Chapters of Opera | Page 7

chandeliers having thirty-five lights each." Mr.
White's description of this house after it had seen about a quarter of a
century's service is certainly uninviting. Its boxes were like pens for
beasts. "Across them were stretched benches consisting of a mere board
covered with faded red moreen, a narrower board, shoulder high, being
stretched behind to serve for a back. But one seat on each of the three
or four benches was without even this luxury, in order that the seat
itself might be raised upon its hinges for people to pass in. These
sybaritic inclosures were kept under lock and key by a fee-expecting
creature, who was always half drunk, except when he was wholly drunk.
The pit, which has in our modern theater become the parterre (or, as it
is often strangely called, the parquet), the most desirable part of the
house, was in the Park Theater hardly superior to that in which the
Jacquerie of old stood upon the bare ground (par terre), and thus gave
the place its French name. The floor was dirty and broken into holes;
the seats were bare, backless benches. Women were never seen in the
pit, and, although the excellence of the position (the best in the house)
and the cheapness of admission (half a dollar) took gentlemen there,
few went there who could afford to study comfort and luxury in their
amusements. The place was pervaded with evil smells; and, not
uncommonly, in the midst of a performance, rats ran out of the holes in
the floor and across into the orchestra. This delectable place was
approached by a long, underground passage, with bare, whitewashed
walls, dimly lighted, except at a sort of booth, at which vile fluids and
viler solids were sold. As to the house itself, it was the dingy abode of
dreariness. The gallery was occupied by howling roughs, who might
have taken lessons in behavior from the negroes who occupied a part of
this tier, which was railed off for their particular use."
This was the first home of Italian opera, strictly speaking. It had long
housed opera in the vernacular, and remained to serve as the fortress of
the English forces when the first battles were fought between the
champions of the foreign exotic and the entertainment which had been
so long established as to call itself native. Its career came to an end in
1848, when, like its predecessor and successor, it went up in flames and

smoke.
Presently I shall tell about the houses which have been built in New
York especially for operatic uses, but before then some attention ought
to be given to several other old theaters which had connection with
opera in one or another of its phases. One of these was the New York
Theater, afterward called the Bowery, and known by that name till a
comparatively recent date. The walls of this theater echoed first to the
voice of Malibran, when put forth in the vernacular of the country of
which fate seemed, for a time, to have decreed that she should remain a
resident. This was immediately after the first season of Italian opera at
the Park Theater. The New York Theater was then new, having been
built in 1826. Malibran had begun the study of English in London
before coming to New York with her father; and she continued her
studies with a new energy and a new purpose after the departure of her
father to Mexico had left her apparently stranded in New York with a
bankrupt and good-for-nothing husband to support. She made her first
essay in English opera with "The Devil's Bridge," and followed it up
with "Love in a Village." English operas, whether of the ballad order or
with original music, were constructed in principle on the lines of the
German Singspiel and French opéra comique, all the dialogue being
spoken; and Malibran's experience at the theater and Grace Church,
coupled with her great social popularity, must have made a pretty good
Englishwoman of her. "It is rather startling," says Mr. White, in the
article already alluded to, "to think of the greatest prima donna, not
only of her day, but of modern times--the most fascinating woman
upon the stage in the first half of the nineteenth century--as singing the
soprano parts of psalm tunes and chants in a small town then less
known to the people of London and Paris and Vienna than Jeddo is
now. Grace Church may well be pardoned for pride in a musical service
upon the early years of which fell such a crown of glory, and which has
since then been guided by taste not always unworthy of such a
beginning." Malibran's performances at the New York Theater were
successful and a source of profit, both to