Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, Volume 2: The Pantheon Opera and Its Aftermath, 1789–1795. By Judith Milhous, Gabriella Dideriksen, and Robert D. Hume. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001; pp. 883 + illustrations. $125.00 hardcover; Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King's Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance. By Ian Woodfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; pp. 339. $59.95 hardcover.

Extract

Opera buffs and anglophiles are sure to find their own pleasures in Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London and in volume 2 of Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, but these new works will also appeal to general readers and theatre scholars who have long-standing interests in the profusion of theatrical entertainments in London during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Both volumes capture an overheated theatre scene, stoked by class-consciousness at its most acute. Both books, but especially Italian Opera, find uses for financial records. The meticulous bookkeeping of eighteenth-century London opera underscores the need for lots of money to run an enterprise made up largely of foreign performers, designers, and composers, none of whom came cheap, in the competitive bidding and prototypical stardom that marked the European opera scene of the time. Both works show opera managers spending money on attractions they could bring to London to aggrandize their patrons' vaunting senses of themselves, and vaunting came naturally at a time of high imperial ambitions and high colonial revenues, though neither book searches opera for its metatheatrical possibilities.