First nights at the opera.(Book Review)

by Thomas Forrest Kelly Yale University Press, 416 pp. $35

When Thomas Forrest Kelly's First Nights appeared in 2000, it was an unexpected hit. Kelly's clubby, down-to-earth prose brought to life the circumstances around the birth of five musical masterpieces, and the book became a favorite gift for graduating music students. He has now brought the same technique to five opera premieres. Once again, each chapter is rich in context: what else each theater played that season, seating plans, maps and histories of the cities of the premieres, what time the shows started. There is a "Documents" section at the end of each chapter featuring firsthand accounts of the reactions of the audiences. Some things haven't changed much--the theater where Giulio Cesare was first heard soon went bankrupt; the Paris Opera was government-subsidized until shortly before Les Huguenots came in; and there is plenty of prima donna behavior (from the women, too). But other aspects of the opera experience of long ago are gone. Don Giovanni first played in an 800-seat theater, and there used to be an appealing "Let's put on a show" quality when Wagner's barber played a Nibelung in has Rheingold and the brother of Verdi's publisher played mandolin in Otello. Before Cesare begins, "the stage is swept of orange peels, bottles, and debris of various kinds that accumulates during a performance," and the first performance of Owllo shares the bill with a ballet.