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Updated: September 24, 2025
Wagner had personally visited the opera-houses throughout the land and selected the best singers. The audience included the Emperors of Germany and Brazil, King Ludwig, the Grand Dukes of Weimar and Baden, eminent composers like Liszt, Grieg, Saint-Saëns, and many other notable persons.
It may truly be said that Monteverde was the great operatic reformer, the Wagner, of the seventeenth century, as Gluck was of the eighteenth. An epoch-making event in opera history was the opening, in 1637, of the first public opera house in commercial Venice whose wealth afforded her citizens leisure to cultivate art. Soon popular demand led to the erection of many Italian opera-houses.
In short, I had hitherto frequented gambling-tables just as I frequented ball-rooms and opera-houses because they amused me, and because I had nothing better to do with my leisure hours. But on this occasion it was very different now, for the first time in my life, I felt what the passion for play really was.
He took a larger theatre, and even that succeeded. Soon he was recognised as the lessee of more than one, and still he prospered. Villebecque began to dabble in opera-houses. He enthroned himself at Paris; his envoys were heard of at Milan and Naples, at Berlin and St. Petersburg. His controversies with the Conservatoire at Paris ranked among state papers.
There is no spoken dialogue, and the music is continuous from first to last. Cambert's operas were very successful, and in conjunction with his librettist Perrin he received a charter from the King in 1669, giving him the sole right of establishing opera-houses in the kingdom. Quarrels, however, ensued. Cambert and Perrin separated.
When, therefore, the Italian opera-houses close for the season, they are never reopened for the accommodation of wandering "stars." The consequence of this is, that the drama is banished to the inferior theatres, and whilst thousands of francs are spent on the scenery of a new opera or ballet, the poor player has to content himself with an indifferent stage and wretched decorations.
But the engraving cabinets and the Rembrandt original drawings are justly celebrated. And now with the two new theatres, or opera-houses, Stuttgart ought soon to forge to the front as an art centre in Germany. Thanks to its energetic King and cultivated Queen. The question with which I began this little talk is Richard Strauss retrograding in his art? may be answered by a curt negative.
And yet, in that same Russia, any nonsense whatever that came out of Italy, got immediate hearing and sickening praise. The opera-houses of every city were given over, during the season, to Italian troupes.
By this Beethoven did not mean that Mozart had not written music before for a German libretto, but that he had never written German music before in an opera. The distinction is one more easily observed by Germans and critical historians than by the ordinary frequenters of our opera-houses. "Die Zauberflote" has a special charm for people of German blood, which is both admirable and amiable.
The most important of all the north German opera-houses was that of Hamburg, where the opera did not depend on the patronage of a court, but was organised, as at Venice, as a public entertainment.
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