Opera box

“ Mark yonder, that roomy box on the grand tier, which a quiet, plainly-dressed party has just entered. There is a matronly lady in black, with a few bugle ornaments in her coiffure. She ensconces herself in a corner, her back towards the audience, screens herself with a curtain, and then calmly proceeds to take a review of the front rows of the stalls, and the occupants of the proscenium boxes. It is not considered etiquette to take more than a cursory glimpse of the matronly lady in black through your opera-glass. ”

“ As for the curtains, they are neither a French nor an Italian, but exclusively an English peculiarity. What possible use can they serve? They have absolutely no effect but to deaden the sound.
An interesting feature in every American Opera-house is the young ladies' box—a sort of omnibus box to which young ladies alone subscribe. The gentlemen who are privileged to visit them in the course of the evening are also allowed full liberty to supply them with bouquets, which are always of the most delicate and most expensive kind—costing in winter from £4 to £5 a-piece. ”

“ On our last evening we attended the Royal Opera, occupying a box quite to ourselves, where we heard good singing and well-rendered music by the Royal Band, beheld a fashionably-dressed and intelligent-looking audience, and were stared at by old King Oscar who sat rigid in his box, and glared at us with a mighty black opera-glass until he had studied each feature of the stranger guests, and by his persistence thereby directed upon us the curiosity of every other pair of opera glasses in the house. ”

“ The one we refer to was suitable, becoming, individual, and reflected personality in a way to indicate an extraordinary sensitiveness to values, that subtle instinct which makes the artist.
With very young women it is easy to be decorative under most conditions. Almost all of them are decorative, as seen in our present fashions, but to produce an effect in an opera box is to understand the carrying power of colour and line. The woman in the opera box has the same problem to solve as the woman on the stage: her costume must be effective at a distance. ”

“ Simple-minded folk, not up to this, wait in their stalls, and wonder why everybody else is going. Members of orchestra disappear, lights extinguished, brown-holland coverings descend, the fireman enters, the box-keepers retire, and suddenly it bursts upon the inexperienced Opera-goer that it's all over, except shouting for carriages, and that's over too by now, and that there is to be no more Opera to-night. ”

“ It is a peculiarity of her Majesty’s Theatre that whether the “house” be a good one or a bad one, there are always, before the termination of the first act of the opera, some occupants of the pit who are compelled to content themselves with standing-room.
Opinions are divided as to the place in the enceinte of the magnificent theatre where the greatest enjoyment of the performance can be obtained. To some, a box on the grand tier—vast, roomy, with space for six to sit abreast—is considered the superlative of operatic felicity. ”

“ In a box opposite the royal box were two people, a man and a very young woman, who also in the crise of the opera were not looking at the stage. The eyes of the man, sitting well back—purposely, so that he might see her without marked observation—were fixed upon the rose-tinted, delicate features of the girl in a joyous blue silk gown, which was so perfect a contrast to the golden hair and wonderful colour of her face. ”

“ John took a box at the opera. There is some sense in taking a box at the opera when you owe two quarters of your rent of thirty pounds a year. To have a box all the year round with your visiting-card pinned to the door, that is needless, unforgiveable extravagance, for it does not then belong to you, but to your friends.
When John took the stage-box on the third tier, it was bread and butter, dinners and teas, that he laid down in payment for the little slip of paper. ”

“ In this blessed land putting a serious opera on the stage is not at all a serious thing. A fortnight is generally time enough. The musicians of the orchestra, and the singers, who are generally strangers to each other and get no encouragement from the audience (the latter are [245] generally either chatting or sleeping—in the fifth box they either sup or play cards) , assemble inattentive, insensible, and troubled with catarrh, not as artists, but as people who are paid for the music they make. There is nothing more icy than these Italian representations. ”

“ It was a crowded night, for the opera was one that appealed to the senses and stimulated them to activity, and left the mind free to pursue its own schemes; in a word, orchestra and the scenes formed a sort of accompaniment and interpreter to the private dramas in the boxes. The opera was made for society, and not society for the opera. We occupied a box in the second tier—the Morgans, Margaret, and my wife. ”

“ On presenting this at the box office I can get a seat in the rear of the parquet (which corresponds to our orchestra) for just half price. The seats do not extend under the balcony, so they are really very desirable. The extra five cents is for Vorverkauft, which means a fee for buying tickets in advance.
The opera itself is the most charming thing of its kind I have ever heard. The story is a fairy-tale concerning the delightful adventures of two children. Bosetti, a stout little German in spite of the Italian ring to her name, played Gretel and Fräulein Tordeck took the part of Hänsel. ”

“ New Yorkers of highest fashion almost never occupy a box at the theater. At the opera the world of fashion is to be seen in the parterre boxes (not the first tier) , and in boxes at some of the horse shows and at many public charity balls and entertainments, but those in boxes at the theater are usually "strangers" or "outsiders." ”

“ So far it has been introductory recitative; but now the orchestra is all life and melody again, for the luscious music of the duett in which Giovanni compels the trembling servant at the sword’s point to salute the statue and invite him to sup with him. There is no more exquisite fairy-work in the whole opera than the instrumentation of this scene. It were hard to tell whether the impression left by it partakes most of the comic, of the supernaturally terrible, or of the beautiful. ”

“ But the orchestra has become such an important factor in modern opera that musicians would be unwilling to have it reduced in size—the tendency being, in fact, the other way; and at the same time opera is such an expensive luxury that it can only be made to pay in a very large theatre, which obliges the singers to have stentorian voices. ”

“ In this manner the composer will avoid all fugues, syncopations, and treatment of subjects, as being antiquated contrivances, quite banished from modern music. The modern composer will be most attentive to all the ladies of the theatre, supplying them with plenty of old songs transposed to suit their voices, and telling each of them that the Opera is supported by her talent alone. He will bring every night some of his friends, and seat them in the orchestra; giving the double bass or violoncello (as being the most useless instruments) leave of absence to make room for them. ”

“ For some years I have been interested in the new musical development that is going on in Italy. There had been a period when her church music led the world in the variety and beauty of its form. Later on, especially in the eighteenth century, she had produced many composers of distinction in instrumental music, but from then on and until very recent times, opera had almost completely monopolized her writers. The splendid opera-houses which are to be found in her smallest towns are eloquent testimony to the important place which that form of art occupies in the hearts of the Italian people. ”

“ With this a little wind is added from the wind machine, and the rain effect is sometimes worked simultaneously. The result of this complicated effect is very good, and, of course, the effect may be varied as the stage manager may think proper for the opera.
In large opera houses a more complicated system is employed than those which we have just described. It is usually placed against the wall of the third fly gallery. It consists of a kind of cabinet with five or six slanting shelves. On each shelf are kept a half dozen cannon balls which are retained in place by hinged doors. ”

“ The scores of the earliest Italian operas have very little accompaniment save two or three violins above a bass played on the theorbo, or clavecin.
At the beginning of the Seventeenth Century a change took place in music. A great many of the old kinds of wind instruments and the grave old viols began to disappear. They were too old-fashioned for the New Art of the time. The famous opera of Orfeo by Monteverde (1607) is, perhaps, the last of the great operas of that period that contained all that was considered in those days the rich voices of the Orchestra. ”

“ Dingy scenery, shabby and anachronistic costumes, an inefficient chorus, and a scanty orchestra had aided a small constellation of eminent singers to maintain Italian Opera at the King’s Theatre for the entertainment of a clique, not for the pleasure of a public. This was to be changed. The new undertaking promised perfection in every thing. Art was to be considered as well as the artist—the composer as well as the singer. ”

“ Groups of the singers regularly engaged in the opera house stand in the wings, and you feel a nameless hostility emanating from all of them, especially from the one whom you are going to try to supplant. The theatre is like a cavern, and the acoustic is of course totally unknown to you. Two or three pale spots down in the orchestra chairs indicate the whereabouts of the director and perhaps the stage manager and first Kapellmeister who have come to hear you. The overhead "rehearsal lights" are very unbecoming and you are quite conscious of it. ”

“ Both of these were filled, exclusively, with the highest classes of society; all, without exception, in full dress, then universally worn. The audiences thus assembled were considered as indisputably presenting a finer spectacle than any other theatre in Europe, and absolutely astonished the foreign performers, to whom such a sight was entirely new. At the end of the performance, the company of the pit and boxes repaired to the coffee-room, which was then the best assembly in London; private ones being rarely given on opera nights; and all the first society was regularly to be seen there. ”

“ After all, in an opera, the poetry must be the handmaid of the music. Why do Italian comic operas always please, in spite of their wretched librettos—even in Paris, as I was witness myself? Because the music is supreme, and everything else is forgotten. All the more then will an opera be likely to please in which the plan of the piece is well carried out, and the words are written simply to suit the music; not turned and twisted so as to ruin the composition for the sake of a miserable rhyme, which God knows does far more harm than good in a dramatic representation. ”

“ The orchestra consists of sixty musicians, and is really good. They have played together so long, that they can play almost anything, and they excel in Mozart, whom, with Wagner, they adore, while they look with condescension upon the works of Puccini. The scenery of this particular opera house used to be famous. They were the first to have moons which really rose about as slowly as the real one, and they are still unique in possessing a wonderful clock-work sun, which contracts as it rises. The Ring dramas, with their complicated settings, are given without a single hitch ”

“ On the other hand, Cavalieri’s own instructions show his wonderful practical knowledge in the performance of opera, and give us an exact idea of the first operatic theatre: ‘The hall should not hold more than a thousand spectators comfortably seated, in the greatest silence. Larger halls have bad acoustics: they make the singer force his voice and they kill expression. Moreover, when the words are not understood the [Pg 336] music becomes tiresome. The number of instruments must be proportioned to the place of performance. The orchestra is invisible, hidden behind the drop. ”

“ THERE is hardly a writer on music, no matter how advanced his views, who will not agree with me in all I have said in praise of "Orpheus and Eurydice," the principal Mozart operas, Beethoven's "Fidelio," and Weber's "Freischütz" and "Euryanthe." The question therefore arises: "Why are these works not performed with greater frequency?"
A general answer would be that the modern opera house is too large for the refined and delicate music of Gluck and Mozart to be heard to best effect. Moreover, these are the earliest works in the repertoire. ”

“ Hence the origin of airs, choruses, symphonies, and of that enchanting melody which often embellishes modern music at the expense of its poetic accompaniment.
"At the birth of the Opera, its inventors, to elude that which seemed unnatural, as an imitation of human life, in the union of music with speech, transferred their scenes from earth to heaven, and to hell. Not knowing how to make men speak, they made gods and devils, instead of heroes and shepherds, sing. Thus magic and marvels became speedily the stock in trade of the lyrical theatre. ”

“ It is characteristic of the audacity of youth that I should have given two new performances of operas which were rehearsed and produced while we were on tour, “La Dame Blanche” and “Orpheus.” But as the principal rôles had been sung by most of our artists in Germany, these two operas being in the regular repertoire of every German opera-house, the feat was not so extraordinary. The performances were good in ensemble and gave great pleasure to the audience.
My farewell performance in Boston was a Saturday matinée of the “Walküre” with Materna as Brunhilde. In the morning the orchestra struck. ”