Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Volume 1: The King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1778-1791: The King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1778-1791 Vol 1: Amazon.co.uk: Curtis Price, Judith Milhous, Robert D. Hume: Books

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Review

"Essential."--Choice
"This new study provides some enlightening insights into the business side of the eighteenth century musical London."--Classical Music
"[A] lavishly-documented and richly entertaining book...an admirably clear and sensible narrative, often enlivened by flashes of humour...this is an outstanding contribution to the history of opera in England."--The Musical Times
"Seven-hundred pages allow a rich, thorough treatment of theater, personnel, and music that is unlikely ever to be superseded, so the responsibility of the authors is to be as fair as they are industrious. As far as I can see, they have succeeded in being both while remaining user-friendly in their writing style - direct, readable, warm, and alive to the humorous and less reputal parts of the story."--Albion
"With this volume the writers have produced a magnificent achievement in opera and ballet scholarship."--Unknown

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This interdisciplinary study attempts to make sense of what has long been regarded as a chaotic period in the history of opera in London. In 1778 R. B. Sheridan acquired the King's Theatre and its resident opera company in what we would now call a leveraged buy-out, plunging the opera into escalating debts that were to haunt it into the 1840s. The 1780s and early 1790s were a stormy but exciting era: the company hired some of the foremost singers and dancers in Europe; ballet d'action came to London, with Noverre himself as ballet master; the company employed such composers as Sacchini, Anfossi, Cherubini and ultimately Haydn; it went bankrupt and carried on through years of wrangling in Canchery; the King's Theatre burned down in 1789 and was rebuilt and re-opened in defiance of the Lord Chamberlain's refusal to license the new building. Drawing on librettos and scores, ballet scenarios, pamphlets, scattered manuscripts, legal records, architectural drawings, newspapers and other sources, the authors reconstruct the history of the company its shifting artistic policies, analysing opera and ballet repertoy, performers, production circumstances, finances and managerial infighting.