6th. Three more delightful volumes of Horace Walpole’s letters, addressed nearly a century ago to Sir Horace Mann, have just been published by Lord Dover, who only lived to see the work out!
The noble author, in a letter dated October 8th, 1741, thus mentions an inclination in the public of that period to put down the Italian opera. It is curious to remark the time of its opening. In those days people went into the country in the spring, and returned to town in the autumn. What Hottentots!
‘The Opera begins,’ he tells his friend, ‘the day after the King’s birth-day. The directors have already laid out great sums. They talk of a mob to silence the operas, as they did the French players, which will be more difficult; for here half the young noblemen in town are engaged, and they will not be so easily persuaded to humour the taste of the mobility: in short, they have already retained several eminent lawyers from the Bear Garden (boxers) to plead their defence.’ In a letter dated May 24th, 1743, he thus speaks of Handel’s first oratorio.—‘Handel has set up an oratorio against the operas, and succeeds. He has hired all the goddesses from farces, and the singers of Roast Beef from between the acts at both theatres, with a man with one note in his voice, and a girl without ever a one; and so they sing, and make brave hallelujahs; and the good company encore the recitative (!) if it happens to have any cadence like what they call a tune.’ The song alluded to is ‘The Roast Beef of Old England,’ which the galleries used always to call for between the acts. As to recitatives having ‘any cadence like what they call a tune,’ I must confess that I do not understand what is meant: unless, which is possible, the satirical writer means to insinuate that the public of his day could not distinguish between recitative and air.
In another letter of the same year, he writes,—
‘We are next Tuesday to have the Miserere of Rome. It must be curious! the finest piece of vocal music in the world to be performed by three good voices, and forty bad ones, from Oxford, Canterbury, and the farces!’ From this it appears that the chorus singers of his day were brought from the country choirs to London; the metropolis, even with the assistance of the chorus from the theatre, (the ‘farces’) could not furnish forty voices!
In March, 1746, Horace Walpole thus speaks of the Italian opera, and of Gluck, the celebrated composer:—
‘The opera flourishes more than in any latter years; the composer is Gluck, a German; he is to have a benefit, at which he is to play on a set of drinking-glasses, which he modulates with water. I think I have heard you speak of having seen some such thing.’
The Chevalier Gluck exhibiting on the musical glasses! There must be a mistake in this; some other person, surely, was engaged by the great composer for this purpose.
But a few months later in the same year, the same writer is in another story. The anecdote is curious for half a dozen reasons:—