Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London Volume 2: The Pantheon Opera and Its Aftermath 1789-1795 (review)

Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London Volume 2: The Pantheon Opera and Its Aftermath 1789-1795. Judith Milhous, Gabriella Dideriksen, and Robert D. Hume.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001 913 pages, $125.00.

This weighty volume is a follow-up to a recent examination of a dozen years of intrigue-spiced activity at the King's Theatre, Haymarket, which for most of the eighteenth century was London's most important venue for Italian opera.

The heyday of the King's Theatre came early in the century, when it served as the showcase for new works by Handel and other composers affiliated with the Royal Academy of Music. ¹ But that organization existed only from 1719 to 1728, after which time Italian opera in London began a slow and inglorious decline. Over the next decade neither Handel's reincarnated Royal Academy nor the long-suffering Opera of the Nobility (which set up shop in the King's Theatre at the end of 1734) was able to gain solid financial footing. Destructive rivalries and a plague of mismanagement can be counted among the opera companies' problems, but probably the main reason for their failure was a simple shift in taste; stirred by the huge success of The Beggar's Opera, London audiences by the late 1730s had come to realize that they much preferred to spend their money not on imported opera but on indigenous English entertainments. Although the King's Theatre continued to present Italian opera, its next half-century amounts to what one of these authors in an earlier essay summarized as "a dizzying sequence of changing managements and a tale of artistic mediocrity." ² The nadir began to come into view when, in 1778, the King's Theatre was taken over by yet another set of proprietors. ³ Artistically as well as fiscally, one disaster followed another until a spectacular fire finally put the opera house out of its misery.

The affairs surrounding the 1789 conflagration form the subject matter of the prequel to the current study. ⁴ Volume 2 of Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London deals not only with the phoenix that soon rose from the ashes of the destroyed King's Theatre but also—and primarily—with its competition, a relatively small opera house that was hastily built inside the huge yet architecturally elegant exhibition hall called the Pantheon. ⁵ Testimony as to the precise capacity of this peculiar building-within-a-building is apparently nonexistent, but the authors ⁶ have compiled enough peripheral material to allow them a highly educated guess; whereas the new King's Theatre seated approximately 3,000, the opera house at the Pantheon seems to have held less than half that number. More by coincidence than by design, both venues hosted their first productions in February 1791; for a short while—and for the first time in more than half a century—Londoners had their choice of two enterprises devoted primarily to Italian opera.

That the second volume is almost twice the length of its predecessor is hardly a surprise; whereas volume 1 chronicled a portion of the downward course of a single operation, the narrative section of the new book explores the overlapping trajectories of a pair of companies that vied desperately for the affections of Italian opera's dwindling audience. It has long been reported that the rivalry between the King's Theatre and the elitist Pantheon—funded secretly by the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury—was intense, but the finely documented introductory chapters of this book explain just how "heated" the competition was; the evidence offered here remains circumstantial, of course, yet there is enough of it to give readers a hint as to why the Pantheon, too, eventually went up in flames. ⁷

The narrative chapters—exhaustive in informational content but hardly exhausting in literary style—make up only the first third of...