42 ON THB PRESENT STATE OF THE OPERA IN LONDON. 



marvel, is it not rather to be expected, that an opera should stand 

 or fall, not according to its own intrinsic merits, but according to 

 the perfection of voice and execution, and that its fate may even 

 depend on the face and figure of the prima donna ? Can it, under 

 these circumstances, excite surprise that the Puritani should, night 

 after ni^ht, attract crowded and admiring audiences, while Spon- 

 tini's Vestale, Winter's Opferfest, Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable, 

 and even Weber's Oberon, proved failures at the time they were 

 produced, and are now nearly forgotten. Good music may un- 

 doubtedly, in some instances, meet with a favourable reception from 

 the public — for instance, Beethoven's Fidelio ; but the success of 

 this opera may fairly be attributed to the splendid performance of 

 Schraeder Devrient, and subsequently to the equally excellent re- 

 presentation of a striking character by Malibran. But for these 

 lucky accidents this opera might probably have been laid on the 

 shelf with the others ; the attraction lay in the singer and the ac- 

 tress, not in the music. Pasta performs in Norma and Anna Bole- 

 na, and immediately the demand for these two dullest of dull operas 

 becomes universal. Malibran holds the mirror up to Nature in the 

 Somnambula, and the call for the opera becomes so urgent that the 

 publishers find considerable difficulty in supplying the requisite 

 number of copies. The same observations may be applied, with 

 equal truth, to the Puritani ; it owes its success, in a great mea- 

 sure, to the performance of Grisi, Tamburini, Rubini, and Lablache. 

 Had any of the highly- extolled operas been presented to the public 

 with a piano-forte accompaniment previous to their performance, 

 the music-sellers would not have been remunerated for the expense 

 of publication. 



A musician can form as perfect an idea of a composition from 

 looking over the score, as he would be enabled to do by playing it 

 or hearing it performed. It would be, perhaps, requiring too much 

 to expect that amateurs should attain the knowledge and experience 

 requisite to enable them thus to judge ; but it surely is compatible 

 with the time usually allotted to this study, to expect that, from a 

 good arrangement, with the voices in score and the instrumental 

 parts compressed into a piano-forte accompaniment, they should be 

 competent to pass a correct judgment in regard to the style of an 

 opera, and its fitness for public performance. A really efficient 

 musical education would enable the public to appreciate the intrin- 

 sic value of an opera, indc'pendently of adventitious circumstances; 

 it^would render them capable of criticising its merits and defects 

 more justly after having studied it at the piano, than the present 



