French Opera: Galathée

“A Galathée matinée was given yesterday at the cosy [sic] Fourteenth street House, when Massé’s favorite work was received with the same enthusiastic plaudits which greeted its previous performance. Mlle. Naddie sang with great power and vocalized with exquisite fluency, and M. Wilhelm enacted the part of the love-stricken Pygmalion to perfection. M. de Surmont’s Midas and M. Edgard’s wealthy, but ridiculous amateur of statuary, were excellent specimens of the ability of these deservedly popular artistes.”

“Saturday, at the matinee, Mlle Naddie attained the most handsome triumph in Galatée, while M. Wilhem showed himself worthy of his reputation and talent in the role of Pygmalion.”

The French Opera is a “living corpse”. Juignet is forced to cancel his payments due to several unfortunate circumstances mostly of a financial nature. The performers united to form an association to keep the opera going; however, we learned by experience that these enterprises often don’t succeed. Despite the circumstance, new operas are being rehearsed. The reason for the financial difficulties in our opinion is that Juignet overdid it with buying an opera and a theater company. These two are competing against each other and thus cannot successfully exist at the same time. In addition, the theater company performed only three evenings a week, therefore both companies were only active a third of the week. Certainly another factor is that the audience is limited to members who understand French. By the way, some of the performances were rather good, i.e. Galathée. Mme Naddie is a very gifted, conscientious and skilled singer and actress, and Anthelme parallels her performance skill. May the French Opera exist as long as possible?