Here osso-buco, and minestrone, and spaghetti were to be found as undiluted as at Savini’s in Milan, and washed down with such productions of the vine as Chianti, Lacrima Christi, and Capri.
No abominations in imitation of French cookery were to be found here. No half-crown dinners of half-a-dozen courses, with their deadly accompaniments of artichokes fried in tallow (au Cardinal) would have been permitted here; no New Zealand mutton garnished with turnip-tops (ris dé veau garni aux truffes) could have showed its unhallowed head in those sacred precincts and lived, for no mashers of the present-day type existed, and shop boys and shop girls knew their places too well to venture into such reserved pastures, even with the prospect of eating a veritable dinner as served on the Continong.
One cannot leave the subject of music without a reference to the promenade concerts that came into being about this period at the Queen’s in Long Acre.
It was here that the first public exhibition of the telephone was given, and when a series of grunts had vibrated through the hall and a bald-headed old patriarch had told us that the sound actually came from Westminster, the surprise and delight of the enraptured audience was intense, and we marvelled where such discoveries would end.
And the fun and the frolic at these gatherings was beyond description, often more delectable than correct, but nevertheless delightful and invigorating. The orchestra, moreover, was superb, and the vocalists the best that money could provide, and all these delights were presided over by one Rivière, a pushing musical instrument-maker in Leicester Square, who by sheer impudence had forced himself into prominence before an ignorant public whilst all the time incapable of reading the most ordinary score at sight.
So far as execution and diabolical contortions were concerned he was immense, and as big an impostor as Jullien himself.
When Offenbach was all the rage, and Schneider (under Lord C.’s wing) was his principal exponent, I had the honour of being one of a privileged half-dozen who did homage to the Diva at a dinner party in a private room at Limmer’s. Although in the zenith of her fame, her personal charms at the time were unquestionably on the wane, and I can recollect her comments on popularity and what it was worth as she told us how ten years previously, when young and beautiful, she had appeared in London only to be ignored, and that now everybody was at her feet. And then she shrugged her shoulders with an indescribable fascination peculiarly her own, and complacently puffed away at her cigarette.
It may have been a few years later that Major Carpenter, a wealthy amateur musician, introduced to the operatic world a charming English girl, who, under cover of the Italian name of Chiomi, was to electrify London with her singing.
The opera the fair débutante selected was probably the most formidable a nervous subject could have chosen; and so one night every one attended at Her Majesty’s to hear Lucia expounded. Everything went well up to the mad scene, when, unaccompanied by orchestra, the unhappy heroine has to sing and toss straws about amid a series of impossible runs and shakes. With the straw tossing no fault could be found, but the voice that should have been moving us all to tears was a series of gurgles that eventually subsided into silence.
Sir Michael Costa meanwhile sat grim and immovable, when a few bars would probably have nerved up the fluttering victim, but that to that orthodox Italian would have been “trifling with the text,” and so no aid was forthcoming, and the trumpet blasts that had emanated from Ashley Place ended in a fiasco, and sweet little Chiomi was heard of no more.