Daniel Snowman
The Gilded Stage: A Social, Political and Economic History of Opera

Daniel Snowman | The Gilded Stage: A Social, Political and Economic History of Opera

- Hello. Welcome. I never quite know how to introduce a lecture about opera. Should I say buon giorno, guten Tag, shalom? I mean, I’m talking today about the most complex multimedia art form ever, probably. I’ll explain all that in a moment. As you see, among my books, is a book about the history of opera, but most people who talk about or write about the history of opera write primarily about the great composers, the great works that they produced, and maybe some of the great singers who’ve sung in them. I want to talk about both the, as it were, the production and also the consumption, the supply and the demand, if you like, not only the operas and the composers and the performers and the rest of it, but also the, as it says in the book here, the social history of opera. Who knew about it and how? What sort of people went to the opera over the course of history? What sort of people went into work for it and so on, but it’s more than that. It’s also political, as we’ll see in a moment when I get into the history of it all, economic, I mean, it was an attempt to combine all the arts at a time when some people wrote poetry or novels or plays or architecture or music or performed, opera was a form of art that tried to combine all the arts. Come onto that in a minute, and final little question for you to think about over the next hour or so: What do we mean by opera? I know what a symphony is or a poem or a novel or a building or a piano concerto, but the word opera? Let’s come onto that a little bit. Very often, when I’m talking to people about the history of opera, very often, I sort of see, well, why do you want to sit for an hour listening to boring old me talking about it? Why don’t we all go to the opera together, which will be a lovely thing to do, and when do you think about the operas that are the most popular, that maybe you and certainly I have been to over time?

Most of them are works that were produced in what I think of as the long 19th century, from the early sort of time of Mozart, sort of, and then through the 19th century, through to Puccini, the 1910s, 1920s, and so on, are the ones that are the most popular all around the world, and indeed, if we were to go to see an opera at an opera house, as we would say, we’re probably primarily thinking of a 19th-century established building or building, again, built around that kind of time. I’ve been hundreds of times to Covent Garden, for 75 or 80 years almost by now, and the building we know and I love to this day was opened in 1858, as you see there, and adapted and updated a little bit, including 25 years ago with different kind of access and so on. Many of the great houses were built in the 19th century, the great Opéra in Paris is not necessarily the major opera centre at the moment, but, I mean, this is a building that dates from a little bit later than the Covent Garden building in the, this time, in the 1870s, and indeed, the whole area is named after the Opéra. When people heard that I was, “Oh, Daniel, "you’re writing a book about the history of opera.” You know, “When does opera begin? "Are you starting with Monteverdi?” And I say, “Well, you know, "I’ll mention Monteverdi and so on,” but it actually starts, depends on how you define it.

I’ve defined it loosely as the attempt to combine all the arts in a way that people in the Italian Renaissance tried to imagine what it was like in ancient Greece when one of the great ancient writer, Aeschylus, you know, or Euripides had a play, and there was a festival of drama in ancient Athens, and there would’ve been, oh, there would’ve been costumes and props and sets and a chorus and an audience, but didn’t they also have everything set to music? And what sort of music would it have been? And that they would not have known, so if you want to talk about the origins of what we have always called opera, I suppose you have to go back to Renaissance Italy, above all, and perhaps, in particular, to Florence, one of the great cultural centres of the arts in the Renaissance time, the, you know, Rinascimento, or the re-creation of what they thought of as the ancient Greeks and in Florence, you know, you know, you and I love Florence. Many of you have probably been there, and you’ll know the great central piazza. You’ll know the Uffizi. You’ll know the “David” statue and culture and all that. Don’t forget, it was also in some ways a horrible place.

There was murder going on. There was cruelty. Savonarola burnt at the stake, and if you just go slightly south from this square across the Ponte Vecchio, the old bridge, turn left, and you’ll see that you’re in the Via de’ Bardi, the Lord Bardi, I mean, now in the late 1500s, 1580s, ‘70s, that kind of time, and he used to have a gathering of friends would come to his great villa, and they would all talk intelligently about what it was like in ancient Greece because we wished to aspire to do what the brilliant ancient Greeks did, and he had friends like Francesco Galilei, who was the father of Galileo Galilei, and they talked about the music and arts of ancient Athens, and gradually, very often, in the, not the Uffizi, but the Pitti Palace, not very far from there, south of the Arno River, the local grand duke would put on some sort of show and have all the other dukes from different parts of the Italian peninsula coming and staying for a week, and they’d go hunting and fishing and singing and dancing, and he’d put on a show, and during the intervals, or the intermissions of the show, they might put on a little bit of musical drama, and that gradually built up until, in the early 1600s, one of the Italian dukes, one of the dukes in Mantua, Mantova, one of the Gonzaga dukes, was going to have a lot of people around on a special week, oh, you know, to celebrate my daughter’s engagement to the Lord this of France or to celebrate a military victory we’ve achieved, and we need to put on a show for all these people to impress them how cultural and wealthy we are in Mantova, so Mr. Striggio, you’re my secretary, but you’re also a good poet. Could you write a kind of a spiritual play about something from ancient times, from Homer, you know, the Iliad or by Virgil, something that has ancient, ancient Greek roots, ideally, with moral centre to it, and, Mr. Monteverdi, you write the music for the church every Sunday. You’re a good musician.

Get together with Striggio and see if between you, you can’t put on a special show, and so the first, what I guess you and I would call opera, if you want to have a silly statement like that, would’ve been something that was put on in the palace there in Mantua by the Gonzaga dukes by, we say Monteverdi, but all he did was write the music. He didn’t do everything else, and it was based on the story of Orpheus, “Orfeo,” the Orpheus in the under… Wasn’t called an opera. It was called a favola in musica, the fable with music, and mentioned that Claudia Monteverdi wrote the music in Mantova, and the date at the bottom is 1609. It actually had its premier a couple of years earlier, but there was, you know, no programmes printed. They printed all this a bit later on in order to send to all the dukes who’d been there just to remind them how important we in Mantova are, and gradually, the various dukes in different parts, different duchies around the Italian peninsula, there was no Italian unity then, all began to put on this or that or the other. Monteverdi himself went over to Venice where he’d earn a bit more money. It was a more commercial city, and don’t imagine that operas had a continuous story or history from that day to this. Absolutely not.

I mean, following all this for the next half century, nearly, was, well, not quite long, because it was called the 30 Years’ War, so there was no way, while there was invasions going on all over Central Europe, that anybody was going to be putting on anything as expensive and demanding as all this. Let’s jump into my historical helicopter and go over the Alps and north where opera gradually gets to this area or that area, if it’s safe and if there’s any money involved, and I want to take you from Northern Italy across to France, which was one of the countries in more or less Central Europe, but a bit further west, that wasn’t too badly injured by warfare, and by the middle of the 17th century, by the 1650s, there was a new young king of France, young man acquired the name of Louis XIV, Louis Quatorze, and we always think of Louis Quatorze a bit like Henry VIII, as being, you know, a fat old I’m going to make lots of money and rule everybody and conquer those who don’t like me, but bit like Henry VIII when he was a young man. He was handsome fellow, slim, loved dancing, loved music, and in particular, the cardinal in charge of everything by then was an Italian, and Cardinal Mazarin, Mazzarino he’d been, and Mazarin, who was an immigrant to the French world and was controlling it politically, in many ways, wanted to Italianize much of the culture that his young Louis XIV cared about, so tried to teach him Italian, tried to get him to dance the way the Italians might have done, and, indeed, Louis XIV, as I say, he likes dancing.

He’s a nice, handsome young fellow, and he becomes known as le Roi Soleil, the Sun King, and he was dancing as somebody with all the sunshine on him, with all the, you can just see all the sun’s rays on the young man, and one of the Italians that Mazarin was encouraging was a young Italian, Northern Italian composer called Giovanni Battista Lulli, and Lulli came to Paris, tried to worm his way up the social network, Frenchified his name, became Jean-Baptiste Lully, L-U-L-L-Y, and Louis and Lully, I wouldn’t have liked to meet either of them. Both sound as though they’re pretty difficult characters, but they worked together, and the king, Louis, particularly later on in his career when he began building a huge palace and a whole centre for the monarchy just outside Paris in Versailles, right, we’re going to put on very grandiose shows there, music, drama, scenery that moves on and off, some kind of lighting if we can work out how to do it, and we’re going to invite all the grandees from the whole of France to come and stay with us, and boy, will they be impressed by what we put on, and they wouldn’t dare revolt against us or risk anything against my great monarchy, says Louis XIV. I mentioned at the beginning of my little talk that politics was part of the history of opera. Can you imagine something being put on by a duke in Italy inviting all the other dukes to see how wonderful he was? And by Louis XIV, who’s internationally the model celebrity, powerful monarch putting on these shows.

So far, everything we’ve talked about, I should say, you know, we love categories, names, you know, the Renaissance, the classical era, whatever, and nobody talked about opera, but they talked about, I mean, opera simply means a work, a thing, an oeuvre, an opus. There was no one word for it all, but that word gradually stuck, but in France, under Lully, it was more likely to be called a tragédie en musique. You know, it may be of Italian origins, or copied in a way, but we do it our way, and that’s different from everywhere else, and this gradually called the historians. It’s always opera seria, serious. It’s of a high moral status, and you attend it, men only, probably, at the origins of the Monteverdi opera. I think the ladies were invited to a later performance, not in a theatre in Mantua, but in one the grand rooms in the great palace that is still there in Mantua if you visit to this day. Let’s, again, jump into the helicopter, get away from all these dictators, and I want to whiz across to London. London, by now, we’re in the early 1700s, about towards the end of the French period that I’ve been talking about, and the great composer in London for half a century was actually born in Germany in a little town called Halle, near Leipzig and Weimar. His name, of course, was, well, in English, George Frideric Handel, Georg Friedrich Händel, and ambitious, clever young man. He learnt to play the piano quickly. They tried him out at the local church, and as he got into his teens and a bit beyond, he wanted to travel. He went all the way up to Hamburg.

I mean, there wasn’t a united Germany, but there was a state based in Hamburg up north where there was a good orchestra and music and young Handel, you know, wormed his way up the network, got to know the composer and conductor, a man called Keiser, and did good work there, and then he came back again, and he worked briefly for the duke of this or the prince of that or somebody who was in charge of part of the Holy Roman Empire, but he wanted to get away. What he really wanted to do was go to Italy because Italy was where his kind of music began. Opera, perhaps, but other things. There were many composers, particularly in Florence, in Rome where he, you know, he befriended a local cardinal, even though, as a lad, he was brought up as a good Calvinist or Lutheran, but he could network well. He could try out languages he wasn’t good at but wasn’t ashamed of. He’d go all the way down to Naples, and he’d find other composers who were there. Oh, there’s a musical theatre alongside the regal palace of the Bourbons all the way south there, and finally, he makes his way to London because London, by the time Handel is 25, is the kind of the New York of its day. It’s big, it’s powerful, it’s rich, it’s entrepreneurial, and if you get your way there, it’s a very big city, the biggest, probably, in the whole of Europe, and Handel comes to London, and when he’s a young man, just about 24, 25, he gets a commission to write an opera that’s put on in the Queen’s Theatre. This is still Queen Anne in the hay market, pretty much where the Andrew Lloyd Weber show is on at the moment, and with a wonderful singer, an Italian castrato called Nicolini, and it works well. I don’t want to exaggerate.

They didn’t do it night after night for months, but Handel became well-known to a handful of people who attended the theatre and clapped and thought it was all very clever, but opera… Don’t imagine that Handel’s a great celebrity, that everybody knows who he is and knows all his music. He makes a bit of money. He loses a bit of money. Opera’s not particularly popular, but, you know, in fact, it’s rather unpopular. It’s easy to make fun of. It’s a caricature. Always was, always is, you know, it’s not on until the fat lady sings. It’s elitist and all these silly things that are said to this very day, and certainly, if you’re, if you’ve been castrated, boy, are there jokes that I will not repeat before a polite audience right now, but they’re obvious. The castrato. Why were all these boys castrated? Well, they were probably in the papal choir in the Vatican, and there weren’t women allowed to sing holy works for a church, and if the boys, when they were approaching puberty, could be castrated, they could retain their high voice. Don’t confuse the castrato voice with the falsetto that, you know, any man, you know, it was very different, and indeed, the castrati, they were made fun of.

They were big, strong men, Farinelli and people, big chests, big chest resonance could project their sound, but they had funny little schoolboy heads, and there, in the middle, is an Italian, therefore Catholic soprano who wants to make lots and lots and lots of money, and Hogarth, a bit later on, by the, I guess, the 1730s or ‘40s, he’s making real fun of the whole idea of posh, Italianate, Catholic, foreign, incomprehensible, classical music, and in particular, opera. There is an Italian, bewigged, overly dressed violinist, probably practising before he goes on stage, and there, outside making a racket is the noise and the smell and the dirt and the languor and the rest of it of a typical London bunch of people. London was a huge city, something like half a million. The theatres would take, you know, 1,000 or something, and rather like today, had the very rich and the desperately poor immigrants coming in on the Thames, and there you see, I mean, a man on the top right there blowing a Jewish shofar, another Jewish guy playing an instrument, some kid playing the drums, little boy weeing against the wall, desperate, probably, lone mother asking for a bit of money, and the guy, that sort of posh Catholic foreign classical violinist can’t bear it, so you get quite a good idea from Hogarth of what London was really like at a time when we think certain classical composers and performers were at the top of their art. If you can see right in the top left of the picture, it’s a tiny little poster, and this is way back, this isn’t modern, for “The Beggar’s Opera.” What was “The Beggar’s Opera” an opera? “The Beggar’s Opera” was put on by, not in the Covent Garden piazza or anything like that. There’s no opera house there, but not very far away, in the Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Was it an opera? It was a story with music, popular music, music that everybody knew, “Greensleeves” and so on, to English-language texts, which Handel’s operas were to Italian texts. Here’s a German putting on things to Italian texts to a London audience. This is “The Beggar’s Opera,” also by Hogarth, with the two girls, Lucy and Polly, each pleading to their father, Lucy Lockit, lock it, lock him up, Polly Peachum, impeach him, and there in the middle is Macheath, all stringed up, and he’s probably going to be beheaded or hanged or something, and the two girls… It’s a parody of the politics of the time. It’s a parody of girl opera singers, you know, “He loves me more than he loves her.” “No, he loves me more,” you know, and all that sort of stuff. Very funny, brilliant, and I think, in an earlier lecture some of you may have seen, I showed you an image of “The Threepenny Opera” by Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s, derived, ultimately, from this show, which did so well. It was on 60-something nights, night after night after night, made a fortune for the man in charge, whose name was John Rich, and John Rich, I must say, as a Snowman, I don’t like to make fun of other people’s names, but they all went on about how John Rich got very rich, and with the proceeds, he built the first theatre on the piazza of Covent Garden. I won’t go into all that now because I’ve got a lecture later on for Lockdown about the whole history of the Covent Garden piazza, including, of course, opera and so on, but let’s move on, and I want to take you around the world, as I said I was going to do.

Let’s take the helicopter across to Vienna, 18th century, young Mozart sort of tried to get away from his silly little town in Salzburg, beautiful city, you know, “I want to be big. "I want to go to the centre of the Habsburg Empire, "and maybe I can make some money there, "and I’ve got lot of talent.” He’d been all over the place. He’d spent a year and a bit in London as a kid, and if you know your Vienna, this is the Michaelerplatz, sorry, the St. Michael’s Place, just to the north of the whole bourg, the whole centre of Vienna, and the one building you won’t recognise there in the middle, that yellowish building, is, in fact, the Burgtheater, the Royal Theatres. Now, in the 1800s, it was removed to the Ringstrasse outside main Vienna, and it was in that theatre that young Mozart brought together by the emperor Joseph II, emperor of the Habsburg Empire, brought together with Lorenzo Da Ponte, Italian, Jewish-born, writer of texts, and the two of them put together a work that was first premiered there in Vienna in that theatre, and it was “The Marriage of Figaro,” “Le Nozze di Figaro.” “Così” went on there, and Mozart, somehow, clever, pushy, genius, nonstop creative, and yet of very lively social character, managed to make a kind of life for himself in Vienna and continued to travel a certain amount. He travelled to Prague. Prague wasn’t the capital of Czechoslovakia or anything. It was part, it was the main city in another part of the Habsburg Empire, Bohemia, if you like, and that was the theatre there, the Estate Theatre in Prague’s still there to this day. It’s been done up over the years, and every time I’ve ever been there, which is a number of times, there would almost certainly, at some point, be putting on a production of “Don Giovanni” because the man in charge of the Estate Theatre said to young Mozart, “You know, you’re a bright young lad.

"I wish you’d write something for us,” and it was through his initiative and money that Mozart and Da Ponte came together to write “Don Giovanni,” which was premiered there in Prague. Now, don’t imagine, as I said at the outset, that this is simply a nonstop history of opera from one year and decade and place to another. It comes and goes according to wider circumstances. The lecture I’m giving in a fortnight from now is about war and the arts, and when there’s a serious war, there very often aren’t arts. Not very long after this, and very soon after poor young Mozart had died, a revolution broke out in nearby Paris, and the French Revolution, 1789, Mozart’s still alive, just, but whether he knew about, I can’t imagine. There were no newspapers or television programmes or tweets or X’s or anything, and it broke out in the… That’s the Bastille. It was invaded, the prison, and if you go there now, to the Place de la Bastille, you’ll find there is an opera house opened by President Mitterrand on the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. There isn’t the old prison or castle or whatever you want to call it, but the Paris Opera House opened, not in 1789, but in 1989, which we’ll come on to later on. By the way, very near that square is a statue of Beaumarchais, the French writer, arms dealer, liberal, pro-American Revolution, blah, blah, blah, who wrote the Figaro plays, including “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro,” both of which later on to become well-known operas.

It’s only, really, I mean, there’s hardly any theatre or opera going on during all this period, and the Napoleonic Wars, which followed right through until, you know, 1815, the only major opera, I mean, the one or two, but the only one you will probably know about would be Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” originally “Leonore,” which he wrote, developed, changed, wrote a different overture, couldn’t make up his mind, and eventually, it was premiered in Vienna soon after the occupation by French Napoleonic troops who came along to the opera, didn’t really care, left early, made no money, and it was only later on, after the end of the Napoleonic period, that Beethoven finally renovated, wrote a final scene, heil freedom, and all that kind of stuff, and never wrote another opera, and really didn’t want to, and you can sort of see why. After the end of the Napoleonic period, finally, second time he was captured and that had all come and gone, you begin to get a sort of the great monarchies come back, the French monarchy, the Russian czarist world, and things are scary, and you don’t want to offend the political authorities, but you begin to get artworks that suggest what we came to label Romanticism. Man, if I may be sexist about it for a moment, identifies with nature, is individualistic, can dream of confronting the whole planet and indeed the moon and the stars without having to be part of a rational old-fashioned Enlightenment hierarchy, and you get painters, people like Caspar David Friedrich here, emerging.

The two of them are sort of, read it how you like, kind of emerging from darkness into light. We’re in the kind of early 1820s by now, and this is true in all the arts, including opera. I mean, think of some of the operas post-Napoleonic times, of Donizetti, the bel canto beauty of, I don’t know, “Lucia” or Bellini’s “Norma,” and then, a beautiful lyrical tune following all that. It’s a kind of Romantic, optimistic, I am part of the world that is going to be ever improved, and you get that, as I say, in operas, German operas, by people like Weber. Weber, also in the 1820s, later on, he comes to London as a young man, dies in London, sadly. In his opera, for example, “Der Freischütz,” “The Free Shooters,” here was one of the sets for the early production of it in the 1820s where, you know, our temporary hero, transient hero, wants bullets to be produced by magic with which he can destroy danger, demonism, but look at the way the scenery is suggesting what I mentioned earlier: the unity of man and nature, the optimism, the future, life, death. I keep mentioning the social history of opera. Who knew about it? Well, it changes all the time after the Napoleonic period. Take this country. Take Britain. In the 1820s, '30s, '40s. New industrialization. New international trade. You’re some kind of financier or industrialist or banker, maybe up north in Sheffield or Manchester or Leeds or Glasgow or wherever it might be, and you’ve heard that the thing to do to get known is to visit London, oh, and go to the opera. Opera? What’s that? Well, let me take my beautiful young daughter. She might sort of encounter some handsome young millionaire.

You never know, so how do you get seats? Where do you sit? What time does it begin? Do you have to get there before it starts? Or can you walk in while it’s on? Remember, the lights don’t go down. It’s candlelight by now, probably, and there is his daughter dressed up to the nines, or rather, she’s about as undressed as she’d dare be. She’s in the box. She’s not looking at the stage, although the show is actually on. What she’s doing is she said, “My God, isn’t that? "There’s Sir George over there. "Oh, if I lean forward enough, maybe he’ll notice me.” I mean, it’s crudely social, and it’s crudely political. You may know something, or you may not know much about Belgian independence in 1830, bit after this was portrayed, and it’s widely believed in Belgium that the independence, the revolution that led to independence in 1830 partly began as a result of an opera. The opera was in the Théâtre de la Monnaie, still there now to this day in Brussels, and they were putting on an opera by the composer Auber, the French composer, “La Muette de Portici.” It’s not an opera you’ll know or is often put on, but it includes a great chorus, “La liberté, la patrie,” and so on and the audience went wild. They were excited.

They wanted an encore, and then, after that opera was all over, they all burst out into the streets, joined the demos, which were demanding that, in the broader Netherlandish regions, the more southern, more French-speaking, independent-minded, democratic-minded Belgians should have independence, and Belgian independence, it’s a bit of a myth, bit like a King Arthur story or, you know, Queen Victoria never smiled or something, but it’s a myth that’s… I got this image that you’re watching now, not from the archives of the La Monnaie theatre, but from the Belgian National Archives, which tells you something about that the role believed to have been played by that particular opera at that time and in that place. Talking about politics, let’s go to my great hero, Verdi. Giuseppe Verdi, born in 1813, still Napoleonic times. He’s born in the duchy of Parma. There’s no united Italy or anything. Nice young lad. He’s no great child genius, like Mozart or anything. If you look at his birth certificate, you’ll find that he was not named Verdi, but he was named Joseph Verdi because he was technically a citizen of the expanding Napoleonic French Empire at that time, and there are a lot of myths associated with him. First opera I ever went to was “Rigoletto” by Verdi, although many years ago, I’ve seen it many times since, and wrote a little book about him. He wouldn’t have been an easy person to meet. He later on said, “I’m a landowner. "If they want to put on my operas, "there are plenty to choose from,” and yet, in his late life, he wrote one of the greatest of all operas, I think, “Otello,” and ended with yet another Shakespearean, a sort of comic parody of “Falstaff,” great creative genius, and people always used his name as an acronym for the secret desire for a united Italy, and, you know, Vittorio Emanuele was the king of one of the few bits of Italy that had a kind of independence in Sardinia or, you know, and so people, it is alleged, went around, right from the beginning, when Verdi was quite young and had only just written “Nabucco,” with its lovely chorus about la patria perduta. Viva Verdi!

You couldn’t be arrested by the Habsburg authorities for celebrating a composer, but everybody knew, and Verdi knew, that his name was being used for Vittorio Emanuele, re d'italia, Victor Emmanuel, king of Italy. In fact, this was used much, much later in his life, in retrospect, and again, the phrase was used the time of his death within a few days of Queen Victoria in January 1901, so there’s an awful lot of mythology, but the fact is Verdi was far more famous, as was Wagner, worldwide, and therefore, wealthier than anybody like Mozart could possibly have been. Why? Lots of reasons. By now, Verdi would be painted, and the painter would be paid a lot of money. He even lived on to be photographed quite a bit. In one wing of La Scala Milan, which you see there, the wing nearest the image here, which is now a museum of operatic history, many of the images, I’m, well, some of those I’m showing you, but many of those I used in my big book on opera history were derived from the opera museum there in a wing of La Scala Milan, and as you’ll see at the top, , the Ricordi Establishment. Ricordi was the great music publisher at the time, and their headquarters, their establishment at that time, during Verdi’s life, was there in a wing of the Scala Theatre in Milan, and that meant that people could get… And there also this about the time of the development of the steamship, so you could cross the Atlantic far quicker than when everything had to be done by sailing ship. It’s about the time, since we’re talking about the United States, of the development of the railroad right across from New York, Chicago, across to San Francisco.

One way or another, it’s a buildup of modern technological establishments. Photography has just come in. We just saw a photograph of Verdi. There are no photographs of Mozart, and one way and another, Verdi becomes a global celebrity. I don’t know who’s playing this, all these trumpets and things, and oboes and whatnot in… It’s a photograph from the 1870s in the American West. I’m not quite sure. I think it’s in Utah or Nevada, and yet they could easily have been playing, by then, a brass version of the “Grand March” from Aida, for example, by Verdi. By then, they could have picked up the music in a music shop in, not necessarily San Francisco, but in Reno, Nevada and be playing his music. The piano is travelling around the rich world, the Northern world, but also Australia, South Africa, and every young girl who wants to try and attract a sensible wealthy young man is learning to play the piano because she probably, this poor girl, this is late Victorian times, probably playing, you know, probably doesn’t know that it’s actually a wedding march from “Lohengrin” by Wagner, and Wagner and the publishing company Schott are probably making a lot of money out of it because that’s the way things are going for these celebrities. Operas are getting bigger. They’re getting grander. Big orchestras. Bigger choruses. All those new opera houses that I showed you at the beginning. 1850s, '60s, '70s. More audiences. People could travel more. They had more money if they were wealthy. Look at the size of this rehearsal in the new Paris Opera House. Two pianists. Two conductors, one conducting the score and the other one conducting the chorus. Somebody to turn the page of the two pianists, and it’s amazing. They’re all dressed up properly. Top hats. Dresses for the ladies, and there’s also development of other things in the opera world.

By the later 19th century, the conductor, you know, Mozart didn’t have to stand up with a baton conducting. He just played the, you know, virginal or harpsichord or whatever it might be and nodded a bit to a small orchestra and a small cast for one of his operas. By the time of Wagner and Verdi, serious productions take place. Here’s somebody directing a production of Wagner’s “Valkyrie.” There’s Brünnhilde going off with her spear and so on, and Wotan coming up. “Oh, sorry, Maestro. I’ve just been to the loo. "Tell me when you want me to join in.” This will be probably 1880s, '90s rehearsal, and as I say, conducting comes in, and opera becomes more and more and rapidly global. I talked about Italian unification, but it didn’t really work that well. There was poverty. The economy didn’t work well. Many Italians, I mentioned the steamship, particularly poor ones from Calabria, Naples, the South. They would, if they could, make the journey of a lifetime on a steamship across to that golden city, New York and maybe take a train across, but probably stay there, pretty much where they got off the boat on the Lower East Side of New York. Canal Street. Mulberry Street. They might put a picture of Garibaldi or something in the windows, but they were not the only Italians there, and opera is developing in New York in the '80s. The Metropolitan Opera House New York in those days down near Times, what becomes Times Square on West 39th Street is opened in 1883, and it’s financed by all the grand wealthy, the people who build the railroads, the people who do the big investments and so on, and when I was first in New York in the early '60s, Kennedy period, I remember going down there, wanting to go to the Metropolitan Opera, walked right past it, not realising what looked like a block of flats or a huge supermarket.

I didn’t realise that was a theatre. It’s not what theatres looked like, but it was, and I went there, and I remember seeing, I know, Jon Vickers and people in operas in 1960, '61 and, of course, the great hero, earlier on, of the beginning of that century, of all the Italians who’d migrated to New York, was a poor, talented Neapolitan boy with a lovely voice who’d moved to America and had sung earlier, long before I was there, half a century before, in that theatre, and he was not only a brilliant, brilliant singer, but one of the first to make recordings, and he was also a brilliant cartoonist. He did a wonderful parody of himself making an early recording, and his name, of course, was Enrico Caruso. Anybody knows where he lived. I love the fact that I mentioned that there were very, very early recordings, and I love the way he has parodied himself singing into the speaker there, into the microphone, and he’s parodied all that with the little dog of HMV up there in the corner. I mentioned this is the period of early motorcars. Puccini, more or less who lived about the same time as Caruso, well into the early 20th century, he loved motorcars. He loved modern technology. There he is in a car. He actually had a bit of a crash earlier on, and he wrote whole of “Madama Butterfly” when he was in a, when he had a leg in a bit of a mess. New recordings. Film all around the same time. The singer Geraldine Farrar, who died well into my lifetime and probably yours, she made a film of “Carmen.” This is the fairly early scene with all the girls in the cigarette factory. Filmed by Cecil B. DeMille.

Made in 1915. Silent movie, but there were beginning to be suburbs all around the great cities, and in the suburbs, there would always be a cinema, and you could go to the cinema, and you could see Geraldine Farrar in “Carmen,” and there’d be somebody at the piano playing alongside with it, so you’d hear the music, and wherever she went and sang, in whatever suburb or suburban theatre or at the New York Metropolitan, people would always want to go and see her for real, so opera audiences fill up internationally and certainly all over the United States. Extraordinary. Broadcasting. Radio. I used to work for BBC, which also was founded early in the last century, and they began to broadcast. The Metropolitan Opera New York began to broadcast live, live relays on the radio, on the wireless, of its Saturday matinees, and there you’ve got two or three singers, Rosa Ponselle and her colleagues. They’re listening to the show that they have just been on or about to go into the next act, in costume, not on the internal Tannoy system, but actually around the radio in the early 1930s during the beginnings of the Depression, 1930s America, when people wanted entertainment. Let me move on. We need to get towards the end. Let me take you, again, rather controversially, if I may, to Germany. Remember, and I talked about this quite a bit during my lectures about the Hitler émigrés, Hitler himself began life and national socialism because he cared overmuch, and potentially very dangerously, about traditional Nordic German cultural arts, particularly architecture and particularly music, and he adored Wagner.

Wagner was a difficult man, anti-Semitic, but didn’t plan mass murders in the way Hitler later on went on to do, and Hitler loved going to Bayreuth in the early '30s. There he is with Winifred Wagner, the widow of Wagner’s son, Siegfried. She knew, didn’t know Wagner himself, but she was married to his son, and she very well remembered his widow, Cosima. Cosima and Siegfried both died in 1930, and Winifred took over Bayreuth, and I think I’ve mentioned to you I spent a week with her in Bayreuth in 1969. She’s born in England, oddly enough, and talking in serious detail about her life, times, and memories, but now’s not the time to go into all that. Hitler, absolutely devoted to Wagner and Bayreuth, and in the early years of his rule, after 1933, but before the war, he wanted to put German government money into sending troops to Wagner’s operas in Bayreuth. Again, I’ve shown you this before. Richard Wagner town welcomed, grüßte, the guests of the Führer. The war, beyond horrible, beyond barbarous and unpardonable and horrific, and I’m glad I was only a child and don’t really remember it well, but let me, by way of approaching our conclusion, show you something of the redevelopment, the revival, the renaissance, the rinascimento of opera in my lifetime. In other words, in the decades after the war. Many new opera was, once upon a time, and, as I say, that was opened on the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, 1789, 1989.

The Cardiff Millennial Centre on the right. I don’t understand all the Welsh, and it had a difficult background because the original architect was changed, but I’ve seen opera there, Welsh National, and pretty damn good it can be as well. A lot of opera houses, some of them quite spectacular, wonderful rebuilt one in Barcelona, the Liceu, or the Liceu, depending on whether you’re speaking Catalan or Spanish, and if you go down the coast a little bit from Barcelona down as far as Valencia, you’ll come across a whole art centre, a palace of all the arts, including an extraordinarily designed opera house. The great architect was Calatrava, and this is the Palace of the Arts, named after Queen Sofía, and in that extraordinary building, which opened about 20 years ago, 25 years ago, they put on various high-quality operas. I’ve seen Domingo in his heyday when that was a new building and he was a younger, better performer. Go up to Scandinavia. Lot of opera in Scandinavia going way, way back, particularly in Sweden, but there’ve been recent new buildings, both of them by the seacoast, as this one is, in both Copenhagen and Oslo. Let me just try and move my picture off the screen like that. Both quite difficult to get to, but beautiful when you do, and they’re lovely opera houses in two highly cultured cities, both of which I love, and if we can cross the Atlantic again, don’t forget that a city like Toronto, lovely concert hall it’s got there, great cultural centre, and not so very long ago, they built what they came to call the Centre, the Four Seasons Centre because they have many different things on, including a substantial season with Canadian National Opera. A modern building. You can see all the greenery through it. Doesn’t look like an old-fashioned theatre, but I’ve been there. They’ve shown me over it. You can see every seat is slightly angled, so you can see everything from everywhere.

The acoustic is brilliant, and, of course, the Metropolitan Opera itself moved up from the one I showed you earlier to the West 60s, further up the, up from where it used to be. Everything has moved up Manhattan a little bit northernly, and if you go to the Metropolitan Opera now, and you can very often get last-minute tickets if it’s not absolutely full. It’s very big house, and it doesn’t have boxes with rich, grand diamond-tiaraed ladies all leaning over so you can see them all. It aims at having a mass audience, and very lovely it is too. Opera in our time has become very popular, very worldwide. I get a bit depressed nowadays in our own immediate times. Post-COVID, arts money is diminishing, but remember that not long after the Metropolitan Opera House was re-moved up the road in New York there in 1990, in Rome, the Three Tenors, allegedly all rivals of each other, got together, did a lovely concert, shown on television, watched by hundreds of millions of people, and above all, extraordinarily, the most famous building in the entire southern hemisphere, I would say, is an opera house. Beautiful building in Sydney. Doesn’t always function that well, but I love going there. I’ve seen a lot of operas there, although Melbourne probably has a better but much less picturesque theatre, but that’s another thing to say. Anyway, let me bring you back to my own beloved Covent Garden, by way of an ending. As I say, I’ve got a whole lecture about the Covent Garden piazza, the Italianness of it, the old church, the markets, and, of course, the three opera theatres coming up later for our Lockdown University later in the year, so for the time being, I hope you found this of interest. I’ve only touched on some of the things I would love to tell you about.

If you want to know more or I got something wrong or you want to contact me, please feel free. I’m easy to look up. I’ve got a silly name, Snowman. E-mail me, phone me, or if you want to send me something, you know, a bit more or seriously, ask, you know, e-mail Lockdown, and I’m sure they’ll pass on to me what it is you want to discuss with me. Maybe we can even get together and have a coffee together and a proper discussion. I’d rather do that than go through dozens and dozens of little things online, although I’m sure there are some ideas that you might want to share with me, so farewell for the moment. Addio, adiós, au revoir, auf Wiedersehen, shalom, goodbye, and all the other things that operas might contain. This is the old Floral Hall in Covent Garden. It’s now, since the beginning of this century, become a place for drinks before, during, and after the show, so thank you very much. Goodbye, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, and that’s all, folks. Thanks very, very much.