A Book of Operas | Page 3

it may, therefore, fittingly take the first place in
these operatic studies. The place was the Park Theatre, then situated in
Chambers Street, east of Broadway, and the date November 29, 1825. It
was not the first performance of Italian opera music in America,
however, nor yet of Rossini's merry work. In the early years of the
nineteenth century New York was almost as fully abreast of the times
in the matter of dramatic entertainments as London. New works
produced in the English capital were heard in New York as soon as the
ships of that day could bring over the books and the actors. Especially
was this true of English ballad operas and English transcriptions, or
adaptations, of French, German, and Italian operas. New York was five
months ahead of Paris in making the acquaintance of the operatic
version of Beaumarchais's "Barbier de Séville." The first performance
of Rossini's opera took place in Rome on February 5, 1816. London
heard it in its original form at the King's Theatre on March 10, 1818,
with Garcia, the first Count Almaviva, in that part. The opera "went off
with unbounded applause," says Parke (an oboe player, who has left us

two volumes of entertaining and instructive memoirs), but it did not
win the degree of favor enjoyed by the other operas of Rossini then
current on the English stage. It dropped out of the repertory of the
King's Theatre and was not revived until 1822--a year in which the
popularity of Rossini in the British metropolis may be measured by the
fact that all but four of the operas brought forward that year were
composed by him. The first Parisian representation of the opera took
place on October 26, 1819. Garcia was again in the cast. By that time,
in all likelihood, all of musical New York that could muster up a
pucker was already whistling "Largo al factotum" and the beginning of
"Una voce poco fà," for, on May 17, 1819, Thomas Phillipps had
brought an English "Barber of Seville" forward at a benefit
performance for himself at the same Park Theatre at which more than
six years later the Garcia company, the first Italian opera troupe to visit
the New World, performed it in Italian on the date already mentioned.
At Mr. Phillipps's performance the beneficiary sang the part of
Almaviva, and Miss Leesugg, who afterward became the wife of the
comedian Hackett, was the Rosina. On November 21, 1821, there was
another performance for Mr. Phillipps's benefit, and this time Mrs.
Holman took the part of Rosina. Phillipps and Holman--brave names
these in the dramatic annals of New York and London a little less than
a century ago! When will European writers on music begin to realize
that musical culture in America is not just now in its beginnings?
It was Manuel Garcia's troupe that first performed "Il Barbiere di
Siviglia" in New York, and four of the parts in the opera were played
by members of his family. Manuel, the father, was the Count, as he had
been at the premières in Rome, London, and Paris; Manuel, son, was
the Figaro (he lived to read about eighty-one years of operatic
enterprise in New York, and died at the age of 101 years in London in
1906); Signora Garcia, mère, was the Berta, and Rosina was sung and
played by that "cunning pattern of excellent nature," as a writer of the
day called her, Signorina Garcia, afterward the famous Malibran. The
other performers at this representation of the Italian "Barber" were
Signor Rosich (Dr. Bartolo), Signor Angrisani (Don Basilio), and
Signor Crivelli, the younger (Fiorello). The opera was given
twenty-three times in a season of seventy-nine nights, and the receipts

ranged from $1843 on the opening night and $1834 on the closing,
down to $356 on the twenty-ninth night.
But neither Phillipps nor Garcia was the first to present an operatic
version of Beaumarchais's comedy to the American people. French
operas by Rousseau, Monsigny, Dalayrac, and Grétry, 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. In 1794 the last three of these cities enjoyed "an opera in 3
acts," the text by Colman, entitled, "The Spanish Barber; or, The Futile
Precaution." Nothing is said in the announcements of this opera
touching the authorship of the music, but it seems to be an inevitable
conclusion that it was Paisiello's, composed for St. Petersburg about
1780. There were German "Barbers" in existence at the time composed
by Benda (Friedrich Ludwig), Elsperger, and Schulz, but they did not
enjoy large popularity in their own country, and Isouard's "Barbier"
was not yet written. Paisiello's opera, on