Articles on the refreshing change of programs for the 1869 fall season

“We are about entering upon a new era of music, and one that is much to be desired after the vapidness which has for so long a time characterized that branch of public entertainment. We have been treated for the last four or five years to a kind of olla podrida in the divine art, until we have become weary of opéra bouffe, which, at the best, with all Offenbach’s musical jingle and Grau’s sagacious management, and, later still, the whole of the young Fisk’s treasury at its back, was little more than a French negro minstrel performance. Opéra bouffe hurt everyone that had anything to do with it, except the public, and they hardly escaped unscathed, in the matter of a very serious demoralization of taste. We are now, however, likely to see an epoch in musical entertainments probably bring us back to that inaugurated by Jenny Lind in 1852. Carlotta Patti is about to appear in a series of concerts. Patti is said to possess a voice superior to Lind, and, as a concert singer, is reported to have no superior. We know that before she left this country for Europe she was an excellent singer. She comes back to this country with a method and a voice greatly improved, with a confidence in her merits sustained by a reputation which is not excelled in Europe by any concert singer who has charmed the courts and capitals of the Old Word by the genius which seems to be the inheritance of her family, and a beauty of person which is peculiarly her own; for Mlle. Patti is not only an exquisite artiste, she is a beautiful woman—a most excellent creation to look upon as well as to listen to. According to the programme we are to have a healthy revival of classical music in the Patti concerts. We need not say how refreshing this will be after the wretched attempts at Italian opera doled out by broken-down singers in the unfortunate Catacombs, where, by an unhappy combination of poor artists, bad management and grasping stockholders, Italian opera went down never perchance to rise again. “Dramatic art has had a severe struggle for life in this community for the past few years. It was sorely assaulted by leg performances at Niblo’s and other theatres for hundreds of nights. Entertainments a good deal more exciting than instructive, and, in fact, which might be styled an offence to refined taste and a case of assault and battery upon dramatic art itself. Then we had furious muscular efforts on the trapeze, which people enjoyed in the morbid expectation that the performers—men, women and children, for all of them are in the business—would kill themselves, and thus give the full value for the price of the ticket; but we are happy to say that the audiences were generally disappointed. Again, the legitimate drama had to stand the shock of Japanese jugglers, the attacks of parti-colored harlequins, loose-breeched pantaloons, nimble clowns and smirking Columbines, who flourish in the attractive pantomime. We have had a deluge of these things—this frippery of stage scenery, illusions and legs—but now there is a likelihood that we shall have a new departure in the advent of Carlotta Patti. The demoralizing condition of affairs on our stage looks as though it were about to vanish into the outer darkness where Satan is supposed to dwell, to be replaced by a brighter epoch in our experience of music and the drama.”

“The promise of a singer like Carlotta Patti has refreshment in it for the jaded hopes and often disappointed tastes of our amusement-ridden people; and with such a promise before us it may not be premature to indulge the thought that there is a turn of the tide—that the meretricious has had its little day among us, and that we are to be indulged with a revival of the genuine in art, especially in musical art. We are the more tempted to believe this because it is so evidently time for our turn. What years we have had of the torture of taste! ‘What wonderful inventions we have seen! Signs of true genius and of empty pockets.’ Signs as well of an utter want of conscience on the part of those who cater to the public need of recreation—of an utter want and absence, indeed, of everything save a desperate determination to make money. It is because the strictly commercial spirit has come to reign in the theatre that the true spirit of art has departed from it. No two things in the earth or the waters under the earth are so absolutely irreconcilable as these. No great dramatic poet ever got fair pay for the paper on which his plays were written; but Mr. Boucicault will probably make ten thousand dollars by ‘Formosa.’ Therefore, says the logic of the theatre, as the theatre is now managed, ‘Formosa’ is better than all the dramas of all the great poets put together. Plays are presented on this principle only, and even music does not inspire certain of its votaries with any higher thought. It seems well nigh forgotten that the theatre was ever a temple—that scholars, lettered men and gentlemen were proud of the honors they won there. It is a shop at which entertainment is sold with no thought beyond the price.

“We had at one time a fair prospect that that noble amusement, the Italian Opera, would become domesticated here. It is one adapted to the character of our people, as it ministers to the love of the grand and the beautiful and stirs so profoundly every emotion of the soul. Although strictly devoted to commercial ideas while in the shop none can accept with such simple and generous enthusiasm the appeal of art in its grandest phases as the American; and it would astonish those who have given the subject no attention to learn how the instruction of the lyrical drama was spread among the masses during the years in which it flourished among us. But it fell into unworthy hands. It was degraded to the poor office of stamping two hundred and ninety noodles as the world of fashion, and so was conducted on the sausage-making principle, with some very little pieces of fat to flavor a world of lean. It lingered through several years of that sort of management and died, and its ghost has been heard of wandering in the Western cities. Its successor, the opéra bouffe, was taken as a sort of champagne cocktail, delicate and reviving to the debauched fancy and very pleasant to all other fancy, as a sort of stolen fruit, a little sip of interdicted delight. Opéra bouffe was wicked, but French, and the young ladies went, just as when they are in Paris they go to the Mabille, though they would not venture a visit to establishments of the same class at home. It was also part of the excitement of the whirl of improprieties that reduced the theatrical stage to two points—the naked female form as an appeal to the eye, and Mother Goose for literary furniture. But we have, as we say, the apparent promise that we have got through with all that. There are evidences that managers have to try other terms now, and the best of all is the promise to our public of Carlotta Patti, a signer of such capability and culture that the grandest names of musical history scarcely present her superior. With such a voice to tune the public ear mediocrity in music must stand aside; and the public that has good music will not accept debasing spectacles.”