on his own, O'Reilly commissioned the eminent French architect Victor Louis to design the Leicester Square theater;6 but this grandiose project-a royal opera house in the true sense of the word-was abandoned when the committee realized that Taylor's new Haymarket theater would be finished much sooner than expected (the cornerstone was laid on 3 April 1790 and construction virtually complete by January 1791). Yet Taylor was proceeding on faith alone, because on 30 June the Lord Chamberlain apparently issued O'Reilly a license to stage Italian opera, thereby prohibiting the Haymarket from attempting to do the same.7 Sheldon and O'Reilly then moved

5 See the Covent Garden account book for 1786-87, Lbl Egerton 2287, f. 138. Sheldon was called to the Bar in July 1791. He became a bencher of Gray's Inn in 18 13, being elected treasurer in 1816; see Gray's Inn Book of Orders, 4: 180 and 6:405.

6 Announced in The London Chronicle, 9-12 January 1790. For an account of Louis's involvement, see Glasstone 1982. His design was probably modified by John Soane, the finest British architect of the age. Seven watercolors and a groundplan by him of the Leicester Square theater survive in the Soane Museum (Drawer XIV. 3); they are listed but not discussed in Stroud 1984, 251. O'Reilly retained Soane as a consultant surveyor, paying him at least ?iooo in I790-92. See the Bedford Opera Papers 5.K.7. '

O'Reilly announced receipt of the license in the press but, as far as I can determine, no such document survives in either the Lord Chamberlain papers at the PRO or in the Bedford Opera Papers. Given Salisbury's cozy involvement in O'Reilly's company, the "license" was probably an oral agreement, as any official paper might have been offered as evidence of Salisbury's conflict of interest.




quickly to acquire the Pantheon in Oxford Street, a magnificent concert and assembly hall which they hoped to convert into an opera house in time for the opening of the i790-91 season. By the end of August they had secured a lease from the Pantheon's proprietors, one of whom was Charles Burney. Like several of his fellow investors, the music historian had fallen on hard times and was agreeably surprised when O'Reilly consented to an exorbitant rent. In a letter to his son of 21 July i790, Burney gives a first-hand account of the negotiations.

The Pantheon business has occupied much of my time & thoughts lately. It is I believe sure of being made into an opera house by Wyatt the original architect for OReiley to whom we have granted a lease for 12

years. He is supported by the Ld. Chamberlain, who is determined to grant no one else a licence ... He is to give 3000 G[uinea]s a year- wch. after our part of the Taxes is deducted will be upwards of ?50 per ann. for each share.8 Pacchierotti & Mara are to be principal singers-Bianchi Tenor &c ... [as] the lease promises us 12 years safety & quiet, I have advised the measure; particularly as it will keep Pacc here at least another year. There are 3 Bankers, an [?] exceptionable security for receiving & assigning the money for the boxes to the payment of the rent & performers before all things else. There will be a bustle abt. the building begun to be erected on the old scite [i.e., the Haymarket], but I believe the undertakers will be obliged to give it up for want of money to go on, & for want of a Licence if it shd. be finished.9

As Burney predicted, the castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti (a close friend) and the celebrated prima donna seria Gertrude Mara were among the first singers to be engaged (though Bianchi never sang at the Pantheon). Burney was obviously well informed, especially about Lord Salisbury's intention to freeze out Taylor and the Haymarket, but was apparently unaware that Salisbury was also O'Reilly's chief financial backer.

8 Taylor had leased the Haymarket-a real opera house-in 1782 for 21 years at E1260 per annum (see PRO LC7/88, p. 64)-

9 Osborn Collection, Yale University. Burney's investment in the Pantheon, for which he also served as music director during the I780s, helps to explain the unstinting praise of the establishment and its concerts in A General History ofMusic and in his contributions to Rees's Cyclopaedia. In a letter of 18 April I8o6 to Lady Crewe in which he painfully lists his major financial setbacks, he claims to have been the Pantheon's "foreign secretary to engage singers from Italy & Germany" at the annual salary of ioo guineas (Lbl Add. 37,916, f. I6v). Lonsdale (1965, 352) interprets this to mean that Burney was still employed in this capacity by the Pantheon opera house, but this is not corroborated by the Bedford Opera Papers. Like all his fellow shareholders, Burney lost most of his investment, as is revealed in a memorial addressed to the Lord Chamberlain in the late I790s (London Theatre Museum, Autograph Letters S.520. 1982).




While the Pantheon was being hastily converted into a theater, Taylor's new Haymarket was nearing completion; London would soon have two splendid opera houses but only one Royal Patent. To head off the inevitable collision of interest, Bedford and Salisbury held several meetings at Carlton House, the London residence of the Prince of Wales, pretending to try to reconcile the rival claims to the patent; but all the while they were quietly pouring huge sums of their own money into the Pantheon. Haydn's opera for the Haymarket was thus effectively banned even before the composer received the libretto in early 1791-

The King's Theatre at the Pantheon opened on 17 February 1791 and ran for less than a year before it too was destroyed by fire on 14 January 1792, the company having to complete its second season at the Little Haymarket theater. The Bedford papers permit a remark- ably detailed anatomy of this institution which, despite its brief existence, influenced the course of Italian opera in London for several decades and in whose destruction lies buried one of the most intriguing conspiracies in the history of the English stage.

Artistic Policy and Management

Little is known about the musical organization of the King's Theatre under any manager before O'Reilly. Very few contracts survive from before 179o--certainly none for a music director or composer-and there is no contemporary account of how artistic decisions were made, who chose the singers and repertoire, how a production was conceived, and who, if anyone, directed rehearsals. Apart from the period 1785-89, when the company was in receivership, performers' salaries are rarely known officially, and the press probably exaggerated those of the principal singers. Because of the eminence of Handel, the affairs of the Royal Academy of Music

(171 -28) are better documented than any company before Gallini's. But Handel, an autocrat who planned each season, chose his librettos, conducted rehearsals, and cajoled his awe-struck singers, was atypi- cal. His titular manager, J.J. Heidegger, was merely a business partner.

After Handel abandoned Italian opera in the late 1730s, a different system generally prevailed for the rest of the century: the house composer took an ever less important role in the musical direction (completely disappearing at times) and the manager a greater one. Thus the term "opera manager" meant different things at different periods. For example, in 1763 Felice Giardini was both manager, in




that he conducted the business affairs of the company, and music director, both engaging performers and, as a violinist, taking a special interest in the orchestra. When Taylor acquired the Haymarket in 1782, he actually ran the theater, but his successor Gallini was at first only a caretaker shielded from ultimate financial responsibility by the trustees; as we have seen, Gallini was chiefly concerned with artistic affairs including recruitment of singers and acquisition of scores. During the 1789-90 season at the Little Haymarket, he wore both the hat of business manager and that of music director. And in 1793 Sheridan, who was then co-proprietor of the new Haymarket theater, appointed Stephen Storace and Michael Kelly as "joint directors of the Italian Opera, with a carte blanche," though they were closely supervised "on all important points," and Storace did little more than conduct from the harpsichord and arrange substitute arias (Kelly 1826, 2:33-34). None of these opera managers or directors was an impresario in the continental sense, that is, an itinerant businessman who moved from theater to theater engaging singers by letter, arranging subscriptions, and assuring princely subventions, while leaving the logistics of production to court poets and (less often) composers.

Modern scholars have regarded the late eighteenth-century King's Theatre as fundamentally different from the Vienna Burgtheater or La Fenice, both because of its remoteness from the continental opera circuit and because it lacked a government or royal subvention. The Bedford papers show that the Pantheon was, by contrast, a court theater (whose subvention was, however, known only to an inner circle of nobles and their lawyers). It was organized much like a typical Italian house, with box subscriptions and ticket sales used to cover day-to-day expenses, while the salaries of top performers and other major outgoings were guaranteed by princes or great nobles. The music department was divided into seria and buffa casts, with a separate ballet troupe which, ironically, had the largest proportion of the total budget. In other respects, too, the Pantheon was simply a satellite of Italy, drawing its repertoire and performers from a common fund upon which Naples, Bologna, Florence, Venice, and a dozen other centers also depended. Yet it and the contemporaneous Haymarket differed from a typical Venetian or Neapolitan theater in one important respect: Italian operas rarely originated in London. English fashion and ennui demanded works that could be easily changed and adapted during the course of production; hence the survival of the antediluvian pasticcio, both seria and buffa, well into the nineteenth century.




The system offered little to an opera composer of the first rank. Recalling how audiences became satiated with the best works of Sacchini, the only opera composer to enjoy "complete success" in England, Anthony Le Texier, an aspiring impresario as well as critic, wrote: "I do not think very necessary to follow the ancient custom, and to bring over here one single composer, who is always very expensive to the administration, since we may have the works of many at a very reasonable price.",o Writing many years later but with a keen sense of the history of Italian opera in London, John Ebers (1828, 59) noted that "experience sufficiently proves to us, that the operas imported from the continent are, both in music and poetry, such as to render nugatory here the employment either of a poet, or a composer (other than as a conductor and arranger)." Da Ponte's frustration with the English system is well known: while he and his predecessors were allowed to write a few original librettos, their main task was to adapt old operas and to provide verses for substitute arias.

O'Reilly, the idealistic but wholly inexperienced manager of the Pantheon, boldly tried to reform the Italian opera in London. Although the company's business affairs were overseen by the noble committee, the Irishman was given wide latitude to make artistic decisions. He may even have possessed most of the skills which the self-promoting Le Texier listed as necessary for a "good administrator of an Opera": fluency in foreign languages;,, knowledge of classical history, stagecraft, and declamation; a thorough enough "knowledge of music to judge of its effects, and especially of its effects when compared with those of the words." Whether O'Reilly personally selected operas for production by this last exacting criterion is doubtful, but complete authority over repertoire and other facets of the music department at the Pantheon was written into every major contract and confirmed by correspondence with other members of the company, who respected the office if not the man.

Frankly admitting his ignorance of music, 12 O'Reilly appointed as his assistant manager Luigi Borghi, a respected violinist and acquain-

1o Le Texier 179o, 5-6. This book presents yet another plan to secure the opera patent, and Le Texier, like O'Reilly, claimed the approbation of the fickle Prince of Wales.

" Le Texier 1790, 37-38. O'Reilly had enough Italian to translate librettos into English and enough French to write to Mozart--hence, he probably did not know German, which Le Texier believed essential (see below).

12 On his recruiting trip to Italy during September and October 1789, O'Reilly was accompanied by an unnamed composer whose judgement he trusted (O'Reilly 1791, 57).




tance of Haydn. 13 Borghi, who probably came from Padua, had been in London since the early I770os playing in the Haymarket orchestra and composing opera dances and some chamber music. He was supposedly responsible for all musical aspects of the Pantheon company, but the principal singers answered only to the manager himself, while the music director, the orchestra leader, the house poet, and the ballet master were rulers absolute in their respective departments. Borghi's main areas of influence were in recruiting singers, composers, and orchestra players, commissioning operas, and acting as buffer between the performers and O'Reilly. The relationship between manager and deputy manager is neatly illustrated by a letter from Madam Mara of 16 January 1791, written about a month before the opening of the Pantheon; she wanted to extend her holiday at Burghley, the country estate of her friend and patron Lord Exeter:

Dear Sir I wrote to Mr. OReilly to ask wether he could allow me to stay at this

place 'till Satturday- if he can defer the Rehearsal 'till Monday; he will not only oblige me; but also Lord Exeter. I know that a Word or two from you will be of service to us in this particular, but however if you think it would make any retard upon the whole; We don't desire it.'4

Borghi and O'Reilly conceived a company markedly different in its artistic policy from any which had been formed in London since Sacchini's turbulent tenure as house composer in the I770s, perhaps even since the arrival of J.C. Bach in 1762. The new order they envisaged was reflected by Henry Tresham's frontispiece curtain for the Pantheon, an encoded manifesto that was ballyhooed in the press before its exhibition at the beginning of the first season, then roundly ridiculed thereafter. A Description of the Allegory, painted for the Curtain of the King's Theatre, Pantheon (179I) provides a fatuous explanation of the finer points of the curtain, which within a week of its unveiling had been retouched so that it no longer resembled so much "the Walls of Newgate."'5 Seated in the clouds near Apollo and Shakespeare and amid genii and the Muses was a group of composers, each of whom

'~ On 8 March 1792, one of the few occasions Haydn is known to have attended the opera in London, Borghi provided him with a complimentary ticket; Bedford Opera Papers 3.C2.4.

"4 Bedford Opera Papers 2.A. 58; the addressee is unnamed but easily ascertained from the context. Mara was a prolific correspondent in several languages. See Kaulitz-Niedeck 1929.

15 A newspaper clipping of 23 February 1791, preserved in the Mander and Mitchenson Pantheon Scrapbook.




had contributed to the glory of Italian opera in London: Handel, Pergolesi, J.C. Bach, and Sacchini. They appear to have been chosen not only to reinforce the lineage of the King's Theatre but also to make a statement about genre: a balance of professors of the seria and buffa modes declared an intention to ignore Le Texier and others who believed that in the new style "the true theatrical music may be found only in comic Operas" (Le Texier 1790, 16-17). At the center of the curtain is its dedicatee, Metastasio, "looking up, and listening with admiration to the Music of the Spheres." The routine obeisance to the late "happy Bard" was nevertheless another statement of policy: Italian opera was an enterprise worthy of guidance from a supreme genius, a novel idea for a late eighteenth-century London theater. That Borghi and O'Reilly were unable to attain it was owing less to their incompetence and inexperience as managers than to the London Italian opera system itself.

Recruitment

In fall 1790 O'Reilly and Borghi faced a more urgent task than finding a genius to lead their company. With Taylor aggressively (though vainly) recruiting singers for the nearly-completed Haymar- ket, they had to assemble a cast which would convince the confused and highly volatile body of potential subscribers that the Pantheon would indeed be the only theater licensed for Italian opera during the forthcoming season. The appointment of the famous Pacchierotti and Mara helped to inspire confidence in the venture. But to fill out the rest of the seria and all of the buffa casts, O'Reilly decided to seek rising young stars from abroad.

For an impresario resident in London, recruitment from the Continent had always been arduous and uncertain. Though worried about the effect of the British climate on the voice, most Italian singers were willing to accept the risk of sore throats and colds, often using it as a means of prising a few more pounds or an extra benefit night from what were already the most generous contracts obtainable anywhere in Europe. Since Handel's day, Haymarket managers had tried either to re-engage principal singers in June or July just after the end of the opera season and before the exodus for Italy, or had asked agents or knowledgeable expatriates to send reports on promising musicians (Gibson 1984). Singers often gathered in Northern Italy (Florence, Venice and Bologna) in September and October to await offers. And in Lord Cowper, Gallini found a dilettante on whom he could rely to negotiate terms and conditions (Gibson I987).




More often than not the system failed, partly because the travel- ling agents arrived in Italy between opera seasons when they could not hear prospective singers in action on stage. Even an old opera hand did not necessarily guarantee success as foreign agent: witness Da Ponte's disastrous journey to Italy in the fall of 1798 on behalf of the King's Theatre. So happy was he to return to his native country after many years in exile and so intoxicated with the power which Taylor had invested in him that he frittered away his time, finally engaging "two singers of the first rank and the only ones I found unemployed in Italy" (Hodges 1985, i57). In London they failed to please.

O'Reilly's task was less difficult. The noble committee had agreed "to guarantee" the salaries of about two dozen performers; this would ease negotiations considerably, though the meaning of the guarantee changed as the company's finances worsened during the first season. 16 The manager faced another potential problem. The promised Royal Patent would assure a monopoly only on staged operas in the Italian language; operas in concert, albeit a rare phenomenon in London, were not prohibited. And ballet, which had entered its first golden age and was undeniably more popular than opera, was not specifically covered by the terms of the patent. O'Reilly was therefore in direct competition with Taylor to engage the best available performers-- singers and dancers. Fortunately, Mara and Pacchierotti, who were resident in London and had perhaps been told of the Lord Chamber- lain's intention to deny the new Haymarket a license, were signed up in August. But most singers and dancers had left for the Continent in June and early July.

To steal a march on Taylor, O'Reilly quickly appointed a foreign agent: Antoine Trancart, a dancer of small repute who had already been hired as a choreographer on 19 July 1790. Trancart set off for the Continent in early September, as O'Reilly had done almost exactly a year before. In his luggage was a bundle of printed contracts headed "Teatro del Pantheon," which would occasionally be altered to read "Teatro Reale"--quite fraudulently, since no Royal Patent had been issued. At Paris on 16 Septemeber he engaged Jean Bercher Dauber- val and his wife Theodore as ballet master and principal dancer,

16 The guarantee was specified in the original lease of the Pantheon. This document does not survive in the Bedford Opera Papers, indeed it may have been destroyed before 1793 when Sheldon was challenged to produce it in court; it can, however, be reconstructed from copious lawsuit testimony: see, for example, Sheldon vs. Mackell, PRO C12/192/27.




respectively, at a combined salary of I200 guineas plus two benefits, the contract to run from I November 1790 to 31 July i791 (Bedford Opera Papers 4.A.28). This was a crucial appointment, since Daub- erval, who had also been approached by Taylor, could be relied upon to corner the market on solo dancers and to assemble a troupe of

coryph&es. Trancart was then free to travel to Italy, where he signed up singers at Leghorn, Florence, Turin, and Bologna, the last having become a clearing house for opera in the late eighteenth century. Several of the contracts (to be discussed below) appear to have been ratified by O'Reilly when the singers arrived in London a month or two later. There is little correspondence in the Pantheon papers about the selection of performers, though the contract with Giovanna Salimbeni, the second seria soprano, is endorsed with testimonials in response to letters of inquiry from Borghi.

Back in London O'Reilly was being impeded by the good intentions of the Prince of Wales. While Sheldon, for all his string-pulling, seems never to have interfered with any artistic decision, the prince, whose modest musical abilities were politely exaggerated in every quarter, took a special interest in singers and dancers. He read over Trancart and Dauberval's letters from Paris "& approved of much of what has been done." Meanwhile the greatest dancers of the era, Vestris junior and senior, had already been engaged by Taylor for the Haymarket, and the next most celebrated, the ballerina Marie Louise Hilligsberg, was about to be snatched away too, thanks to the prince's meddling. O'Reilly reported to Sheldon on 9 October 1790 that "His R.H. Assured me he never forbid Hilligsberg to engage with me & that if I wished it he would write to her to Engage with me as he knew she was not engaged some time back but could not answer for the present" (Bedford Opera Papers 5.D.9). Whether or not the prince kept his word (his credibility seems to have been in inverse proportion to his enthusiasm), Hilligsberg did not dance at the Pantheon until the following season.

The Prince of Wales put intense pressure on O'Reilly to appoint Nancy Storace as prima buffa. Why the future King George IV should have taken such a keen interest in Mozart's first Susanna is not entirely clear, but a special relationship emerges from O'Reilly's letters. La Storace stood at a crossroads in her career. The days of glory at the Burgtheater lay behind her, and the slight edge which had always caught on her voice had now turned to harshness. Appearances at the Haymarket before the fire and at the Little Haymarket thereafter had been reasonably successful, but neither she nor her brother Stephen -with two Viennese opere buffe in his portfolio, one of them to a




libretto by Da Ponte-had found stardom in Italian opera in London. Their equivocal position cannot be attributed to cabals of the sort that ruined the Burgtheater. The sometimes partisan Gallini had commissioned Stephen to acquire scores for the King's Theatre at Vienna in 1786 and later gave him several opportunities to compose,s7 while Nancy was always treated deferentially by the Italian circle in London. There may well have existed an unscrupulous coffee-house lobby which Cassanova warned Da Ponte to avoid, but it was too diffuse, too overshadowed by the lawyers of the rich and powerful to have significantly influenced the Storaces' careers.

In mid-September 1790 when O'Reilly and Borghi began to negotiate with a proud and obstinate Nancy Storace, she was flush with the success of her performance in Stephen's comic opera The Haunted Tower and was doubtless committed to her brother's next major English work, The Siege of Belgrade, which was scheduled for Drury Lane in I79I. In a letter of I6 September to Borghi, O'Reilly expresses irritation with the singer's prevarication over her draft Pantheon contract. At this stage the meddlesome prince offered to arbitrate. In an important letter to Sheldon of 9 October 1790, the manager reveals that Mrs. Storace was holding out for the freedom to perform elsewhere besides the Pantheon, a privilege not granted even the great Pacchierotti:

[The Prince of Wales] begged of me to engage Storace & sd if I did he would oblige me in return- I told him of her offers to me & that she would not bind herself for 50 Nights, & also mentd my having wrote abroad- His answer was that he would make her engage on My terms & added that it was better for me to have a Performer of whose merit I was sure than Trust to a new Singer of whom I could not know the success here, -& particularly at this moment...

This Morning he sent for me again and asked me if I had Determined as to Storace-- I beged a little time to consult with my friends but assured H.R.H. I would do every thing in my Power to arrange with her- & he sent for Storace & with a vast deal of Good Humour said he would shew me the best way to know a good singer: he made her sing- & blew the organ himself she played. He again assured me he would do every thing in his power to serve me [Bedford Opera Papers 5.D.9].

This hastily arranged morning audition suggests that Mrs. Storace was already waiting at Carlton House when O'Reilly arrived and thus may have conspired with the prince to force O'Reilly into accepting

'~ See Skillern and Broderip vs. Storace, PRO CI2/1703/17, a lawsuit which is discussed below.




her terms. For reasons explained below, she never sang at the Pantheon opera house, though, curiously, the theater paid her coach hire in September of the following year (Bedford Opera Papers 2.C.21I .a). Since this was in the midst of the recruiting season, the gesture may show that the Pantheon had not given up hope of engaging her.

Storace's contractual demands were not entirely to blame for the lack of an agreement, for neither was O'Reilly negotiating in good faith. On I6 September 1790 he wrote to Borghi: "I omitted men- tioning to you about Sigra Storace whose answer I beg you will immediately insist on and in case of its being adverse conclude with Casentini directly" (Bedford Opera Papers 2.A.50). The next day O'Reilly and Borghi engaged Anna Casentini as prima buffa; she was still in Leghorn, and her contract was negotiated and signed in her absence by Pacchierotti, whose pupil she was reputed to be. Thus, all the while the Prince of Wales was trying to persuade O'Reilly to employ Mrs. Storace, the manager already had a prima buffa-Casen- tini, who made a great success in London.

With the principal singers and dancers safely engaged, O'Reilly and Borghi turned next to finding a house composer for the Pantheon. Since scores and parts of the latest Italian operas were as easily obtainable in London as Venetian glass (and cheaper to ship), finding a suitable composer had been a rather low priority for their predecessors. Yet, almost uniquely among managers of the King's Theatre after Heidegger, O'Reilly and Borghi seem to have realized that the malaise of Italian opera in London was partly owing to the chronic absence of a great composer. Breaking with tradition and ignoring Le Texier's advice, they decided to employ the most celebrated composer of the age: Giovanni Paisiello of Naples. But he may not have been their first choice.

On 26 October 1790 O'Reilly wrote the following letter in his best schoolboy French to "Monsieur Mozart C61"bre Compositeur de Musique

' Vienne":

Monsieur! Par une personne attachee ' S.A.R. le Prince de Galles j'apprends votre dessein de faire un voyage en Angleterre, et comme je souhaite de

connoitre personellement des gens a talents, et que je suis actuellement en stat de contribuer a leurs avantages, je vous offre Monsieur la place de Compositeurs ont eus'8 en Angleterre. Si vous ttes done en 6tat de Vous

18 "Diese W6rter geben keinen Sinn" (Nottebohm i88o, 67-68).




trouver a Londres envers la fine du mois de Decembre prochain 1790 pour y rester jusqu'a la fin de Juin 1791 et dans cet espace de tems de composer au moins deux Operas ou sdrieux ou comiques, selon le choix de la Direction, je vous offre trois cents livres Sterling avec l'avantage d'&crire pour le concert de la profession ou toute autre salle de concert A l'exclusion seulement des autres Theatres. Si cette proposition peut vous etre agreable et vous ites en 6tat de l'accepter faites moi la grace de me donner une reponse A vue, et cette lettre vous servira pour un Contract.

Jai 1' honneur d' tre Monsieur

Votre tras humble Serviteur Rob. May [sic] O'Reilly

Ayez la bontd de diriger au Pantheon A Londres.

This letter, the original of which has not been traced, was published by Nottebohm (i88o, 67-68). Its authenticity is beyond doubt, and I suspect that the misreading of O'Reilly's middle name (Bray) confirms that the letter was written by the manager himself, since his "Br" formation is virtually indistinguishable from a capital M. Whether Mozart responded or even received the letter is not known. He had long hoped to make a second journey to England, the prospect of which grew in the mid I78os in parallel with his friendship with Michael Kelly, the Storaces, and Thomas Attwood.

The terms set forth in O'Reilly's letter are somewhat niggardly in comparison to those offered to singers and dancers yet are typical of late eighteenth-century opera. Although totals are difficult to estimate because of outside income from concerts, publishing, copying, and other jobs, Joseph Mazzinghi, a local London musician whom the Pantheon managers finally settled on as music director, received the same salary (E?3oo) for writing one opera plus other more mundane duties (to be discussed below). Pasquale Anfossi's salary for the 1783- 84 season was probably ?350;'9 in 1787 Haydn had demanded ?500 and a free benefit for composing an opera for the Haymarket and for participating in the Hanover Square concerts, but of course he did not come to London at that time (Landon 1978, 696). Francesco Bianchi reputedly received ?600oo as house composer at the Haymarket in 1794, but this figure is probably exaggerated.2o

'9 Based on a quarterly payment recorded in PRO C31/233, no. 314, p. 7. A Biographical Dictionary (1:82) reports payments to him of ?740 during the 1785-86 season, though only ?370 of that figure is likely to have been covered by his contract.

20 Opera House 1815, 20. As is explained below, the statistics given in this pamphlet are highly unreliable.




That O'Reilly was to dictate operatic genre to Mozart might seem presumptuous, yet the choice was almost always the theater manager's, whether in London or on the Continent, despite the boasts of Da Ponte and other librettists. Mozart was to be allowed to compose for the Professional Concerts, a concession undoubtedly arranged through their organizer, Wilhelm Cramer, who was soon to be engaged as leader of the Pantheon opera orchestra. A promise to work for no other theater was similarly extracted from Mara, Pacchierotti, and the other principal artists and performers at the Pantheon.

A hint of the circumstances behind the invitation is found in the first sentence, which also provides the only firm evidence that Mozart was contemplating a trip to London on his own initiative. Dropping the Prince of Wales's name was a ploy O'Reilly had used when approaching other luminaries.21 The "personne attachee a S.A.R. Prince de Galles" can now be identified as Nancy Storace, who was probably in correspondence with Mozart in 1790. A plausible reason for the invitation thus emerges from O'Reilly's letter to Sheldon of 9 October, in which the manager reviews the singer's main demands: first, that "she would not bind herself for 50 Nights"; the second, which is not spelled out, concerns O'Reilly's "having wrote abroad." One can deduce that Storace stipulated (i) that she be allowed to sing in her brother's forthcoming English opera at Drury Lane, and (2) that her friend Mozart be engaged as the Pantheon's house composer. The second point is somewhat weakened by the fact that the letter to Mozart was not written until 26 October, more than two weeks after O'Reilly claimed that he had written "abroad," but this would hardly be the only instance of his procrastination and inability to keep promises, shortcomings of which Sheldon frequently complained.

The absence of any correspondence from Mozart in the Bedford Opera Papers does not necessarily mean that he failed to respond, since very few letters addressed to O'Reilly, besides office copies from Sheldon, survive. One can only speculate why Mozart did not accept the invitation: commitments in Vienna, or was it the prospect of direct competition with the far more famous Haydn in a foreign city? Perhaps we can now better understand why Mozart, when dining with Haydn on the eve of his departure from Vienna on 15 Decem- ber, reportedly urged him not to go (Landon 1978, 754). Haydn was almost completely ignorant of London theater politics (and never understood why his last opera was blocked), whereas Mozart, from

21 For example, when he invited Victor Louis to submit plans for the Leicester Square opera house in 1789; see Taylor 1791, 9-11.




O'Reilly's invitation and perhaps through correspondence with Nancy Storace, knew of the Pantheon's guaranteed monopoly on Italian opera. Mozart may have done the honorable thing by not accepting O'Reilly's invitation, but a likelier explanation is that he simply waited too long to respond.

On 23 November i790, less than a month after the invitation was issued, the following item appeared in the London press: "The celebrated Pasiello, so long adored in the musical world, is engaged by Mr. O'Reilly, for the King's Theatre, and is expected in England before the opening" (anticipated in early January but delayed till February). In a detailed prospectus of the Pantheon company published a few weeks later on 16 December 1790, the house composers are named as "Mr. Mazzinghi" and (in larger letters) "Signor Paesiello."22 Yet, for reasons unknown, the creator of II barbiere di Siviglia never crossed the Channel to accept the appointment.2 3 O'Reilly's agent had perhaps approached him in late September or early October, but there is no evidence that Trancart's recruiting trip took him as far south as Naples. Nor is there any correspondence about Paisiello in the Bedford papers. His name was squeezed onto a list of first-quarter payments on 20 February 1791, though nothing was disbursed to him at that time (Bedford Opera Papers 2.B. 16). On 20 April 1791, at the end of the second quarter, he was paid ?125, presumably an advance for the score of La locanda. The opera had its premiere at the Pantheon on 16 June 1791, being the only work which Paisiello composed expressly for London (Bedford Opera Papers 4.B.4). He was certainly the featured composer during the two seasons of the Pantheon's existence, as the company also mounted adaptations of La molinarella and La discordia conjugale. Curiously, however, these older scores were not acquired from the composer himself but, as is explained below, through intermediaries in Paris.

Paisiello's non-appearance in London left the Pantheon without an established house composer. For Gallini or Taylor this would have been no more than a minor irritation. Yet O'Reilly and Borghi made a final attempt to engage a composer who could rise above the level of the hack work expected of the titular music director Mazzinghi. They turned to the dashing Bohemian Adalbert Gyrowetz. In his autobi- ography Gyrowetz paints a compelling picture of musical high society

22 Mander and Mitchenson Pantheon Scrapbook, I: Ioa. 23 In 1794 the Prince of Wales expressed an interest in inviting Paisiello to

England "for a few months." See The Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales, 177o- 1812

4:530-31.




in London in the years before and during Haydn's first visit (Gy- rowetz 1915, 70-84). While exaggerating his role as Haydn's sponsor and spinning a yarn about the end of his association with the Pantheon (which he calls the "Odeon"), he displays better powers of recall than most of his contemporary memoirists. There is no reason to doubt his account of how he was invited to compose an opera for O'Reilly's theater. The Duke of Cumberland introduced him as music teacher to several influential families, in whose houses in Hampstead "oder Heighet" he spent the summers. Contact with the Prince of Wales may have been established through Nancy Storace, whom he accompanied on the piano in concerts at Brighton, the prince's celebrated sea-side pleasure dome. Before Haydn arrived in early 1791 and excepting only Stephen Storace, Gyrowetz was surely the most facile and attractive foreign composer on the London scene. The commission to compose an opera seria on the subject of Semiramis, which he says came from the "Vize-Direktor des neuen Theatres" (that is, Borghi), was probably prompted by genuine respect for his talent rather than by capricious pressure from the opera committee; had the Prince of Wales or Lord Salisbury suggested Gyrowetz, the commission would have come directly from O'Reilly.

That the company was prepared to invest its resources in a composer completely untested in opera is yet another sign of the naive idealism with which the Pantheon was launched. Gyrowetz's claim that Madam Mara was to have been his prima donna (1915, 84) is corroborated by the letter from the singer to Borghi (i6 January 1791), the first paragraph of which was quoted above (p. 63):

I beg you to be so kind to tell Mr Tonioli when you see him, that I wish, that the beginning of my first Rec: of Semiramide Deh chiudetevi o mai, orride porte dell'soggiorno di morte &c may remain if he thinks the whole of it too long he may shorten it.

Girolamo Tonioli was the Pantheon's house poet. Since Gyrowetz's engagement was not announced until i i January 1791,24 it is unlikely that he had already begun to set the libretto; rather, as is suggested by the terms of the poet's contract (discussed below), Mara seems to have been asked to approve her role in what was to be little more than a pasticcio. The composer was to receive ?150 for the second quarter 1791, but his salary was withheld: "Mr. Gyrowetz not having as yet

24 Mander and Mitchenson Pantheon Scrapbook, I:I I.




composed his Opera."2s In the exciting climax to the story of his association with the Pantheon, Gyrowetz tells how the score of his opera, which he claims was in rehearsal in January 1792, was lost in the fire. But the absence of Madam Mara and indeed of any seria singers at the Pantheon during the 1791-92 season renders this account a fiction. There is no record that Semiramis was ever finished, let alone rehearsed.

Any theater that aspired to engage Mozart, Paisiello, and even Gyrowetz must be taken seriously. The same commendable impulse to reform the complaisant London opera establishment was also felt in the appointment of an outsider as head scene painter. Like Gyrowetz, William Hodges, R.A., was an unlikely choice. Highly respected for his topographical paintings of India and the South Pacific, some of them executed on the voyage with Captain Cook, Hodges had last worked as a scene painter in his youth at Derby. In their zeal to sweep away the cobwebs from the Italian opera in London, the new-broom managers had rejected Gaetano Marinari, a veteran artist whose work for the old Haymarket had recently been criticized for anachronisms and general lack of unity of design. Hodges's perhaps predictable failure at the Pantheon had an unexpected benefit: among several assistant painters brought in as emergency replacements was the i6-year-old J.M.W. Turner, fresh from drawing classes at the Royal Academy of Arts and suddenly entrusted with large set pieces some of which anticipate subjects he treated in later easel paintings. 26

Seria, Buffa, and Ballet

By engaging Mara and Pacchierotti in August 1790, even before the Pantheon lease was executed, O'Reilly signalled an intention to specialize in opera seria, as did the early appointment of Hodges as scene painter on 14 July 1790: the only essential ingredients of opera seria were fine singing and spectacular scenery. Besides the aging but still popular prima donna and primo uomo, the Pantheon hired four other seria singers--one short of the full complement normally carried by the Italian opera in London. Three reserved the right to perform in buffa productions, though only the tenor Gustavo Lazzarini and the seconda donna Giovanna Salimbeni actually crossed over to the other

25 Bedford Opera Papers 4.B.4. There is no further mention of the opera or the composer in the Bedford archive, apart from an undated payment for E6o for unspecified services (2.B.4 and 4.B.2). 26 Discussed in Price i987b.




genre. Given the company's secret noble subvention and its barely concealed function as a court establishment, the economy is surprising. Despite the problems the opera seria department would soon encounter, Mount Edgcumbe was to laud the Pantheon above all other theaters for its serious productions.27

In contrast with the care O'Reilly took in assembling the seria cast, he showed an initial laxity towards comic opera. When it opened in February I791, the Pantheon had no primo buffo; Lorenzo Cipriani, hired as mezzo carattere, filled in until Giovanni Morelli arrived in April or May I791. A few years earlier at the Haymarket, Morelli had been admired more than Benucci (Mozart's first Figaro), yet his belated Pantheon debut was an anticlimax. As we have seen, the unknown Anna Casentini was engaged as prima buffa instead of Nancy Storace. And the music director Mazzinghi, who had an option to compose a comic opera, would not or could not fill the gap in the repertoire left by Paisiello's non-appearance in London. O'Reilly had obviously decided to let opera seria carry the Pantheon through its first season, but the relative position of the two genres soon changed. When Pacchierotti and Mara fell ill shortly after the beginning of the season and opera seria virtually collapsed, the under-staffed buffi stepped in, and mainly with one opera, Guglielmi's La bella pescatrice, they kept the vocal department afloat for more than a month. In consequence, buffa performances far outnumbered seria during this season.

Of dire necessity O'Reilly had discovered a production formula which persisted in London for many seasons. Opera buffa, which depended on a well balanced cast of good actor-singers rather than on one or two virtuosi, was relatively cheap to perform because it required only simple, stock scenery and no machines or chorus; it provided a staple diet for the rank-and-file opera-goer. Opera seria, by contrast very expensive to produce, appealed to a smaller, more refined audience and was thus offered much less often; it was the pdtj de foie gras which marked this as an aristocrat's table. To assure both an air of courtliness and reasonably full houses, the King's Theatre could not have one kind of opera without the other. True, the Pantheon was forced to abandon the serious genre for the 1791-92 season, but the decision was an aberration-the result of a conspiracy

27 Mount Edgcumbe 1824, 70-75. Another sign of his snobbish conservatism is that, though he subscribed to the Pantheon for both seasons (his engraved ivory ticket survives in the Bedford archive), he declined to take a box at the Little Haymarket after the January 1792 fire.




to be unfolded below-and not a bellwether of the reform Le Texier and other critics were calling for. After a season's hiatus, the serious genre returned as the mainstay of Italian opera in London. 28

If O'Reilly at first placed too much faith in opera seria, he seems to have under-estimated the requirements of the ballet. He appointed the little-esteemed dancer Antoine Trancart as chief choreographer in July 1790, only to demote him to foreign agent in September. As we have seen, the celebrated Dauberval was then brought in as ballet master. He was essential to the company: every opera performance was accompanied by at least two ballets, one between the acts--de- scribed as "analogues

' l'op6ra" though the genres were kept quite

separate-and the other "d6tach6"--that is, an afterpiece. Given its popularity and the partisan loyalties generated by such principals as Hilligsberg and Didelot, ballet might be seen as the tail that wagged the dog. All ballets d'action required much more scenic spectacle than any opera seria, and the ballet master, solo dancers and coryphies consumed by far the biggest proportion of the Pantheon's total budget. Despite the meager musical and choreographic remains, the history of Italian opera in late eighteenth-century London is to a large extent the history of ballet.

The company's first-season budget can be reconstructed from the salaries agreed in individual contracts, from surviving quarterly payment sheets, and from check-book stubs (see Tables i-3).29 The bill for the ballet exceeded that for opera buffa and seria combined (see Table 4, col. 2). These figures may be compared to those for the near-contemporaneous Haymarket, whose expenditures are known for only two seasons: 1783-84 and 1793-94. The first is recorded in an undated memorandum which originated in O'Reilly's office and was thus prepared after the event. Though not broken down into seria and buffa departments, the I783-84 figures are detailed enough in other respects to instill confidence in their accuracy (Bedford Opera Papers

28 When William Taylor, O'Reilly's successor as King's Theatre manager, faced the prospect of similar retrenchment in 1796, he also considered reducing the company to a single troupe of singers. While he did not reveal which kind of opera would have to go, the tastes of his masters (still the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury), not to mention his personal attachment to Brigita Banti, the great prima donna seria, would almost certainly have meant the curtailment of opera buffa; see Bedford Opera Papers 6.A.2.a.

29 Locations of all contracts are given in col. 3 of Tables 1-3; the payment sheets for the first and second quarters I79I are in the Bedford Opera Papers 2.B. i6 (2.B. 12 is another copy with slightly different totals) and 4.B. 3, respectively. Some performers were advanced a fraction of their second payment (see 4.B.2). Third-quarter payments are known only from the check stubs in 3.Misc.




TABLE I

Opera Seria: 1790-91 Season

salary

place & date of perqs/ guaran- pro-

singer quality contract agent comment roles perfs tee contract jected paid

Gasparo primo London i6 O'Reilly benefit in March Rinaldo 14 no ?1200 1200 677 I S Pacchierotti uomo, Aug 90 (actually 2 (Armida)

sop. (4.A.30) June); right to Enrico (Idalide) castrato produce "new" Quinto Fabio

opera and to (Quinto Fabio) intro. arias

Gertrude prima [London [O'Reilly] benefit (17 Armida 14 no 0ooo wooo 528 lOr

8s Elisabeth donna Aug 90] Apr.); right to (Armida) Mara seria, contract intro. arias and Idalide

sop. lost; see to compose (Idalide) Emilia PRO substitutes (Quinto Fabio) C12/185/34

Gustavo primo Bologna Trancart, right to sing in Ubaldo 55 yes 560 560 535 2su od Lazzarini tenor 28 Sep 90 witness either opera (Armida)

serio; (4.A.52) L. Baldini seria or buffa Palmoro primo (Idalide) Lucio mezzo Papirio (Quinto carattere Fabio)

Celidoro (La bella pecatrice) Calloando (La Molinarella) Riccardo (La locanda)

Giovanna seconda Florence Trancart, right to sing in Zelmira 34 yes 28o (230) 280 250 Salimbeni donna 23 Sep 90 recom- either opera (Armida)

seria (4. A. 30) mended seria or buffa; Alciloe & by replaced by (Idalide) Fausta buffa Francesco Teresa Schinotti (Quinto Fabio)

Cecchi on 25 Jun 91 Lisetta (La bella pescatrice)

Giuseppe secondo London 2 O'Reilly Idreno 14 no 200 200 166 13s 4d Benigni sop. Aug 90 (Armida)

serio (4. A. i) Ataliba (Idalide) Volunnio (Quinto Fabio)

Giovanni bass, London 27 O'Reilly right to sing in Carlo (Armida) 14 no 500 1oo 1oo Garelli ultima Jul 90 either opera Imaro (Idalide)

parte (4.A.36) seria or buffa Maro Fabio and (Quinto Fabio) terzo buffo

total for opera seria: ?3740 3340 2258 165 rod

2.A.29).3? The total expenditure on opera for the 1783-84 season is

obtained by adding together the ?3900 for "Principle Singers"-who included Pacchierotti and Rauzzini-and the ?2948 set aside for "Sundry Salleries," presumably those of the 12 other vocalists listed in The London Stage (1968), Part 5, for this season. Whereas there is a

30 Financial records of the Haymarket company for the period 1784-89 are given piece-meal in various affidavits, depositions and masters' reports preserved in the PRO. The breakdown of these seasonal totals into departmental budgets, which are anyway disputed by the litigants, awaits further investigation.




TABLE 2

Opera Buffa: 179-9x Season

salary


singer quality contract agent comment roles perfs tee contract jected paid

Giovanni primo buffo, London 15 Nov O'Reilly contract also covers Don 18 yes ?400 420 400 Morelli basso 90 Morelli was & Borghi 91-92 season; free Pistofolo

still in Venice; benefit (16 June) or (La did not appear ? 15o molinarella) at Pan. till 14 Arsenio

May 91 (La locanda) (2.L.26)

Anna prima buffa London 17 Sep O'Reilly, benefit (cancelled); Dorinda 39 yes 700 700 700 Casentini assoluta, 90 (4.A. 31), witness right to introduce (La bela

sop. negotiated by Borghi new music pescatrice) Pacchierotti for Rachelina Casentini in (La Leghorn molinarella

Guerina (La locanda)

Lorenzo buffo Turin 20 Oct Trancart "mezzo Benefizio" Don 30 yes 400 430 429 Cipriani caricato and 90 (4.A. 34) (cancelled), Alfonso

acting primo Cipriani to pay (La bela buffo till expenses pescatrice May 91, Valerio basso (La locanda)

Teresa seconda Bologna 28 Sep Trancart, her arrest for debt Vespina 39? yes 300 300 300 Calvesi donna buffa, 90 (4.A.38) witness L. on 12 Apr 91 (La bella

sop. Baldini interrupts run of pescatrice) La bella pescatrice Donna

Eugenia (La molinarella) Marinella (La locanda)

Agostino bassi caricati Bologna 5 Oct Trancart Giuseppe reserved Agostino: 39/31 yes 6oo 6oo 6oo Lipparini 90 (4.A. 33) right to sing Conte (La (father) & "ultima partd nella bella Giuseppe Opere serie" pescatrice) Lipparini Don (son) Rospoloni

(La molinarella) Giuseppe: Macabruno (La beila pescatrice) Don

Luigino (La molinarella) total for opera ?2400 2450 2429 buffa:

good correspondence between the salaries of coryphbes for 1783-84 and

I790-9 -indeed, one might even assume that O'Reilly was using the memorandum as a guide in making engagements-there is a notable discrepancy of more than ?iooo in the total salaries of the solo dancers. The richer rewards of the latter season probably reflect the growing reputation of Charles-Louis Didelot and others in this remarkable troupe.




TABLE 3

Ballet: 1790-91 Season

salary


dancer rank contract agent comment roles perfs tee contract jected paid

Jean ballet Paris i6 Trancart Jean to compose Th6odore: 99/6 yes ?1260 1260 1260 Bercher master Sep 90 (i.e., choreograph) Thalie Dauberval and (4.A.28) all ballets (Amphion et and wife principal "Historiques & Thalie) Louise Th&odore dancer, Pantomines... (The Deserter) Dauberval resp. d6tachis ou ? (La file mal

analogues A gardte) l'op6ra"; two Calysto (Le benefits (24 March sidge de and 9 May, resp.), Cytbtre) free of charges, Eucharis O'Reilly to pay all (Telemachus in costs of ballet the Island of production except Calypso) Jean the music Bercher:

Skirmish (The Deserter)

Charles- principal Paris 4 Dauberval Charles-Louis to Charles- 56/19 yes 1100oo 1100oo o33 6s Louis dancer Oct 90 for have a benefit Louis: 8d Didelot and (4.A. 24) Trancart (cancelled) Amphion and wife figurante, guaranteed at (Amphion et Julie- resp. ?3oo; his wife to Thalie) Louise receive a salary of Z-phyre (Le Didelot ?ioo, but siige de

withdraws from Cytbre) ? (La company after first file malgardie) quarter Tel6machus

(Telemacbus in the Island of Calypso) Julie-Louise: Melpomine (Amphion et Thalie)

Mlle. solo Paris 19 Trancart benefit between i Jeune 6i yes 500 500 382 8s Louis dancer Sep 90 March & mid-May nymphe de la 4d Gervais (4. A. 17) (cancelled) Phocide dit6 (Amphion et Troche Thalie) ? (La

filk malgardee) niece (The Deserter) Adonis (Le siige de Cytbire) nymph (Telemachus in the Island of Calypso)

Lauchlin principal London 8 O'Reilly restricted to Berger de la 19+ no 520 525 437 [Or Duquesney dancer Dec 90 performing at the Phocide

(4.A.6) Pantheon (Amphion et Thalie)

The figures for the 1793-94 Haymarket season are reported by the anonymous author of Opera House (1815, 19-20), who, in attempting to paint Taylor's regime as black as possible, praises O'Reilly's financial restraint. As these sums include only principal singers, dancers and




TABLE 3 (Continued) Ballet: 1790-91 Season

salary


dancer rank contract agent comment roles perfs tee contract jected paid

Salvatori solo Paris 7 Dauberval to dance solo or in Salvatori: 53/34 yes 500 500 6o6 13s Vigano dancers Oct 90 for ensembles; allowed Berger de la 4d and wife (4. A. 9) Trancart ?40 for their Phocide

journey from Paris (Amphion et to London Thalie) Simkin

(The Deserter) ? (La file mal gardie) a Lucanian (Le siege de

Cythbre) his wife: ?

(Amphion et Thalie) ? (La file malgardie)

James principal London 14 O'Reilly contract negotiated Deserter (The 32 yes 430 430 432 17s D'Egville dancer Oct 90 by his father Pierre Deserter) 6d

(4.A.5) in the absence of Mentor his son; ?30 for (Telemachus in travel; benefit in the Island of April or May Calypso) (cancelled) Brontes (Le

siege de

Cytb~re) Marie- principal London 3 O'Reilly benefit between i ? (Amphion et 45 yes 500 [500] 480 Louise dancer Jan 91 recomm. March and May Thalie) Venus Reine (4.A. i6) by (cancelled) (Telemachus in

Deligni Dauberval the Island of Calypso) nymph (Le siege de

Cytbhre) Antoine choreo- London 19 O'Reilly he is to have a ? yes 400+ 500 400 Trancart grapher Jul 90 benefit in March or and wife and (4. A.x It) April (cancelled),

dancer, not guaranteed; she resp. is to receive ?io

per performance Marie ensemble London 27 O'Reilly salary to be paid to Rosine: suite 47/66 no 250 250 216 13s Rosine dancers Oct 90 their father, Louis d'Amphion 4d and Marie (4.A. 29) Simonet (Amphion et LIonore Thalie) Simonet companion to

Calypso (Telemachur in the Island of Calypso) ? (La

filk malgarde) Lnore: muse de la danse (Amphion et Thalie) Duchess (The Deserter) Calypso (Telemachus in the Island of Calypso) VWnus (Le siege de Cyt:re) ? (La file malgardie) total for solo dancers: 5460 5565 5248

165 2d




TABLE 3 (Continued)

Ballet: 1790-91 Season

salary


dancer contract agent comment tee contract jected paid (?sld)

Figurants and coryphies Jean Louis Aumer Paris 27 Trancart yes 6o 43 6 8

Sep 90 Catherine Berry London i O'Reilly no 45 30

Dec 90 Susan Birt London 2 O'Reilly no [351 23 6 8

Dec 90 Louise Augustine Paris 17 Trancart yes 70 51 3 4 Bitthemer Sep 90 Manette Bitthemer Paris 28 Trancart yes 70 54 3 4

Sep 90 Louis FranCois Paris 27 Trancart yes 70 50o

Boisgirard Sep 90 Susannah Bruguier London 18 Borghi no 40 26 13 4

Dec 90 Vincent Duchesne Paris 21 Trancart yes [80o] 53 13 4

Sep 90 M. Fialon Paris 7 Trancart ?io for travel yes 90 56 13 4

Oct 90 Catherine Jacobs London 14 O'Reilly no 40 26 13 4

Dec 90 Marie Josephine London 3 O'Reilly first figurante ? 6o 26 13 4 Lisieux Jan 91 Antoine Menage London 2 O'Reilly no 55 36 13 4

Dec 90 Anne Nicole Paris 27 Trancart 6o 46 6 8 Rousseau Sep 90 Jean Antoine Paris 27 Trancart yes 70 50 Rousseau Sep 90 Jean Schweitzer Paris 12 Trancart yes 70 50

Oct 90 Marie Vedie Paris 12 Trancart yes 70 50

Oct 90 Mlle. Durand [no engaged after season began yes - 70 50

contract] [?] [no engaged after season began yes -

80 56 13 4 contract]

Mr. Taylor [no engaged after season began no - 30 20

contract] Miss Watson [no engaged after season began no - 35 23 6 8

contract] Melle. Manage [no engaged after season began no - 30 o10

contract] sub-total for figurants: 985 1230 835 ii 8

figurants for third quarter (paid in lump sum): 257 i8 2

total for figurants: 985 1230 1093 9 Io total for soloists (from above): 5460 5565 5248 16 2

total for ballet: 6445 6795 6342 6 o

choreographers and no mezzi caratteri or coryphbes, they are evidently gross exaggerations.

A comparison of the contracted salaries in Tables I and 2

graphically illustrates the different attitudes towards opera seria and buffa. At Exi200 Pacchierotti was to have been the highest paid individual in the company. Yet the salary hierarchy of this division is




TABLE 4

Expenditures for Opera and Ballet at the Haymarket and Pantheon Theaters

Haymarket 1783-84 Pantheon 1790-91 Haymarket 1793-94

seria: ? ? 3740 ? buffa: ? 2400 ? opera total: ? 6848 6140 6000+ solo dancers: 4365 5460 9Ioo+ coryphies: 975 985 ? ballet total: 5340 6445

in steep decline-a reflection of the social orders (kings, generals, servants) depicted in many serious operas. The elderly Giuseppe Benigni, second serious soprano, was to receive only ?200, which shows that castration on musical grounds did not necessarily lead to fame and fortune. There is a greater feeling of comradeship and egalitarianism among the buffi, with a difference of only ?400 in the salaries of the highest and lowest paid members. Even Teresa Calvesi, the second woman, received a decent wage. The lack of a comedian of the stature of Benucci or La Storace may, however, have influenced the choice of repertoire during this season-La locanda being a good example-in favor of works whose characters are of roughly equal importance, socially and (thus) musically.

As the final columns of Tables 1-3 show, published or even contracted salaries can be misleading. Despite careful preparations, the Pantheon venture was in deep financial trouble almost from the beginning of the first season. Audiences were thin and the few unbiased critics hostile. The simultaneous illness of Mara and Pacch- ierotti was both a disaster and a blessing: it ruined O'Reilly's grandiose plans for opera seria but also allowed him to make considerable savings by docking the stars' wages during the second quarter. By the end of the season, they had each received little more than half their contracted salaries of i 200 and ?iooo, respectively. All the serious singers were affected by the financial crisis, and the gloomy figures of the final column of Table I do not inspire much confidence in O'Reilly's managerial skills. Yet the final reckoning shows a strong sense of justice. Mara and Pacchierotti, who appeared only 14 times this season yet earned substantial amounts outside the opera house, suffered most. The tenor Lazzarini, the workhorse of the company whose rising star was hardly diminished by the presence of the great Giacomo Davide at the rival Haymarket, appeared in every production (both comic and serious); he received slightly more than the prima




donna and so could not complain. The second rank singers, who depended on their small Pantheon incomes for survival, suffered the least. The buffi, even the Gianni-come-lately Morelli, fared far better, as all received their full salaries. The ballet, too, was little disturbed by the mid-season retrenchment, though the coryphbes were cut proportionally more than the principals; the ballet master was unaf- fected.

The discrepancy between official, contracted salaries and the actual wages of many singers and dancers brings into question the

legality of the contracts and the meaning of the so-called guarantee proffered to about two dozen performers whose names appeared on a list deposited with the Pantheon's bankers. 3' As is shown below, key clauses of several contracts, which were signed and sealed with much ceremony, had been invalidated by a recent ruling of Lord Chief Justice Kenyon; neither were the guarantees legally binding. As

Burney suggested (". . . the payment of the rent & performers before all things else"), the Pantheon trustees were merely agreeing, in the event of bankruptcy, to try to settle these debts before others. This perhaps explains the suspiciously haphazard application of the guarantee: for example, Mara and Pacchierotti did not have it, whereas many of the lowly coryphbes did.

If the performers' contracts are not a reliable index of salaries, they provide valuable new information about terms and conditions. These perquisites are a firmer guide to pecking order within the company and, more important, reveal the influence of singers and dancers on repertoire. Most desired was the benefit, that is, a performance for which an individual artist would receive the total box office receipts less certain overheads. The custom, which originated in London in the late seventeenth century, allowed favored actors, singers, dancers, and occasionally composers and instrumentalists to supplement regular salaries by pitting their ability to draw an audience against the management's inherent stinginess. 32 The exact terms were negotiable. For the first Pantheon season O'Reilly offered benefits to five singers and six dancers, some free of charges ("franche di tutte spese") and others subject to certain restrictions. The benefits of the more esteemed performers were to occur early in the year when the house was likely to be full. Had illness and worsening debt not disrupted the season, the order shown in Table 5 would have been observed. Even

31 See Sheldon vs. Mackell, PRO C1 2/192/27. 32 For an overview of the practice in the late eighteenth century, see The London

Stage (1968), Part 5, cxxxiii-cxxxvii and clxxxv-clxxxix.




TABLE 5

Benefit Performances, Pantheon Theatre, 1791

benefit name rank date promised performance

Ist Pacchierotti primo uomo March 2 June 2nd Dauberval ballet master March 24 March 3rd Mara prima donna March 14 April 4th Theodore first dancer - 9 May 5th Morelli primo buffo -6 June 6th Trancart choreographer March-April cancelled 7th Deligni first dancer March-May cancelled 8th Casentini prima buffa April cancelled

? Didelot first dancer - cancelled Gervais-Troche first dancer March-May cancelled Cipriani buffo caricato cancelled

if O'Reilly had been able to open in early December 1790 for a long season, it is unlikely that all the promised benefits could have been accommodated. In the case of the dancers, the manager was obviously trying to reduce costs by offering benefits in lieu of correspondingly higher salaries. Two performers were to be granted compensation in case of cancellation-Morelli (f?15o) and Didelot (?3oo)-though there is no record that the latter received anything for his loss. Benefits were less of a gamble for both artists and managers at the playhouses. Their seasons of i90 nights or more meant that benefits could be used to keep salaries down with little risk to the company. But at the opera house, with a maximum of only 60 or 70 nights per season, benefits posed a potential problem. The unusually short 1790-91 season (only 55 performances) partly explains the cancellation of so many benefits. But as the manager of a theater with a noble subvention, O'Reilly should have been able to meet all his obligations. That Bedford and Salisbury seem to have changed the rules in mid-season, forcing him to balance the books in face of hopeless commitments and mounting debts, is the first sign of a conspiracy.

The details of the primo uomo's contract are particularly interesting. Pacchierotti had an option to produce a "new opera," that is, a work not already in the company's repertoire. O'Reilly agreed to defray half the "Expences of such new Opera in respect to Music Decorations and Dresses and all other Matters and Things incidental to a New Opera" (a full transcription of the contract, which is in English-Pacchierotti had mastered the language-is appended to this article). Given the high cost of producing a new opera seria, this was a dubious concession. Yet Pacchierotti exercised it: at his benefit on 2 June he sang the title role in Bertoni's Quinto Fabio. The bills submitted for properties,




wine, soldiers (that is, supernumeraries), and tailoring show that this was a routine production with no extraordinary expenses (Bedford Opera Papers 4.D.13, 37-38, 63, and 82); and the lack of bills for music copying suggests that Pacchierotti, perhaps attempting to hold down costs, supplied the score and orchestral parts himself. On io June the company paid out ?3 i 2s 6d for "Pacchierottis Benefit" (Bedford Opera Papers 4. D. 82), which, if this sum represents half the cost of mounting Quinto Fabio, would also point to a modest production. But this payment may simply have covered the cost of the orchestra; exactly the same amount was authorized for Morelli's benefit on 28 June.

Pacchierotti's contract provides an alternative to a new work: if he decides "to take an Opera ... which shall have been previously performed during the said Season then [he] shall pay all the Expences which shall be incurred . .. beyond the sum of one hundred pounds." Even with the voluminous documentation of the Bedford archive, the nightly expense of mounting an opera seria is arbitrary. Does one include a proportion of the annual rent, the fuel bill, the other singers' salaries? Considering that the orchestra alone cost about ?32 per night, one is not surprised that Pacchierotti opted for a new opera, which was likely to draw a larger audience than one which had been performed several times earlier in the season.

The contract also acknowledges a prerogative granted to every London primo uomo and prima donna since the age of Senesino and Cuzzoni (and probably before): namely, the right to "introduce any New Music in any performance" during the season. Whether of the singer's own composition or hauled from a suitcase, arias could be inserted without the approval of the music director or resident composer and were subject to only one condition: "the Copy Right of all such productions and all Emoluments to arise therefrom or from the sale thereof shall from the time of the same being respectively brought forward be and become the sole Right and property of... Robert Bray O'Reilly." This long-established principle of ownership was in fact bitterly disputed at the time, and its legality is discussed below.

The web of relationships between the Pantheon's performers weakens the received notion that none but the finest Italian opera singers were engaged for the London stage. Only Pacchierotti was truly celebrated in Italy. Mara, though she had performed at Venice, does not appear on the list of prospective prime donne drawn up for La Fenice in i793 (Bauman 1986, 345), and Morelli, who had earned a good reputation there, was only one of several leading buffi. Most of




the second rank singers had appeared with the Pantheon's principals in Italy: the Lipparinis with Morelli in several productions at Venice in the early i78os; Casentini with Pacchierotti in Bertoni's Artaserse and Anfossi's Nitteti at Venice in 1788 and 1789, respectively; and

Benigni with Mara in Nasolini's Andromaca in 1789.33 Cipriani, who had sung at La Scala in 1787, already had good contacts in London, since his older brother, Giovanni Battista Cipriani, was a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts and occasional scene painter at Covent Garden. 34

Morelli seems to have had an agreement with the Pantheon (though it is not mentioned in his contract) to supply scores and librettos, which may account for the extra ?20 added to his projected salary (see Table 2). At the end of the 1790-91 season, he travelled to the Continent, writing to the theater on three occasions and later submitting itemized bills "for Music bought at Paris for the use of the Pantheon" (Bedford Opera Papers 2.C.1i7.a and 2.C.2 I.a). Included are two librettos and the recitatives "per l'opera di Nina," presumably Paisiello's Nina pazza per amore, first performed in Italy in I789. Though duly added to the Pantheon's music library,35s Nina was not mounted in London until 1797. Given the theater's close contact with Paisiello, one is surprised that Morelli chose to acquire the recitatives in France rather than ordering them directly from the composer.

Composer and Poet

The appointment of Joseph Mazzinghi as house composer and music director was probably politically motivated. He was closely associated with the Prince of Wales and organized concerts at Carlton House in 1791. Born and bred in London, though respectfully addressed by his colleagues and public as "Signor Giuseppe Mazzin- ghi," he was enough of an establishment figure to assure a smooth continuation of King's Theatre musical practices, yet not so esteemed as to feel chagrin at possibly having to play second fiddle to Mozart or Paisiello. Mazzinghi's articles of agreement, dated 17 July 1790, are among the earliest issued by the Pantheon and are remarkable for the wide range of duties required within the opera house and for the freedom given without (Bedford Opera Papers 4.A.9). While the

33 Information gathered from Sartori unpublished, and Wiel 1897. 34 Their fraternity is confirmed in a newspaper clipping of i March 1791: Mander

and Mitchenson Pantheon Scrapbook, 11:2. 35 Bedford Opera Papers I.A.2.




principal singers had to request the manager's permission to perform even in concerts, Mazzinghi could play and compose for whomever he wished; at the beginning of the second Pantheon season, for example, he supplied the music for at least two Covent Garden comic operas and contributed to the same theater's desecration of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice on 28 February 1792. Promised ?300 per year (the same as Mozart), he received ?250 for the first season.

Mazzinghi was to "perform all the same Dutys in every respect as have been usually heretofore done and performed by the Composer or Director of the Italian Operas;" indeed, on empirical evidence, his articles of agreement might have originated with those issued to Porpora by the Opera of the Nobility. He was to attend all rehearsals and to direct from the harpsichord every public performance of the season, whether opera or ballet. In typical late eighteenth-century fashion he was expected to share responsibility for the instrumental ensemble with the first violinist (either Wilhelm Cramer for opera or Felice Chabran for ballet), though he was mainly concerned with the singers. While some rehearsals were accompanied by harpsichord only,36 "A Grand piano forte," hired from Longman and Broderip, was probably the director's preferred instrument in the orchestra pit (Bedford Opera Papers 5.G.24.a and 5.G.34.a). In a list of musicians compiled in his First London Notebook, Haydn mentions "Maz- ingi-at the piano-forte in the Pantheon" (Landon 1976, I82).

The importance of the pasticcio to the London stage throughout the eighteenth century has long been recognized, but its prominence in an official list of the house composer's duties is somewhat discon- certing: Mazzinghi was to provide "all such music as shall be necessary in the course of [the] Season for such Operas as shall be given . . . and Arrange all the Pasticcios fit for public Representa- tion." Only secondarily does the contract state that he may be required to supply "the Music of one entire new Comic or Serious Opera." The manager promises (ambiguously) to give Mazzinghi the libretto at least six weeks before the composer "shall be required so to do." Mazzinghi's third main task was to "compose and Select all such new music ... as shall be necessary for the Ballett Master in the Arrangement or Composition of the necessary Balletts." Most ballets produced at the Pantheon and continental theaters were also pasticcios, concocted by the lowest order of composers, yet this clause would seem to place Mazzinghi in potential conflict with the ballet

36 See, for example, the rehearsal of La bellapescatrice on 22 January 1791; Mander and Mitchenson Pantheon Scrapbook, I:Ii.




master Dauberval, who had total control of the dance department, taking a personal interest in acquiring and arranging music for his productions.

Besides arranging ballets and contributing substitute arias to all the operas produced by the Pantheon, Mazzinghi was also commissioned to compose an opera of his own, Zafira. Slated for the second season, it was never performed, probably never even rehearsed.37 An undated scenario prepared by Marinari, who replaced Hodges as chief painter and designer in October 1791, confirms a Turkish theme: a typical two-act opera buffa set in the seraglio of Achmet, with a prospect of a palace and gardens "vagamente illuminati in tempo di notte" (Bedford Opera Papers I.A. I). Copying bills suggest that either Mazzinghi never finished the work or, more likely, had assembled at least two-thirds of it from stock. 38 During a performance of Dauberval's Turkish ballet Lafoire de Smirne on 14 April 1792, two dancers quite unexpectedly sang a "duet in the Seraglio Scene, accompanied on the harp," as The Morning Herald reported two days later. Perhaps this was a fragment of Mazzinghi's opera. That he evidently chose to treat the commission as just another pasticcio is less a reflection of his limitations as a composer than of the special requirements of the London system.

Girolamo Tonioli, the Pantheon house poet (and author of Zaffira), is of little consequence to the history of opera, yet his contract casts new light on the anomalous role of the Italian librettist in London. Writing many years after the event, but of a theater that had changed little since the 179os, Ebers (1828, 58-59) declared the post of poet superfluous to an establishment that relied almost entirely on imports. But as manager he was still compelled to employ such a person, Stefano Vestris, who performed various unspecified tasks. From Da Ponte's memoirs we learn in vivid detail exactly what these tasks were. His frustration with the London system resulted partly from being an outsider who over-estimated his importance in the larger scheme; like other King's Theatre poets, Da Ponte was afforded considerable opportunity to build a mini-empire within the opera

7 According to a news report of 31 October 1791, "A new comic Opera founded on a Turkish story is preparing for the Pantheon, by Mazzinghi. The dramatic part of the work was furnished by Tonioli, a learned diffident and ingenius Italian." See Mander and Mitchenson Pantheon Scrapbook, II:17.

38 On I9 June 1792 the house copyist submitted a bill for "The New Opera of Mazzighi's [sic] called Zaffira" (Bedford Opera Papers 2.F. 15.a). The amount charged (E7 8s i od) is, however, less than a third of the usual fee for copying an opera buffa (see below).




house. A thorough knowledge of English verse and an appreciation of the musical tastes of the British upper class were essential; and, as Tonioli's contract shows, success depended crucially on entrepreneur- ial skills. Da Ponte was deficient in all three areas.

Tonioli and Da Ponte stood in the shadow of Carlo Francesco Badini, a close associate of Taylor (around whose neck he kept a noose, Da Ponte said: 1929, 243). Badini was the chief staff librettist at the Haymarket on and off from the late 176os until the mid 1790s. He also wielded considerable power, not always for the good, as editor of more than one London newspaper. Because he was closely associated with the Haymarket, he stood little chance of being appointed Pantheon librettist; besides, O'Reilly mistrusted him.39 Badini remained with the unlicensed Haymarket where he wrote the libretto of Haydn's aborted opera L'anima delfilosofo. Tonioli was one of a number of Italian scribblers who had long frequented the coffee houses near the Haymarket waiting for scraps from the house poet's table. But these were rare, and he is known to have written only one libretto previous to his appointment at the Pantheon: Le gemelle, an opera buffa set by Anfossi in

i784- Tonioli's contract (Bedford Opera Papers 4.A. io) helps to dispel some of the myths surrounding Da Ponte's employment in London. Opera House claims that Mozart's former librettist received ?250 for the 1793-94 season and that he or the prompter "had also the perquisite of the Opera books, estimated at ?500 per annum" (i815, 2 ). The anonymous author seems once again to exaggerate; Tonioli's salary was just ?ioo for the first season (of which he received all but ?i6 9s 4d). There is little reason to assume that Da Ponte's would have been much more, nor were his duties likely to have varied appreciably from Tonioli's. These were (i) to "alter and translate into English all such Opera Books or Compositions commonly called Pasticcios"; (2) to "produce all such new Opera's during the said season as shall be requisite"; (3) to write "one entire New Comic Opera of his own composition" to be delivered to the manager one month after being told to do so; and (4) to "deliver to the licencer of Dramatic performances a fair regular and correct Manuscript Copy of each of such Opera's in such manner as the same have been usually delivered to such licencer."

The first item is somewhat surprising, since one has assumed that the translations printed on the facing pages of nearly all Italian

9 Letter from O'Reilly to Sheldon, 22 January 1792, Bedford Opera Papers 5.D.29.




librettos published in London throughout the century were generally the work of English gentlemen who had made the Grand Tour or of poetasters of Italian origin. Da Ponte, for example, used John Mazzinghi, probably an uncle of the composer, to translate several of his early London operas.4o Tonioli was, however, expected to translate his own poems, though there are at least three exceptions: the verse of Armida, the Pantheon's first production, was "adapted to the Music by ... Tonioli and Translated from the Italian By Mr. O'Reilly" (from the 179i libretto); L'Idalide and La locanda were both translated by Da Ponte's later associate John Mazzinghi. The English texts of the other Pantheon operas are, as far as is known, by Tonioli.41

Opera seria and opera buffa seem to be treated differently in the list of Tonioli's duties. He is required "to produce all such new Opera's" but is allowed to write "one new comic opera." The implication is that serious operas were by definition pasticcios, things to be "produced" rather than created anew. Madam Mara's discussion of Gyrowetz's opera in a letter to Borghi (quoted above) can now be read in a different light: "tell Mr Tonioli ... that I wish, that the beginning of my first Rec: of Semiramide ... may remain if he thinks the whole of it too long he may shorten it." She is not asking for adjustments to a newly written libretto, rather instructing Tonioli how to adapt an old one. Unfortunately, nothing is known of his one original Pantheon libretto, the seraglio opera Zaffira, save the above-mentioned scenario, though the copying bill for a fragment of the score suggests that it too might have been assembled rather than composed.

The vague "perquisite of the Opera books" to which the author of Opera House believed Da Ponte entitled is clearly spelled out in the final section of Tonioli's contract. The poet is to receive

All the profit that may arise from the sale of the Opera Books condition- ally that the said Girolamo Tonioli shall pay all and every charge and expence attending the printing and translating all and every such Opera

40 Occasionally a native dramatist such as Aaron Hill or Colley Cibber would write an opera seria which was then translated into Italian by a staff poet. See Price 1987a, 124-137-

41 A long, facetious letter published in The Morning Herald on i April 1791 points to several mistranslations in La bella pescatrice (for example, "Lasciami bestemmiar" is rendered as "Let me rave" instead of "Let me blaspheme"). The writer blames O'Reilly, not the house poet, for the blunders. But they may also be the work of John Mazzinghi, who is named as the translator of Da Ponte's one-act version of La bella pescatrice (i794),

which reprints large chunks of the English part of the 1791 libretto verbatim except for the corrections mentioned in the newspaper.




Books, in consideration thereof said Girolamo Tonioli agrees and under- takes to allow to [the manager] Three pence for every Book so disposed of during the course of the aforesaid season [Bedford Opera Papers 4.A. Io].

At is 6d per copy, Tonioli could have augmented his modest salary considerably, though whether (after the printer had been paid) sales would have amounted to the ?500oo Da Ponte is supposed to have pocketed is doubtful. There is no record in the Bedford Opera Papers that Tonioli ever paid the company any royalty on his librettos.

Copyists and Copyright

After the assistant manager Borghi, the most important member of the music staff was Leopoldo De Michele. Nominally employed as copyist, he in fact controlled the flow of music through the theater, acquiring scores, arranging and transposing numbers, and generally reshaping operas and ballets; he also supervised the publication of music performed at the Pantheon during the first season. De Michele had been employed by the King's Theatre since the mid i76os, first as bufo mezzo carattere and later as a principal bass, combining performance with music copying. After retiring from the stage in 1783, he was named one of the Haymarket's five trustees. Sometime before November 1787, Taylor sent him to Italy to engage performers. When his fellow trustees forced his resignation, De Michele wrote a letter to the Lord Chamberlain protesting that he was owed more than ?900.42

Although a financial forecast of the first Pantheon season earmarks only ?65 for music copying (Bedford Opera Papers 2.A.32), De Michele earned in excess of ?400 for piece-work and miscellaneous administration; his total income thus exceeded that of deputy manager Borghi (which was ?400). The copyist's true importance to the company is indicated by a slip of the pen found in a preliminary ledger for second season expenses: "Mr. Micheli [sic] Manager" (Bedford Opera Papers 3.Vol.VIIIA). He charged a standard rate of ?2 I for copying a two-act comic opera and ?io ios for a ballet score.

42 For details of De Michele's Haymarket career, see A Biographical Dictionary 1973, 4:32 i, and Taylor vs. De Michele, PRO C12/615/9. He and the other trustees are satirized in a thinly veiled allegorical pamphlet The Testament, or Will, of Mr. William Taylor 1785. In a Chancery affidavit of 15 February 1786 (PRO C3 1/239, no. 2o6), Taylor names Carnevale and Badini as the authors of a scurrilous printed attack, presumably this pamphlet.




But for operas the process was never straightforward, since all but new works needed extensive alterations. For example, in addition to the fixed fee for copying Guglielmi's La pastorella nobile, first heard in Naples in 1788, De Michele re-copied four sheets "between the duetto & Trio," and later altered "6 songs and a quartet." He was also paid for "recopying 5 airs, copying several pages for replacing said airs, pasting them in the Books, and changing the numbers" (Bedford Opera Papers 2.G. I.a and 2.E. 19.a). Though not explicitly corroborated by reviews, these last alterations were almost certainly in response to adverse criticism after the London premiere on 17 December 1791: "The dramatic parts of these compositions being, in general, only calculated as a vehicle for the music, little is expected on that ground."43 Such "in-flight" adjustments were commonplace at the time.

The bills for Paisiello's La discordia conjugale show that De Michele was more than a mere music copyist. He charged ?24 for the score, somewhat more than the usual fee; and this did not include 5s 3d for inserting an aria by Cimarosa into the first act nor 4s 6d for "Copying & Transposing the last movement" (Bedford Opera Papers 2.E. 19.a). Transposition, especially of ensembles for singers of different ranges, can be more than a crude mechanical process. A full score of the first act of La discordia conjugale (Lcm MS 441) appears to be the only survivor of the Pantheon's music library, the rest of which was destroyed in the fire. The manuscript is in various hands; De Michele was responsible for some entire pieces, the secco recitative, and new words written over the existing text. Several pieces not copied by him are on Italian paper, which further suggests that the score was assembled from bits acquired from the Continent.

De Michele was not the only Pantheon copyist. During the 791i-

92 season he was assisted by Antonio Stracchini, the head prompter, whose job was to extract librettos from scores. Stracchini prepared or supervised the preparation of two copies of each, one of which, in accordance with the Licensing Act of 1737, had to be sent to the Lord Chamberlain's office for censoring fourteen days before the premiere (Bedford Opera Papers 5.M. i3.a and b). Several of these librettos survive in the Larpent Collection.44 During the previous season De Michele was assisted in this capacity by J. Gautieri, about whom nothing else is known except that he was still employed as a word-book copyist at the King's Theatre in i796-97, since the

43 19 December 1791, Mander and Mitchenson Pantheon Scrapbook, II:i8b. 44 See MacMillian 1939, Nos. 902, 922, 925, 928, 929, 934, 1015, 1048.




Larpent copies of three Da Ponte librettos- I/tesoro (II June 1796), Il consiglio imprudente (29 December 1796) and Merope (3 June I797)-appear to be in his hand.45

The contracts of all Pantheon performers of any consequence include a clause, mentioned above, to the effect that any music heard at the theater during the regular season automatically became the property of the manager. Yet, according to a custom said to have been established in the i750s, the house copyist, not the manager, had the right of "publishing and Vending all such Operas and Musical

Compositions."46 Therefore when, say, Giardini introduced his own new arias into Cimarosa's La Ninette in 1789-90, the copyist could sell the most popular of them to any publisher without the composer's or manager's consent, and the publisher was not obliged to pay anybody a royalty.

De Michele certainly exercised this prerogative during 1790-91, but for the second Pantheon season the manager drew up a formal contract with the music publishers Thomas Skillern and George Goulding. They paid ?105 "for their own proper use and Emolument [the copyright of] all the Music to be performed at the Pantheon ... either in Operas or Dances" (Bedford Opera Papers 2.L. 17, dated i November i791). The contract makes no mention of De Michele nor allows any alternative for distributing music. The only known fruit of this agreement is the King's Theatre, Pantheon. Opera Register, a series of arias and ensembles extracted from various operas and issued as separate numbers by Skillern and Goulding in 1791-92.47 The publishers' monopoly was a new departure for a London opera company, and the legality of the contract was challenged almost immediately by a rival firm. The ensuing Chancery lawsuit had profound consequences for music copyright in Great Britain.

A composer's right to his own music had been definitively established in i777 by a ruling in a celebrated lawsuit over unautho- rized editions of J.C. Bach and C.F. Abel, whereby the Act of Anne (0 709) was extended to cover musical compositions.48 But the rights of composers and arrangers in the cut-and-paste world of Italian opera were still murky. The ad hoc gestation of the Pantheon's score of La

4sI am grateful to Dr. Alan Tyson for pointing out that corrections and emendations in Da Ponte's hand are scattered throughout these Gautieri copies.

46 As stated in Storace vs. Longman, PRO C 2/618/12.

47 Locations of some surviving copies are recorded in RISM under various composers' names. Other numbers can be found in the Mander and Mitchenson Collection and the London Theatre Museum.

48 See Hunter 1986, 278-80, and Small 1985-




discordia conjugale illustrates why ownership may have devolved to the house music copyist. Yet the unwritten agreement between copyist and manager had been challenged by Stephen Storace in 1788. The Chancery lawsuit centered on "Care donne che bramate," which Storace had composed for his sister as a replacement for one of Lisetta's arias in Paisiello's serio-comic opera II re Teodoro (London premiere, 8 December I787). The piece was the hit of the show and Storace decided to publish it himself. However, De Michele simul- taneously sold a copy to Longman and Broderip; their slightly bowdlerized version of "Care donne" became a best seller. Storace then asked the Court for compensation and an injunction against further sales.

Even allowing that about half of what is stated in them is untrue, the various bills and responses of plaintiff and defendants provide a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the music department of the King's Theatre before the period covered by the Bedford Opera Papers.49 Storace claims that shortly before he left London in September 1786, Gallini asked him to procure a copy of II re Teodoro in Vienna, which he did. But when the opera was put into rehearsal at the Haymarket in late autumn 1787, "many people thought the music dull and heavy;" and Nancy in particular had objected to one aria because it was too long, so the manager "indulged her with the Liberty of changing the same for another." Stephen was then invited to compose a lively substitute aria. The defendants (Longman and Broderip) allege that he simply produced a tune to which the house poet, Badini, fitted words. The composer hotly disputes this claim, saying that Gallini first ordered Badini to write an appropriate replacement verse, which was then set to music; Storace does concede, however, that he agreed to accept no payment if his sister were allowed to sing the aria and if the piece remained unpublished. Of course this admission weakens his claim that Gallini invited him to write the aria.

The villain of the case is De Michele, who quietly sold the entire score of II re Teodoro, including a copy of the inserted "Care donne," to Longman and Broderip. The publishers' main line of defense was that the oral agreement between manager and copyist should be honored, and that, while freely admitting the music to be by Storace, they had lawfully purchased the words from Badini. Lord Kenyon

49 Hunter 1986, 280, n. 70, cites only an affidavit related to this case (PRO C3 i/ 247/81). The complete suit and countersuit are found in PRO C12/618/12 (25 January 1788), C21I/I73/17 (12 February 1788), and C12/623/35 (14 February 1789).




ruled that any private arrangement within the opera house could not over-ride the public right established by the Copyright Act, and that, therefore, the aria was the property of the composer. This did not, however, stop Longman and Broderip from continuing to sell it, even after a special jury of the Kings Bench had also found against them, and Storace had to go to law once again to seek an injunction.

Though cited as a landmark decision for British composers, Lord Kenyon's ruling had little effect on the later Pantheon contracts, most of which were now technically illegal. Yet Skillern and Goulding unwisely decided to test this precedent in a lawsuit against the original defendants Longman and Broderip.so The case should have been clear-cut but was seriously complicated by disputed authorship. It centers on the aria "Anche nel petto io sento," which Madam Mara introduced into Idalide at her benefit performance on 17 April i79i. The aria is an arrangement of Paisiello's popular duet "Nel cor pii non mi sento" upon which Beethoven later wrote Six Variations (WoO 70).5'

Mara never claimed to be the sole composer of the aria, but she did give this impression by insisting that the instrumental parts be returned to her every night "immediately after she had sung the same and quitted the stage." Continuing to behave in an over-protective manner and ignoring the clause in her contract wherein she surren- dered to O'Reilly all rights to the aria, she then gave Longman and Broderip permission to publish the song. But she was betrayed by De Michele, who "by some excuse and pretence got and detained [the aria] from her and without her consent copied the music thereof and (as she hath heard) gave" it to the contracted publishers Skillern and Goulding. They soon issued it under an ambiguous heading: "Sung by Madam Mara At the Kings Theatre, Pantheon in the Opera of Idalide with Harp Accompaniment by Madam Mara" (RISM P 578). To strengthen their claim to the piece, Skillern and Goulding maintained that "a considerable part of the Music of such song" was composed by Mazzinghi. But in requesting an injunction to stop Longman and Broderip from selling a pirated edition of yet another version, Skillern and Goulding rested their case mainly on their contract with the Pantheon. In this instance they committed perjury: upon realizing

50 PRO CI2/I85/34, dated 21 May 1792. s' The piece is from La molinarella, a performance of which Beethoven attended at

Vienna in the company of a woman who told him that she had lost her copy of some variations on the melody; the next day, according to Wegeler 1833, 80 n., the composer presented her with the "Variazioni etc. perdute par la - ritrovath par Luigi van Beethoven."




that the contract had been signed eight months after Mara sang the disputed aria in Idalide, they instructed their lawyers to alter the date in the bill of complaint from "i November 1791" to "I March 1791 ."52

Luckily, the Court did not ask the plaintiffs to produce the original contract. Oddly, Longman and Broderip had a trump card they chose not to play: Skillern and Goulding had already published the original duet "Nel cor pii non mi sento" in the Pantheon Opera Register under Paisiello's name (RISM P 142). Perhaps the defendants saw the difficulty of trying to prove to a musically illiterate judge that the duet and aria were essentially the same piece, a problem which still affects cases of alleged musical plagiarism.

Without attempting to disentangle the hopelessly complex question of authorship, the Master of the Rolls found in favor of the defendants Longman and Broderip, thereby upholding Storace vs. Longman.53 By reaffirming the right of the composer (even when unknown) to his or her own music, the Court had effectively invalidated private agreements between opera managers and their employees, while at the same time allowing a plurality of publication of any piece of disputed authorship. The house copyist's stranglehold on composers-surely one of the greatest hindrances to the development of opera in eighteenth-century England-had finally been broken.

Conspiracy and Fire

The demise of the Pantheon, which Mount Edgcumbe called "one of the prettiest, and by far the most genteel and comfortable theatre I ever saw" (1824, 71), was sealed long before the fire of 14 January 1792. O'Reilly was under no illusions that, once launched, the company could survive solely on box subscriptions and nightly receipts. He knew that, just as the capital for the remodelling and first-quarter payments had come largely from Bedford and Salisbury, the full running costs could only be met by a continuing subvention.

52 See PRO C31/266, no. 141. 53 The judgement of 24 February 1794 is in PRO C33/486, p. 282. The case is

further complicated because Madam Mara later introduced the same aria into the part of Mandane in a performance of Arne's Artaxerxes on 22 November 1791 at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket. With a new text by John Wolcot (alias Peter Pindar) beginning "Hope told a flattering tale," this piece was then published by the defendants Longman and Broderip. The music "was exactly the same as the Italian song," except that the recitative preceding the English version was composed by her husband John Baptist Mara. The plaintiffs asked the Court to issue an injunction against further sales and to order the surrender of all profits.




Yet neither O'Reilly nor his financial backers could have anticipated Haydn's rampant popularity and Taylor's ability to exploit it. For- bidden by the Lord Chamberlain to mount Italian operas, the new King's Theatre in the Haymarket offered concerts (which included some of the London symphonies), unstaged opera (though curiously not L'anima delfilosofo) and, perhaps most successfully, ballet in which Vestris junior and Marie Louise Hilligsberg triumphed.

O'Reilly was at first unperturbed by the potent competition; a

half-empty Pantheon meant only that the noble subsidy would have to be somewhat increased. But in a financial report to Sheldon (chairman of the trustees) of 3 April 1791, the manager sounds a note of concern: "Last night I passed by the Hay Markett- there was an immense

string of Carriages- and notwithstanding the House [i.e., the Pantheon] was better than I could expect under all the Circumstances" (Bedford Opera Papers 5.D. 17). O'Reilly stood at the top of a long slippery slope. By the end of the second quarter (20 April), the

performers' salaries alone were nearly ?4500 in arrears (Bedford Opera Papers 2.B.22), and by 23 May he was worried.

I am sorry to be obliged to trouble you so frequently Respecting the dangerous situation I now stand in- Mr Hodges- Mde Mara- Mazzinghi & others have given me to understand they will wait no longer for their 2d payment. . . these people have offered to accept a very small portion of their Debts and to postpone the Remdr to the Next season- & If I had any means of quieting them for the present I am certain it would prevent others from taking violent steps against me- In short my dear sir I am at present in so wretched a situation that I know no where to apply but thro' your friendship to that Generous Protection which has hitherto so nobly supported me & which by a small additional effort may place me in a situation to repay My noble patrons what they have already advanced me [Bedford Opera Papers 5.D. 19].

But Sheldon, until now a genial intermediary between the manager and his "noble patrons," blocked all access to Bedford and Salisbury and blamed the financial crisis on O'Reilly's slip-shod management, his inability to keep appointments, and bad relations with certain performers. Dauberval, for instance, took his complaints about the manager directly to the Duke of Bedford. But O'Reilly defended himself against such "fabrications" by implying that the ballet master, who (he says) was an artistic failure at the Pantheon, was hoping to switch allegiance to the Haymarket; he also wrote that Dauberval was a drunkard who indulged "in the most infamous acts that could




disgrace Human Nature."54 But Sheldon would not be moved and advised O'Reilly to consider resigning.

As early as March 1791 O'Reilly had detected a wisp of conspiracy swirling round his patrons,55 but did not suspect that he himself was the target. He was hardly a model manager-the accounts for 1790- 91 are chaotic and incomplete-but most of the shortfall was caused not by poor judgement or unnecessary extravagance, rather by the inexplicable stoppage of the noble subvention. Forced into hiding to avoid arrest and expecting the imminent collapse of the Pantheon company in July 1791, O'Reilly was unaware that his successor was already negotiating contracts for the next season.56 Not until 14 November 1791, on the eve of his flight into France, was he cruelly informed that a new manager had been appointed. "If Mr Borghi is the person you allude to," he told Sheldon pathetically, "he is an honest man."s57 In fact, Trancart, the former foreign agent, had been manager for nearly five months.

O'Reilly had already been forced to assign his interest in the Pantheon to the trustees to help pay off the performers and trades- men. In a document of 30 July 1791 Sheldon extracted a further concession from the hapless manager: "I also assign to [the trustees] all my Reversionary Interests in the Theatre in the Hay Market."s8 In early 1790, when vying with Taylor for the opera patent, O'Reilly had shrewdly purchased a 25-year lease of the Haymarket site from its owner, Sir Edward Vanbrugh. Although the lease was "reversionary," that is, it would not take effect until the current lease expired in 1803, the manoeuver infuriated Taylor (1791, 35) because it undermined his plans for an operatic dynasty in London. However entrenched Taylor became, O'Reilly would eventually assume possession of the Haymarket. But why should Sheldon and the Pantheon trustees have been so concerned about a lease which would not come into force for more than a decade?

Sometime during the summer of 1791, various representatives of the Pantheon, the Haymarket, and the English language theaters

54 In a letter to Sheldon of 22 July 1791; Bedford Opera Papers 5.D.21. 55 Letter to Sheldon, Bedford Opera Papers 5.D. 16. 56 Apart from the seria singers, most performers were re-engaged under the same

terms and conditions that applied during the I790-91 season. 57 Letter to Sheldon, Bedford Opera Papers 5.D. Io. 58 Bedford Opera Papers 6.F.2, an office copy of the original document. The

trustees later claimed never to have accepted O'Reilly's assignment, according to a legal opinion offered by John Mansfield on i I December I797; see Bedford Opera Papers 6.F. I3.




Covent Garden and Drury Lane devised a plan to settle the opera patent dispute once and for all by returning Italian opera to the Haymarket under Taylor's management. The agreement to do so was drawn up by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (playwright, politician and part-owner of Drury Lane), Thomas Holloway (an investor in the Haymarket), and Sheldon-the last clearly being the chief author.59 The plan received the approbation of the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Bedford, and the Marquis of Salisbury. The last two might well have approved, because they were to be allowed to recover their losses on the Pantheon, estimated at between ?30,000 and ?40,000, by gift of a number of boxes in the new opera house, which they could occupy, rent to their friends, sell, or dispose of in any way they saw fit. Furthermore, Bedford and Salisbury were to become overseers of the London Italian opera in perpetuity.

The plan also made provision for the Pantheon. In a clause which, in light of later events, could be interpreted as conspiratorial, the opera house was "to be dismantled & restored as soon as the Haymarket Theatre is fit." "Dismantled" in this context can only mean that the building was to be rendered useless for staging opera. Why "restored"? The clause refers to a requirement of the August 1790 lease of the Pantheon: in the rush to gain possession before the Haymarket could be finished, Sheldon had amazingly agreed to indemnify Burney and his fellow proprietors in case O'Reilly "should not perform his Covenant for reinstating the said Premises in the same [i.e., original] Condition at the end of the said Term [of 12 years] reasonable use and wear thereof excepted."6o At the inception of the Pantheon opera project, the Duke of Bedford was concerned about the restoration covenant. In September I79o he asked his personal architect Henry Holland to estimate "The probable Expence of restoring the Building at a future period." Holland reported that full restoration would cost about ?4000.61 Apparently undaunted by this figure, Bedford allowed the conversion to go forward. Several tiers of boxes, stalls, orchestra pit, dressing rooms, and a proscenium arch were erected in the great rotunda, whose ceiling was lowered to improve the acoustic; connecting passageways to the scene rooms were constructed behind the theater, and a recently renovated organ was ripped out to make room for the stage. "Full" restoration was now

59 There are two copies, one prepared for the Lord Chamberlain's office (PRO LC 7/88, 391-416) and an earlier version in the Bedford Opera Papers (6.Vol.I.a).

60 For details of this lease, see PRO C33/482, p. 158, and n. I6 above. 6' British Architectural Library, Holland Papers HoH/3/4/2.




virtually impossible, and the resulting compensation to the Pantheon owners would have sharply increased Bedford and Salisbury's already staggering debt.

The general agreement of summer 179i was not signed by the parties concerned, nor was it ever made public. Instead, Sheldon behaved as if the document did not exist. He authorized his new manager Trancart to make plans for the 1791-92 season, including refurbishment and minor building work; Bedford and Salisbury's generous subvention was suddenly restored. During the second season all bills were promptly paid and, in contrast to O'Reilly's drastic retrenchment, every performer, even those who did not appear on stage, received his or her full, contracted salary. Trancart's only economy was to drop opera seria, but whether this resulted from Pacchierotti's departure from England and Mara's decision to transfer to the Haymarket to sing English opera or from a genuine desire to hold down costs is unknown.

The events surrounding the Pantheon fire on 14 January i792 are well known and need only be briefly recounted here.62 Starting in a locked scene-painting room adjoining the stage, the fire quickly spread out of control. Everything was destroyed, including the library and musical instruments.63 Haydn, among many others, heard that it was arson, gossip probably supplied to him by one of the new buffi, Teresa Negri, sister of his mistress Luigia Polzelli.64 No crime was proven, but the Pantheon's main insurer, the Phoenix Fire Office, never settled the claim, and rumors of arson circulated for years, gaining the status of fact in the annals of the London stage.

The Bedford Opera Papers provide new information about the fire from those intimately involved. A rough draft of a letter from Sheldon

62 The best account is in Survey of London, Volume 31. 63 Gyrowetz claimed that the Duke of Bedford immediately bought replacements

for the players, but this cannot be verified. The duke certainly poured large sums of money into the company after the fire, but specific expenditures were determined by Sheldon and the managers; there is no record of the purchase of musical instruments during either season. At least one harpsichord survived the fire-probably a practice instrument kept in an adjoining building-and was transported "to the Theatre In the Hayimarket" on 7 February 1792; Bedford Opera Papers 5.G.24.a.

Haydn naturally took a special interest in Negri, reporting her marital difficulties to Luigia (Landon 1976, 115). In recounting the Pantheon fire and the resulting hardship for the singers, Haydn stated that its destruction was a particular blow to Negri, because she "had been engaged in the last piece" (ibid., 122). Robbins Landon guesses that she appeared as Eurilla in La pastorella nobile, a performance of which Haydn attended on 3 December; but she was not in that opera, rather in Paisiello's La discordia conjugale, which was in rehearsal at the time of the fire.



I OO JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

to O'Reilly, written immediately afterwards, seems authentically breathless (and is barely decipherable):

The bustle & anxiety I have been involved in are greatr. than words can xpress & when they will have an end god only knows but for ye present I shall confine myself to an additional calamity that has befallen your unfortunate rash undertaking, and whch calamity assist me in [?] I want words to express ye [?] of

The Pantheon was burnt to ashes but last evening betwn ye hours of one & 5. It is supposed to have broken out abt ye half hour after I but whether by design or accident remains to be ascertnd [?] I will inform you ye result of ye enquiries. . . . Nothing saved but ye chest of Treasurers papers ... [Bedford Opera Papers 3.A. 17].

Given the speed and ferocity with which the flames spread and the widely reported total destruction of the theater and its contents, one is surprised to learn that anything, let alone the complete financial records of the company, was rescued. O'Reilly's reply (from Paris) of 22 January 1792 is predictably distraught.

I long dreaded the malice of my Enemys & when I was permitted to have the direction-I never left the Theatre a Night without examining it myself- judge my surprize when I learned that the fire men were discharged & no watch man kept at night-even Luppino [the tailor]. Unacquainted as I am with the transactions of this unfortunate theatre for these last five months I can speak to nothing But Public Reports- do not blame me if I Err- But I have been informed that all the connexions [?] of the Hay Market Opera Mr Gallini and a long train of Italians had free access to the Opera- & while the only two friends I had placed upon the free list were refused their admission Mr. Badisti [Badini?] of the Hay Markett was disposing of orders- This I repeat only from Report but if true I am by no means at a loss to guess the cause of the late Calamity.

The ex-manager then vents a suspicion too delicate for plain language:

I believe you could never accuse me of-any intent to injure you or my Patrons-had such been my Intentions I had often the power-but I never yet lost sight of the Obligations I owe you-& want of Gratitude thank Heavens was never [?] the number of my Vices ... but I think I never merited the persecution I have met with ... Deserted as I have been-Exiled & Isolated from all my friends & Connexions I have been obliged to exist upon my own Industry [Bedford Opera Papers 5.D.29].

The implication of high-level conspiracy elicited a sharp response from Sheldon of 2 February.



ITALIAN OPERA AND ARSON IOI

As to your intending to injure me and those partners with whose protection you have been so highly supported I can only say all are involved in endless expences and suits because you have not made good any particle of an undertaking, for the support of which you most solemnly pleged yourself to be fully adequate ... [Bedford Opera Papers 5.A.3].

Sheldon's hypocrisy in denying the Pantheon's noble subvention is truly astonishing.

The Pantheon company regrouped at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket where the season recommenced from 14 February 1792, as if the fire had been only a minor inconvenience. On 24 August of the same year the general agreement was finally implemented, and the new Haymarket quietly assumed control of Italian opera production. The theater was to continue under the court arrangement which had been set up for the Pantheon, with a board of five directors nominated by Bedford, Salisbury, and the Prince of Wales. The directors (naturally chaired by Sheldon) appointed as manager William Taylor, who could be "removed at their pleasure." His stormy tenure, which lasted with several interruptions until 1815, is beyond the scope of this study, but one may observe that he labored under an impossible burden: the Pantheon debt. With 24 boxes set aside for Bedford and Salisbury, the manager was naturally forced to invent various schemes to lighten the millstone round his neck: the practices of dividing boxes into smaller units and of trading them on the stock exchange, as well as the evolution of a less lavish style of opera production which persisted in London well into the nineteenth century, are directly attributable to the Pantheon settlement.

Another reason the directors may have been reluctant to remove Taylor is that he had evidently seen the 179i draft agreement and fully understood the implication of the clause about dismantling the Pantheon. In i794-95 a new playhouse was erected on the ruins, and when it advertised a masquerade to be held on 4 February 1799, Taylor, ever vigilant of musical competition, asked the Lord Cham- berlain to ban the event, even though a license had already been granted for it. The Haymarket manager wrote to Holloway, one of his trustees, on 22 January:

S. . in the outline of settlement of the Interests of the late Pantheon Opera, and the present Opera House, there is a Clause (the 24th) which explicitly states That the Pantheon as a Public place is to be dismantled;




Now how is this the Case, if continued for Masquerades[?]65

Holloway showed this potentially dangerous letter to Sheldon, who responded coolly but with a hint of righteous indignation:

I am very [sure] it never entered into my own or Mr Sheridans Ideas to prevent the Lord Chamberlain's licensing masquerades at the Pantheon or any where else. We coud have no such authority. The words of section 24 speak for themselves. They are "The Pantheon to be dismantled and restored, as soon as the Haymarket is fit" [Bedford Opera Papers 6.A.69.a].

There is no proof that the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Bedford, the Marquis of Salisbury, or even Sheldon ordered the burning of the Pantheon. But the fire rid London of a redundant and costly opera house and all too fortuitously allowed the noble investors to cut their losses. What became of O'Reilly, the star-struck idealist who invited Mozart to London and gave Turner his first job as a painter? In the general opera settlement of August 1792, the disgraced manager, a supposed victim of his own incompetence, was awarded an annual pension of ?200 for life, on condition that he never return to England. His enforced Parisian retirement was salve for a collective guilty conscience.

The Pantheon marked a radical departure from all earlier London opera companies. From its construction in 1705 until the 1789 fire, the King's Theatre was a commercial venture which, despite a subscription system and occasional injections of capital from speculators, had to pay its own way. Little wonder, then, that so many Haymarket seasons ended in bankruptcy, the crescendo of opera-related litigation reaching a climax in the mid i78os. Believing the institution too important to be left to the vagaries of market forces, the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury, in close collaboration with the Prince of Wales, created a true court theater, insulated from public accountability by a secret subvention administered and partly pro-

65 Bedford Opera Papers 6.A.69.b. This announced masquerade was one of many

offered by the Pantheon before and after 1799. Why Taylor should have objected so strenuously to this particular event is not clear; perhaps a copy of the draft opera agreement had just come into his hands. Despite his protest, the masquerade was held on 4 February 1799 as planned.




vided by the Lord Chamberlain himself. The Pantheon was an exclusive club whose members (that is, box holders) had to be recommended by other members and vetted by management.66 The acquisition of a lavish though intimate theater, the appointment of Hodges, a fashionable painter with royal connections, the invitations to Mozart, Paisiello and others, all signalled this new function. Although Taylor was forced to modify the grand plan, the new Haymarket provided fertile soil for the development of narrative ballet and remained a haven for opera seria well into the nineteenth century.

King's College London

Appendix

Pacchierotti's Contract with the Pantheon, I6 August 1790 Bedford Opera Papers 4.A.41 Articles of Agreement made and entered into this Sixteenth day of August in the

Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and ninety Between Robert Bray O'Reilly of Leicester Square in the Parish of Saint Martins in the Fields in the County of Middlesex Esquire Director and Manager of the Opera House for the Ensuing Year at the Building situate in Oxford Street commonly called or known by the Name of the Pantheon on the one part and Sigr. Gasparo Pacchierotti late of Italy but now residing in London on the other part as follows.

First The said Robert Bray O'Reilly for himself his Executors Administrators and Assigns doth hereby undertake and agree to and doth hereby engage the said Gasparo Pacchierotti for the now next ensuing season as and in the character and Quality of first Serious Man Singer in the Serious Operas to be performed at the intended Opera House aforesaid during the said now next ensuing Season and that he the said Robert Bray O'Reilly his Executors Administrators or Assigns shall and will pay or cause to be paid unto the said Gasparo Pacchierotti his Executors or Administrators for his services in the said season the sum of one thousand two hundred pounds of lawful money of Great Britain free and clear of all deductions whatsoever by three even and equal Portions at the Banking House of Messrs. Wright and Company in Henrietta Street Covent Garden the first payment to be made on the twentieth day of ffebruary now next ensuing the second payment to be made on the twentieth day of April then and now next ensuing and the third payment to be made on the twentieth day of July then and now next ensuing.

Secondly That the said Gasparo Pacchierotti shall have a benefit in the Month of March and that the same shall be the first benefit Night in the said season and shall be on such night as shall be mutually agreed between the said Robert Bray O'Reilly his Executors Administrators or Assigns and he the said Gasparo Pacchierotti or in Case the night for such benefit shall not be so mutually agreed upon then the same shall be in the Month of March and the said Robert Bray O'Reilly his Executors Administrators or Assigns shall give six weeks previous Notice in Writing to the said Gasparo Pacchierotti of the night fixed for his said Benefit And further that if the said

66 A copper printing plate in the Bedford opera archive (I.PP.27) reads "I desire that may be a Subscriber to the Pantheon. Note, Recommendatory Cards may be had at the Pantheon. . ."




Gasparo Pacchierotti shall bring out a New Opera for his said Benefit which he shall be at Liberty to do the said Robert Bray O'Reilly his Executors Administrators or Assigns shall and will pay and defray one half of all the Expences of such new Opera in respect to Music Decorations and Dresses and all other Matters and Things incidental to a new Opera and such new Opera shall afterwards be the property of the said Robert Bray O'Reilly his Executors Administrators and Assigns But if the said Gasparo Pacchierotti shall not bring out a new Opera for his benefit but shall chuse to take an Opera for his benefit which shall have been previously performed during the said season then that the said Gasparo Pacchierotti shall pay all the Expences which shall be incurred on his said benefit Night beyond the sum of one hundred pounds which sum of one hundred pounds shall be paid by the said Robert Bray O'Reilly his Executors Administrators or Assigns.

Thirdly In consideration of the said Agreement of the said Robert Bray O'Reilly for payment to the said Gasparo Pacchierotti of the said sum of one thousand two hundred pounds at the times and in manner before mentioned and of his having such benefit at such time and in such manner as herein before is expressed, He the said Gasparo Pacchierotti doth hereby on his part undertake and agree to be ready to perform in the manner aforesaid from the first day of November now next ensuing to the twentieth day July which will be in the Year one thousand seven hundred and ninety one And to act and perform as first serious Man singer during that period and likewise to attend at all Rehearsals and to receive and perform the Orders and Instructions of the said Robert Bray O'Reilly his Executors Administrators or Assigns and such other person or persons as the said Robert Bray O'Reilly his Executors Administrators or Assigns shall by any Note or Writing under his or their Hand or Hands direct or appoint him the said Gasparo Pacchierotti to receive Instructions from in Quality of and a first serious Man singer as aforesaid Provided always And it is hereby expressly agreed by the said Robert Bray O'Reilly that the said Gasparo Pacchierotti shall not be obliged to perform on the Opera stage more than twice in one week during the said season Benefit Nights only excepted.

Fourthly The said Gasparo Pacchierotti doth hereby agree with the said Robert Bray O'Reilly his Executors Administrators and Assigns that he the said Gasparo Pacchierotti shall not nor will at any time or times during the said season sing or act at or upon any other public stage or place of performance or at any public Concern without the permission of the said Robert Bray O'Reilly his Executors Administra- tors or Assigns save and Except at any concert or concerts at the private House or Houses of any Gentlemen or Lady And further that in case he the said Gasparo Pacchierotti shall at any time during his attending the Operas introduce any New Music in any performance the Copy right of all such productions and all Emoluments to arise therefrom or from the sale thereof shall from the time of the same being respectively brought forward be and become the sole Right and property of the said Robert Bray O'Reilly his Executors Administrators and Assigns.

Fifthly That in case of any necessary suspension of the performance of Operas during the said season by Reason of the Death of any of the Royal Family or Accident of Fire the parties hereto are severally to observe and abide by the Custom established, and which Universally prevails in London and Italy on the like occasions.

Sixthly That in case the said Gasparo Pacchierotti shall fail in duly performing and fulfilling all and every or any of the Articles herein before contained on his part he the said Gasparo Pacchierotti shall forfeit and pay to the said Robert Bray O'Reilly his Executors Administrators or Assigns the sum of fifty Pounds sterling for and in respect of every such Breach of Contract the same to be deducted out of any of the above mentioned three payments Provided always that if such failure of performance shall have arisen from Illness and that such illness shall be duly certified to the said Robert Bray O'Reilly by Writing under the Hand of any one or more person or




persons in the profession of Physic or Surgery, Then and in such Case no forfeiture or other diminution of salary or payment shall incur or be made in respect of such failure of performance.

Lastly The said Robert Bray O'Reilly for himself his Executors Administrators and Assigns doth hereby promise undertake and agree to and with the said Gasparo Pacchierotti, That he the said Gasparo Pacchierotti shall have the same Security for the performance of this Agreement on the part of the said Robert Bray O'Reilly his Executors Administrators and Assigns as he the said Robert Bray O'Reilly hath given or agreed to give or shall give or agree to give to the Proprietors of the Pantheon for the due payment of the Rent for the same.

In Witness whereof the said Parties to these Presents have hereunto set their Hands and seals the Day and Year first above written.

Rob Bray O Reilly Gasparo Pacchierotti

Signed sealed and delivered (being) first duly stampt) in the presence of

John Robinson I Cl[er]ks to Mr. Woodcock Wm. Stephens J Lincolns Inn.

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(1785-18oo); vol. 6 (18o9-1818). Holland Papers. London, British Architectural Library, Holland Papers

HoH/3/4/2 Larpent MSS. San Marino, Huntington Library (see MacMillian 1939) Lbl Add. MS 37,916. London, British Library Add. MS 37,916 Lbl Egerton 2287. London, British Library Egerton MS 2287 Lcm MS 441. London, Royal College of Music MS 44i London Theatre Museum. London (Covent Garden), Autograph Letters S.

520.1982 Mander and Mitchenson Pantheon Scrapbook. London, Mander and Mitch-

enson Theatre Collection PRO. London, Public Record Office (Chancery Lane division) Osborne Collection. New Haven, Conn., Yale University, Beinecke Library Soane Museum. London, Sir John Soane's Museum, portfolio in Drawer

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ABSTRACT

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 i790-92, 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.

