"One of the 'Songs Without Words'?"
"Possibly. We nevah listen to Mendelssohn."
"Indeed! You don't admire his music?"
"We do not."
"May I ask why?"
"Because there are no wrong notes in it!"
(Our gallant colonel is "out of it" again.)
Jean and Edouard de Reszke
The idols of the operatic world in Punch's earlier days were mainly Italian or trained in Italy. In the period which we have now reached no single nation retained a monopoly of "stars." Madame Nordica, who appeared in 1890, was an American, Madame Melba was Australian-born of Scottish descent, and the two de Reszkes, Jean and Edouard, the chief glories of many recurrent seasons at Covent Garden, were Poles. A hundred years earlier Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, a famous amateur and critic, declared that the French opera singers were excruciating to listen to. In the late 'eighties and 'nineties the best singing was heard from those who had been trained in Paris. The de Reszkes in particular helped to achieve what Punch had declared to be impossible—they made Wagner popular among the fashionable opera-goers by singing his later works as they had never been sung before, turning to them at the zenith of their powers and reputation, a service to art which more self-protective singers have sedulously avoided. Jean de Reszke was great in Faust, Roméo et Juliette, Aïda, Le Prophète, but he was greater as Siegfried and Tristan. And so with his brother Edouard, when his Mephistopheles or his Friar Laurence are compared with his Wotan, his Hagen or his King Marke. I have spoken elsewhere of the disastrous National Opera House scheme of Mapleson and the fiasco of the Royal English Opera House in Shaftesbury Avenue. Ivanhoe, Sullivan's solitary excursion into the domain of grand opera, which was written for the opening of the last-named building, did not achieve more than a succès d'estime. Punch's notice is friendly but not enthusiastic. When it gave place to the Basoche, he summed up the situation facetiously but shrewdly enough under the heading, "English Opera as She isn't sung":—
It seems impossible to support a Royal English Opera House with its special commodity of English Opera, that is, Opera composed by an Englishman to an Englishman's libretto, and played by English operatic singers. Ivanhoe, a genuine English Opera, by a genuine English Composer (with an Irish name), produced with great éclat, has, after a fair run and lots of favour, been Doylécarté, in order to make room for the Basoche, an essentially French Opera, by a French Composer and Librettist, done, of course, into English, so as to be "understanded of the people." The Basoche has "caught on," and our friends in front, including Composer, Librettist, and Middleman—Druriolanus, who bought it, and Doyly Carty, who bought it of Sir Druri—are all equally pleased and satisfied. Considered as a matter of business, what signifies the nationality as long as the spec pays?—tout est là.