In the 18th century the Italians seem to have thought more of the music of their operas, and to have left the vanities of theatrical decorations to the Germans.
Servandoni, for some time scene painter and decorator at the Académie Royale of Paris not finding that theatre sufficiently vast for his designs, sought a new field for his ambition at the Opera-House of Dresden, where Augustus of Poland engaged him to superintend the arrangement of the stage. Servandoni painted a number of admirable scenes for this theatre, in the midst of which four hundred mounted horsemen were able to manœuvre with ease.
In 1760 the Court of the Duke of Wurtemburg, at Stuttgardt, was the most brilliant in Europe, owing partly, no doubt, to the enormous subsidies received by the Duke from France for a body of ten thousand men, which he maintained at the service of that power. The Duke had a French theatre, and two Italian theatres, one for Opera Seria, and the other for Opera Buffa. The celebrated Noverre was his ballet-master, and there were a hundred dancers in the corps de ballet, besides twenty principal ones, each of whom had been first dancer at one of the chief theatres of Italy. Jomelli was chapel-master and director of the Opera at Stuttgardt from 1754 until 1773.
SCENIC DECORATIONS.
In the way of stage decorations, theatrical effects, and the various other spectacular devices by which managers still seek to attract to their Operas those who are unable to appreciate good music, we have made no progress since the 17th century. We have, to be sure, gas and the electric light, which were not known to our forefathers; but St. Evrémond tells us that in Louis the XIV.'s time the sun and moon were so well represented at the Académie Royale, that the Ambassador of Guinea, assisting at one of its performances, leant forward in his box, when those orbs appeared and religiously saluted them. To be sure, this anecdote may be classed with one I have heard in Russia, of an actor who, playing the part of a bear in a grand melodrama, in which a storm was introduced, crossed himself devoutly at each clap of thunder; but the stories of Servandoni's and Bernino's decorations are no fables. Like the other great masters of stage effect in Italy, Bernino was an architect, a sculptor and a painter. His sunsets are said to have been marvellous; and in a spectacular piece of his composition, entitled The Inundation of the Tiber, a mass of water was seen to come in from the back of the stage, gradually approaching the orchestra and washing down everything that impeded its onward course, until at last the audience, believing the inundation to be real, rose in terror and were about to rush from the theatre. Traps, however, were ready to be opened in all parts of the stage. The Neptune of the troubled theatrical waves gave the word,
——"et dicto citiùs tumida æquora placat."
But in Italy, even at the time when such wonders were being effected in the way of stage decorations, the music of an opera was still its prime attraction; indeed, there were theatres for operas and theatres for spectacular dramas, and it is a mistake to attempt the union of the two in any great excellence, inasmuch as the one naturally interferes with and diverts attention from the other.
Of Venice and its music, in the days when grand hunts, charges of cavalry, triumphal processions in which hundreds of horsemen took part, and ships traversing the ocean, and proceeding full sail to the discovery of America were introduced on to the stage;[29] of Venice and its music even at this highly decorative period, St. Evrémond has given us a brief but very satisfactory account in the following doggrel:—
"A Venise rien n'est égal:
Sept opéras, le carneval;
Et la merveille, l'excellence,
Point de chœurs et jamais de danse,
Dans les maisons, souvent concert,
Où tout se chante à livre ouvert."
The operatic chorus, as has already been observed, is an invention claimed by the French[30]; on the other hand, from the very foundation of the Académie Royale, the French rendered their Operas ridiculous by introducing ballets into the middle of them. We shall find Rousseau calling attention to this absurd custom which still prevails at the Académie, where if even Fidelio was to be produced, it would be considered necessary to "enliven" one or more of the scenes with a divertissement—so unchanging and unchangeable are the revolutionary French in all that is futile.