Chapters of Opera | Page 6

A
year later, the German Calvinists, wanting a place of worship, bought
the theater, and New York was without a playhouse until a new one on
Cruger's Wharf was built by David Douglass, who had married Lewis
Hallam's widow, Hallam having died in Jamaica, in 1755. This was
abandoned in turn, and Mr. Douglass built a second theater, this time in
Chapel Street. It cost $1,625, and can scarcely have been either very
roomy or very ornate. Such as it was, however, it was the home of the
drama in all its forms, save possibly the ballad opera, until about 1765,
and was the center around which a storm raged which culminated in a
riot that wrecked it.
The successor of this unhappy institution was the John Street Theater,
which was opened toward the close of the year 1767. There seems to
have been a period of about fifteen years during which the musical
drama was absent from the amusement lists, but this house echoed, like
its earliest predecessors, to the strains of the ballad opera which "made
Gay rich and Rich gay." "The Beggar's Opera" was preceded, however,
by "Love in a Village," for which Dr. Arne wrote and compiled the
music; and Bickerstaff's "Maid of the Mill" was also in the repertory. In
1774 it was officially recommended that all places of amusement be
closed. Then followed the troublous times of the Revolution, and it was
not until twelve years afterward--that is, till 1786--that English Opera
resumed its sway. "Love in a Village" was revived, and it was followed
by "Inkle and Yarico," an arrangement of Shakespeare's "Tempest,"
with Purcell's music, "No Song, No Supper," "Macbeth," with Locke's
music, McNally's comic opera "Robin Hood," and other works of the
same character; in fact, it may safely be said that few, if any, English
operas, either with original music or music adapted from the ballad
tunes of England, were heard in London without being speedily
brought to New York and performed here. In the John Street Theater,

too, they were listened to by George Washington, and the leader of the
orchestra, a German named Pfeil, whose name was variously spelled
Fyle, File, Files, and so on, produced that "President's March," the tune
of which was destined to become associated with "Hail Columbia," to
the words of which it was adapted by Joseph Hopkinson, of
Philadelphia. On January 29, 1798, a new playhouse was opened. This
was the Park Theater. A musical piece entitled "The Purse, or
American Tar," was on the program of the opening performance, and
for more than a score of years the Park Theater played an important
rôle in local operatic history. For a long term English operas of both
types held the stage, along with the drama in all its forms, but in 1819
an English adaptation of Rossini's "Barber of Seville"--the opera which
opened the Italian régime six years later--was heard on its stage, and
two years after that Henry Rowley Bishop's arrangement of Mozart's
"Marriage of Figaro." At the close of the season of 1820 the Park
Theater was destroyed by fire, to the great loss of its owners, one of
whom was John Jacob Astor. On its site was erected the new Park
Theater, which was the original home of Italian opera, performed in its
original tongue, and in the Italian manner, though only a small minority
of the performers were Italians by birth.
Garcia was a Spaniard, born in Seville. Richard Grant White, writing in
The Century Magazine for March, 1882, calls him a "Spanish Hebrew,"
on what authority I am unable to guess. Not only was Manuel Garcia,
the elder, a chorister in the Cathedral of Seville at the age of six, but it
seems as likely as not that he came of a family of Spanish church
musicians who had made their mark for more than fifty years before the
father of Malibran was born. But it is a habit with some writers to find
Hebrew blood in nearly all persons of genius.
The new Park Theater was looked upon as a magnificent playhouse in
its day, and it is a pity that Mr. White, writing about it when it was a
quarter of a century old, should have helped to spread the erroneous
notion that it was quite unworthy of so elegant a form of entertainment
as Garcia brought into it. It remained a fashionable house through all its
career or at least for a long time after it gave refuge to the Italian muse,
though it may not have been able to hold one of its candles to the first

house built especially to house that muse eight years later. The barrel
hoop of the first New York theater gave way to "three chandeliers and
patent oil lamps, the