A Sketch Of The Development Of Opera

If Music be, among the arts, 'Heaven's youngest-teemed star', the latest of the art-forms she herself has brought forth is unquestionably Opera. There is a good deal of football jersey fascination, and some truth, in the theory that different nations enjoy opera in different ways. According to this, the Italians consider it solely in relation to their sensuous emotions; the French, as producing a titillating sensation more or less akin to the pleasures of the table; the Spaniards, mainly as a vehicle for dancing; the Germans, as an intellectual pleasure; and the English, as an expensive but not unprofitable way of demonstrating financial prosperity. The Italian might be said to hear through what is euphemistically called his heart, the Frenchman through his palate, the Spaniard through his toes, the German through his brain, and the Englishman through his purse. The Englishman who said of the opera,'At the first act I was enchanted; the second I could just bear; and at the third I ran away', is a fair illustration of cheap nfl jerseys an attitude common in the eighteenth century; and in France things were not much better, even in days when stage magnificence reached a point hardly surpassed in history. La Bruyère's 'Je ne sais comment l'opéra avec une musique si parfaite, et une dépense toute royale, a pu réussir à m'ennuyer', shows how little he had realised the fatiguing effect of theatrical splendour too persistently displayed. But though artistic conditions in opera change quickly and continually,though reputations are made and lost in a few years, and the real reformers of music themselves alter their style and methods so radically that the earlier compositions of a Gluck, a Wagner, or a Verdi present scarcely any point of resemblance to those later masterpieces by which each of these is immortalised, yet the attitude of nfl throwback jerseys audiences towards opera in general changes curiously little from century to century. To most of the world (and we say it advisedly,) the opera is a sealed book. We do not mean a bare representation with its accompanying screechings, violinings and bass-drummings. Everybody has seen that--But the race of beings who constitute that remarkable combination; their feelings, positions, social habits; their relation to one another; what they say and eat;[a] whether the tenor ever notices as they (the world) do, the fine legs of the contralto in man's dress, and whether the basso drinks pale ale or porter; all these things have been hitherto wrapped in an inscrutable mystery. In regard to mere actors, not singers, this feeling is confined to children; but the operators of an opera are essentially esoteric. They are enclosed by a curtain more impenetrable than the Chinese wall. You may walk all around them; nay, you may even know an inferior artiste, but there is a line beyond which even the fast men, with all their impetuosity, are restrained from invading. Shakspeare observes, that "all the world's a stage;" the converse of this proposition is no less worthy of being regarded as a great moral truth,--that all the stage is a world. Every condition of life may be found typified in one or other of the officials or attachés of an opera house; from the king upon the throne, symbolized by the haughty and magisterial impresario, to the _chiffonier_ in the gutter, represented by the unfortunate chorister who is attired as a shabby nobleman on the stage, but who goes home to a supper of leeks. Between these two degrees, of dignity and unimportance, come those many shades of social position corresponding to the happy situations of Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, and divers other dignitaries, set forth in the stage director, the treasurer and the chorus-master. The tenor, basso, prima donna and baritone may be considered as belonging to what is called "society;"--that well-to-do and ornamental portion of nfl jerseys the community, who having no vocation save to frequent balls, soirées, concerts and operas, and fall in love--serve as objects of admiration to those persons less favoured by fortune, who make the
clothes and dress the hair of the former.