Cockney Mozart: The Hunt circle, the King's Theatre, and Don Giovanni.(Critical essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-05

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I

THE WEEK THAT MOZART'S DON GIOVANNI MADE ITS FAMOUS, AND FAMOUSLY belated, debut on the London stage, Leigh Hunt, editor and opera critic of the Examiner, found himself marooned in Buckinghamshire. From there he sent a letter to his friend Vincent Novello, the musician, who had tickets to the opening night. We "envy you the power of seeing Don Giovanni," he wrote wistfully. (1) Hunt was envious for good reason. The April 1817 premiere of Don Giovanni at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket marked "a red letter in the operatic annals" of England, a production that permanently changed the nature of opera and opera-going in London. (2) The triumph of the 1817 Don Giovanni, and Hunt's excitement, nevertheless prompt the question: Why was Mozart's most celebrated opera, which premiered in Vienna and Prague in 1787, not produced in London for a full thirty years? The generation delay in the debut of Don Giovanni, at the most prestigious Italian opera house in Europe after La Scala, opens up the political history of Mozart reception in England I wish to pursue here, specifically the struggle between the Mozartians of" the Hunt circle and the aristocratic, anti-Mozart "cabal" at the King's Theatre.

In a series of opera reviews he contributed to the Examiner in 1813, Thomas Barnes, Hunt's old schoolfellow and legendary editor of" the Times, made a strident case for middle-class control of opera repertory at the King's Theatre based on an argument that superiority of rank in Regency society lay in inverse relation to taste and education:

The King's Theatre is almost exclusively visited by the

highest rank and fashion of the nation, and yet these superb aristocrats are delighted with a style of performance which would disgust the lower orders. What is the reason of this? It is simply, that the highest orders of society, with very few exceptions, are worse educated than the inferior ranks of the middle portion of

the community: that with respect to intellect and mental cultivation and everything but manners, they are semi-barbarians, the consequence of which is the utter absence of that best characteristic of a gentleman,

a well-instructed taste. (May 9) It is a measure of the confidence of the new radical bourgeois press, and the Examiner's undaunted class rage during Hunt's imprisonment, that an aristocrat might be described in its pages as a "semi-barbarian," or worse, as failing to meet the requisites of a gentleman. To make "taste" rather than rank the standard for gentlemanliness is, of course, as potentially revolutionary a proposition as universal enfranchisement. My argument in what follows is that the Hunt circle's sense of mission as tastemakers in English music culture took shape during the Regency period with their campaign for professional production of Mozart's operas at the King's Theatre. The opera house's resistance to Mozart came to represent the stifling hegemony of aristocratic taste, inspiring a Cockney sense of injustice as keenly felt as at any lurid outrage of the Prince Regent, or Parliamentary waffling on reform.

The audience for the 1817 Don Giovanni extended far beyond the aristocratic habitues of the King's Theatre in the West End. The press recorded unprecedented crowds at the April 12 premiere: Long before the commencement of the Overture the Pit was literally crammed, and hundreds who subsequently arrived were obliged to return disappointed, or ascend the gallery, which also was completely filled. Belles and beaux were seen indiscriminately huddled together at

the sides of the Pit, endeavoring to catch a glimpse of what was passing on the Stage; and it was remarked as a somewhat rare occurrence, that not a single box in the house remained unoccupied. (3) The box subscribers soon chose to scorn Mozart, but for a few opera-crazed months in the spring of 1817, the King's Theatre presented a spectacle of class chaos and intermingling rarely seen anywhere in the Regency. The sheer press of audience demand for Mozart was so great that democratic reform was literally forced (however temporarily) upon the proprietors of the King's Theatre: "So great, indeed, has been the overflow from the Pit, that has been found necessary to throw open such of the Upper Boxes as remain unlet, in order to accommodate in some degree those who are unable to obtain seats below." (4) In an age when operas rarely played more than a few nights in a season, Don Giovanni ran a record twenty-three nights to "overflowing houses," and would have played more often had not the aristocratic subscribers insisted on the insertion of a conventional baroque opera seria, Paer's Agnese, to break the Mozartian monopoly. "There never was exhibited to the musical world a more consummate feast," concluded the Times, "than Don Giovanni" (12 Jan. 1818).

For two of the famous literary figures of the Hunt circle, the 1817 Don Giovanni was a conversion experience. "I am in your debt for a very delightful evening," wrote Charles Lamb to the King's Theatre manager, his close friend William Ayrton, "and I am almost inclined to allow Music to be one of the Liberal Arts: which before I doubted." (5) Lamb requested three more gallery tickets for the next week's performances. Meanwhile, Thomas Love Peacock persuaded Shelley to accompany him to see Don Giovanni that same season: "Before it commenced he asked me if the opera was comic or tragic. I said it was composite, more comedy than tragedy. After the killing of the Commendatore, he said, 'Do you call this comedy?' By degrees he became absorbed in the music and action.... From this time till he finally left England he was an assiduous frequenter of the Italian Opera. He delighted in the music of Mozart." (6)

Given that Lamb was, on his own admission, unmusical--"I have no ear" (35)--and Shelley so often an unhappy theatergoer, their absorption in Mozart's Don Giovanni speaks volumes for the broad, literary nature of the opera's appeal. For Lamb, Mozart's opera represented music's claim to belong among the liberal arts, and the long-suffering Mozartians of the press worked hard to produce a critical vocabulary commensurate with that new status. Don Giovanni "is a perfect whole," wrote the British Stage and Literan/Cabinet, "the master-piece of the master of his art, the presiding genius of harmony, the Shakespeare of composers" (May 1817). The reviewer at the Theatrical Inquisitor extended the pantheon still further: "It is one of the most stupendous works of human genius, and fitted to rank with the Iliad of Homer, the Eneid of Virgil, or the Macbeth of Shakespeare" (April 1817). "Such music," wrote Richard Mackenzie Bacon, "is surely the highest intellectual enjoyment within the reach of mortals: we bowed in silent admiration before the divine genius of the German Bard!" (7) Mozart opera did not depend on spectacle and bravura singing. It did not merely "astonish" the ears and eyes of the audience; it offered instead a deep psychological truth of character represented in musical drama that in turn required an intellectual absorption from the audience more often associated with reading the great poets. After a century of ephemeral, musically thin opera serie at the King's Theatre, Mozart's operas opened a new and permanent vista of musical possibility because its genius lay not in the operatic "event" but the "work," not in the performance but in the score, a musical text that was reproducible onstage, at the drawing-room piano, and in the imagination. (8) For the London critics, writing mostly for whig and radical publications, there was nothing to choose between Shakespeare and Mozart. Both were "intellectual" in the broadest, trans-disciplinary sense; both were "Bards."

Mozart, no less than the Elizabethan poets, served as a principal muse of the Hunt circle, and as one of its liberal causes. As Hunt wrote in his April 1817 letter to Vincent Novello, "I would have Mozart as common in good libraries as Shakespeare and Spenser, and prints from Raphael" (Clarke 196). In 1820, Hunt proposed to Novello that they collaborate on a book consisting of Mozart songs and airs, with commentary provided by Hunt. Hunt opens "Musical Evenings" by imaginatively recalling the scene of many impromptu musical affairs he and Novello enjoyed with their circle at Hampstead and Oxford Road. He sets out a sequence of songs and readings for his ideal "musical evening," with the Cockney favorite, Spenser, featuring prominently alongside Mozart excerpts from Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte. (9) Music and poetry are once more placed conspicuously on the same footing:

In this country of books, and piano-fortes, and poets, and

firesides, and fair faces ... how many soft or manly voices are reading a favourite poet to hushing rooms:--how many fair hands are going over keys or strings, culling sweet sounds as they would

flowers:--how many fathers, husbands, brothers, and lovers, are standing beside them, with flute or violin, falling in, as the

song requires, with their bending and smiling accompaniments. (10) Poetry and music serve here as the enabling language of highly formalized erotic play, but also of an ideal, democratic social formation. The musical evening functions as a meeting ground for the sexes in which the strict regulation of gender roles produces a general harmony. Both "soft" and "manly" voices may read poetry, but "fair hands" play the piano and harp, while the men of the party perform on the melodic instruments, oddly described by Hunt as "accompaniments." But the word choice is thematically, if not musically, consistent. The musical privilege of carrying the tune is offset, in social terms, by the perfect democracy of Cockney music-making: the men mitigate their pre-eminent role with gestures of submission, "bending and smiling." (11)

As "Musical Evenings" attests, Mozart's operas had been a constitutive staple of Hunt circle life for a decade before the 1817 Don Giovanni. The letters and memoirs of the group are full of vivid reminiscences. Vincent Novello's daughter Mary, who married Keats's schoolfriend Charles Cowden Clarke, remembered entire days singing Mozart around the piano and organ at her childhood home on Oxford Street: "Mornings and afternoons witnessed numerous 'goings through' of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, Don Giovanni, Nozze di Figaro." (12) The Cockney Mozartians gathered around the piano read like a who's who of early nineteenth-century music culture in Britain: Thomas Alsager, opera critic for the Times and founder of the Beethoven Quartet Society; Keats's Enfield classmate Edward Holmes, who was to be music critic for the Atlas, and the author of the first serious Mozart biography; Charles Cowden Clarke, future editor of Musical World; Thomas Attwood, a composer and student of Mozart himself; Henry Robertson, an "agreeable bass singer" and treasurer at the Covent Garden theater who became the Examiner's first opera critic; (13) and Vincent Novello himself, the music publisher and impresario. Lamb, Shelley, and Hazlitt numbered among the audience for these casual concerts, and Mary Cowden Clarke remembers John Keats leaning against the organ, "one foot raised on his other knee"--a semi-supine position that evokes her later, last sight of the fatally ill poet, "half-reclining on some chairs" at Hunt's house on the eve of his sailing for Italy. (14) In a letter to the Novellos, Hunt describes another tragic Italian refugee of his circle, Mary Shelley: the widow was as "quiet as a mouse," Hunt wrote of her, and an avid listener "ready to drink in as much Mozart and Paesiello as you choose to afford her" (Clarke, Life 15, 25).

For the Hunt circle, communal worship of Mozart functioned as a form of group consolation, a binding, constitutive pleasure. They elevated listening to Mozart to a poetics, a shorthand for the Cockney sublime. In his 1815 poem "A Thought on Music," Hunt describes the act of listening to music in almost religious terms: To sit with downward listening, and crossed knee, Half conscious, half unconscious, of the throng Of fellow ears, and hear the well-met skill Of fine musicians--the glib ivory Twinkling with numerous prevalence,--the snatch Of brief and birdy flute, that leaps apart-- Hunt mixes impressionism and word play ("birdy flute") with philosophy. He hails the restorative power of music to make ... the sickliest thought, that keeps its home In a sad heart, give gentle way for once, And quitting its pain-anchored hold, put forth

On that sweet sea of many-billowed sound. (15) The lines exhibit both the strengths and failings of "cockney" verse. The simplicity of "sad heart" and "gentle way" is well balanced by the solemn and wholly poetic surprise of "pain-anchored hold," only to be undone by the cloudy metaphor of the "sweet sea" and its "many-billowed sound." Diction concerns aside, Hunt's evocation of the listening act and its powers is compelling. The "downward listening" of the opening line suggests both a...

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