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Updated: September 24, 2025
People went to talk and to be seen as well as to see and hear; they do so in certain opera-houses still. And the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket possessed the greatest opera-composer living, a greater even than Scarlatti himself. It was a period when there was still a considerable tradition of musicianship among the amateurs of English society.
Moreover, the statistics of German opera-houses show that Wagner's operas, from the "Flying Dutchman" to the "Nibelung's Ring," have been gaining in popularity and frequency of repetition, year by year, with a constancy that might almost be expressed with mathematical exactness by means of a crescendo: <. And we are by no means at the biggest end of the crescendo yet.
For several years we see him busy in multifarious ways, composing, leading musical festivals, concert-giving, directing opera-houses, and yet finding time to keep up a busy correspondence with the most distinguished men in Europe; for Mendelssohn seemed to find in letter-writing a rest for his overtaxed brain. In 1835 he completed his great oratorio of "St. Paul," for Leipsic.
He toiled away at the theatre, nearly driving the singers crazy with the ceaseless work he demanded from them; and to his family, when they had news from him or of him, it must have seemed as though he had already one foot on the ladder and it was only a matter of time for him to climb to the dizzy height of Hofkapellmeister of one of the larger opera-houses.
French operas by Rousseau, Monsigny, Dalayrac, and Gretry, which may be said to have composed the staple of the opera-houses of Europe in the last decades of the eighteenth century, were known also in the contemporaneous theatres of Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York.
Handel naturalized partnership with Heidegger Esther the Opera of the Nobility visit to Oxford opera season at Covent Garden Charles Jennens collapse of both opera-houses. Handel had by this time definitely decided to make England his home; on February 13, 1726, he had been naturalised as an English subject. He had every reason to regard England as the best place in which to live.
So, during that brief express journey, he sat talking gaily enough to Clarissa about the Parisian opera-houses, the last new plays at the Gymnase and the Odeon, the May races at Chantilly, and so on; yet hatching his grand scheme all the while. It had taken no definite shape as yet, but it filled his mind none the less."
Moreover, from the creative point of view, it was an actual advantage for him to be away from the opera-houses of the great capitals. In Switzerland, except for a short time when he was connected with the Zurich opera, he heard no operatic music except such as his own brain created. Undoubtedly this helps to account for the astounding originality of the music-dramas he wrote in Switzerland.
"Dalton, so I understood, had considerable money when he left, enough to last him some months, and until yesterday I have hunted for them where I thought he would be sure to spend it, in the richer cafes and restaurants, outside the opera-houses and the fashionable theatres places where two strangers in the city would naturally spend their evenings, and a woman loving light and color as she did would want to go.
Even in this new land, far from those he would avoid, the old flute-player was determined not to go to the great orchestras, among whose auditors were likely to be travelers. Thus he barred himself from opera-houses, theatres and most of the hotels, by the towering barrier of his own timidity. He would not risk unwelcome prominence even to that slight extent.
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