“Chantons, célébrons notre reine,
L’hymen, qui sous ses lois l’enchaîne,
Va nous rendre à jamais heureux.”
The audience took this up with enthusiastic ardour. “All was shouting and clapping of hands, and—what never happened at the opera before—the chorus was encored, and there were cries of ‘Long live the Queen,’” at which expression of feeling the Queen was so affected that she shed tears.
A similar demonstration occurred the last time the Queen was ever in a playhouse, the play on this occasion being Grétry’s “Les Evenements Imprévus.” By mistaken kindness, one of the leading ladies bowed to the Queen as she sang the words, “Ah, how I love my mistress!” in a duet.
Instantly twenty voices shouted from the pit, “No mistress, no master! liberty!” A few counter voices cried, “Vive le Roi! Vive le Reine!” but the pit drowned them, “No master, no Queen!” A quarrel ensued, but the Queen as composed as before was loudly cheered as she quitted the theatre—never to be seen again at a dramatic performance.
In Maria Theresa, who became Empress of Germany in 1745, the drama had a strong supporter, a taste which had always been wisely encouraged. The story goes that her father composed an opera at a time when war was raging, his country falling into ruins, and his Court receiving the bribes of his enemies.
At the Court of Vienna the drama, at one time or another, has been in popular request. Leopold I. made music and the theatre his great hobby, next to his passion for hunting. According to Vehse,[148] he had a theatre, and he caused at Vienna and Schönbrunn brilliant operas and pastorals to be performed, in which “the scenery and the costumes were most magnificent.” It is reported that the getting up of one of these operas, “Il Pomo d’Oro,” cost as much as 100,000 florins—grand battle scenes, rehearsed under the superintendence of the Court fencing-master, being introduced. The whole of Vienna, we read, became imbued with the Emperor’s fondness for music and the drama, which was equally shared by his second wife, Claudia of Tyrol, who, it is said, sometimes made use of these operatic representations to “tell her lord and husband things which he was not likely to hear elsewhere.” Thus on one occasion she had a piece performed entitled, “La Lanterne de Diogene,” in which the speeches addressed to Alexander the Great were intended to set forth before Leopold the abuses rife at the Court. But the Emperor’s third wife, the saintly Eleanora of Mantua, had no sympathy for the stage, and it is said accompanied her husband to the opera only with inward groans; and, instead of reading the libretto, she studied the Psalms.
Joseph II., again, was fond of the theatre, and he did much for it. One of his favourite comedies was Grossman’s “Not more than Six Dishes,” which appears to have been an amusing satire on the prodigality and the general manners of the nobility, who consequently, we are told, did their utmost to have the piece suppressed. An opera which never failed to amuse the Emperor was one by Paisiello, called “Il Re Teodoro,” the libretto of which was another satire, pointed at King Gustavus III. of Sweden, who, during his stay at Venice in the year 1783, had “displayed a most ridiculous profusion, which even extended to his dressing-gown.”
As a young man Frederick the Great took great pleasure in theatrical amusements, and in the year 1737 he acted at Rheinsberg, when he took the part of Philoctèle in Voltaire’s “Œdipe.” He had a strong partiality for the French drama, and soon after his accession to the throne he summoned a French company to Berlin; but he was apt to criticise “the exaggerated pathos of the French actors,” remarking of Le Cain: “This man would be the Roscius of our age if he exaggerated less. I like to see our passions represented as they really are; but as soon as Nature is crushed by art, I remain quite unmoved.”
He established the Italian opera in Berlin, and until the Seven Years’ War he was a frequent attendant at the opera and ballet, as well as at the French comedy. The theatre, we are told, “cost the Emperor nearly four hundred thousand dollars a year. The admission was free, the boxes being assigned to the Court, the ministers, privy councillors, &c. The pit was filled by the military, every regiment of the garrison sending a certain number of men.” But it would seem that the “gentlemen of the green-room” gave the Emperor some trouble, for he once wrote: “The opera people are such a blackguardly set that I am heartily tired of them.” And on another occasion he wrote still more strongly: “I shall send them all off to the ——, such blackguards may be had any day; I must have money for cannon, and cannot spend so much on those mountebanks.”
The dancers, too, caused him some considerable trouble, and even Vestris, the French dieu de la danse, found no engagement in Berlin, the Emperor remarking, “Mon. Vestris is mad; who in the world but a fool would give four thousand dollars to a dancer, besides three thousand to his sister, and one thousand to his brother.”