Fashionable Acts

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the mobile, ogling, flirtatious and occasionally riotous audience of the Georgian opera (and, arguably, the Georgian theatre) was no more. Its late Victorian counterpart was much quieter, more static, more decorous, and more likely to treat productions respectfully, as fixed works of art. For the Georgian élite, according to Jennifer Hall-Witt, the Italian opera at the King's Theatre, Haymarket, had been the most important and exclusive of a number of the capital's politicised social arenas, a place for the beau monde to go to see and be seen, to gather and/or disseminate gossip and news, and to form, even flaunt, useful connections, be they social, sexual, or political. The productions themselves, however, attracted only selective attention. Georgian operas were ‘events’, not ‘works’; thus, they were continuously in process of creation, being revised and reshaped so as best to display specific singers’ talents. Often they included music recycled from earlier operas; arias, too, were regularly substituted. Audiences frequently ignored the stage to gossip with their neighbours or shrewdly analyse the comings and goings of the elaborately dressed élite women in the boxes above, or to pay heed to the antics of the lounging men of Fops’ Alley in the pit below. It took the appearance of a celebrated singer—a Pasta or a Catalani, for instance—performing a popular aria, to focus the Georgian audience's attention on the stage

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