OPERA AND THEATRES.
With the winter came to an end the amusement which, in spite of the
existing political demonstration, I had drawn from the theatres. The
Fenice, the great theatre of the city, being the property of private
persons, has not been opened since the discontents of the Venetians were
intensified in 1859; and it will not be opened, they say, till Victor
Emanuel comes to honor the ceremony. Though not large, and certainly
not so magnificent as the Venetians think, the Fenice is a superb and
tasteful theatre. The best opera was formerly given in it, and now that
it is closed, the musical drama, of course, suffers. The Italians seldom
go to it, and as there is not a sufficient number of foreign residents
to support it in good style, the opera commonly conforms to the
character of the theatre San Benedetto, in which it is given, and is
second-rate. It is nearly always subsidized by the city to the amount of
several thousand florins; but nobody need fall into the error, on this
account, of supposing that it is cheap to the opera-goer, as it is in
the little German cities. A box does not cost a great deal; but as the
theatre is carried on in Italy by two different managements,--one of
which receives the money for the boxes and seats, and the other the fee
of admission to the theatre,--there is always the demand of the latter
to be satisfied with nearly the same outlay as that for the box, before
you can reach your place. The pit is fitted up with seats, of course,
but you do not sit down there without paying. So, most Italians (who
if they go at all go without ladies) and the poorer sort of government
officials stand; the orchestra seats are reserved for the officers of
the garrison. The first row of boxes, which is on a level with the
heads of people in the pit, is well enough, but rank and fashion take a
loftier flight, and sit in the second tier.
You look about in vain, however, for that old life of the theatre which
once formed so great a part of Venetian gayety,--the visits from box to
box, the gossiping between the acts, and the half-occult flirtations.
The people in the boxes are few, the dressing not splendid, and the
beauty is the blond, unfrequent beauty of the German aliens. Last winter
being the fourth season the Italians had defied the temptation of the
opera, some of the Venetian ladies yielded to it, but went plainly
dressed, and sat far back in boxes of the third tier, and when they
issued forth after the opera were veiled beyond recognition. The
audience usually takes its enjoyment quietly; hissing now and then for
silence in the house, and clapping hands for applause, without calling
_bravo_,--an Italian custom which I have noted to be chiefly habitual
with foreigners: with Germans, for instance; who spell it with a _p_ and
_f_.
I fancy that to find good Italian opera you must seek it somewhere out
of Italy,--at London, or Paris, or New York,--though possibly it might
be chanced upon at La Scala in Milan, or San Carlo in Naples. The cause
of the decay of the musical art in Venice must be looked for among the
events which seem to have doomed her to decay in every thing; certainly
it cannot be discerned in any indifference of the people to music. The
_dimostrazione_ keeps the better class of citizens from the opera,
but the passion for it still exists in every order; and God’s gift of
beautiful voice cannot be smothered in the race by any Situation. You
hear the airs of opera sung as commonly upon the streets in Venice as
our own colored melodies at home; and the street-boy when he sings has
an inborn sense of music and a power of execution which put to shame the
cultivated tenuity of sound that issues from the northern mouth--
“That frozen, passive, palsied breathing-hole.”
In the days of the Fenice there was a school for the ballet at that
theatre, but this last and least worthy part of dramatic art is now
an imported element of the opera in Venice. No novices appear on her
stages, and the musical conservatories of the place, which were once so
famous, have long ceased to exist. The musical theatre was very popular
in Venice as early as the middle of the seventeenth century; and the
care of the state for the drama existed from the first. The government,
which always piously forbade the representation of Mysteries, and, as
the theatre advanced, even prohibited plays containing characters of the
Old or New Testament, began about the close of the century to protect
and encourage the instruction of music in the different foundling
hospitals and public refuges in the city. The young girls in these
institutions were taught to play on instruments, and to sing,--at first
for the alleviation of their own dull and solitary life, and afterward
for the delight of the public. In the merry days that passed just before
the fall of the Republic, the Latin oratorios which they performed in
the churches attached to the hospitals were among the most fashionable
diversions in Venice. The singers were instructed by the best masters
of the time; and at the close of the last century, the conservatories
of the Incurables, the Foundlings, and the Mendicants were famous
throughout Europe for their dramatic concerts, and for those pupils who
found the transition from sacred to profane opera natural and easy.
With increasing knowledge of the language, I learned to enjoy best the
unmusical theatre, and went oftener to the comedy than the opera. It
is hardly by any chance that the Italians play ill, and I have seen
excellent acting at the Venetian theatres, both in the modern Italian
comedy, which is very rich and good, and in the elder plays of
Goldoni--compositions deliciously racy when seen in Venice, where
alone their admirable fidelity of drawing and coloring can be perfectly
appreciated. The best comedy is usually given to the educated classes at
the pretty Teatro Apollo, while a bloodier and louder drama is offered
to the populace at Teatro Malibran, where on a Sunday night you may
see the plebeian life of the city in one of its most entertaining and
characteristic phases. The sparings of the whole week which have not
been laid out for chances in the lottery, are spent for this evening’s
amusement; and in the vast pit you see, besides the families of
comfortable artisans who can evidently afford it, a multitude of the
ragged poor, whose presence, even at the low rate of eight or ten soldi
[Footnote: The soldo is the hundredth part of the Austrian florin, which
is worth about forty-nine cents of American money.] apiece, it is hard
to account for. It is very peremptory, this audience, in its likes and
dislikes, and applauds and hisses with great vehemence. It likes best
the sanguinary local spectacular drama; it cheers and cheers again
every allusion to Venice; and when the curtain rises on some well-known
Venetian scene, it has out the scene-painter by name three times--which
is all the police permits. The auditors wear their hats in the pit, but
deny that privilege to the people in the boxes, and raise stormy and
wrathful cries of _cappello!_ till these uncover. Between acts, they
indulge in excesses of water flavored with anise, and even go to the
extent of candied nuts and fruits, which are hawked about the theatre,
and sold for two soldi the stick,--with the tooth-pick on which they are
spitted thrown into the bargain.
The Malibran Theatre is well attended on Sunday night, but the one
entertainment which never fails of drawing and delighting full houses is
the theatre of the puppets, or the Marionette, and thither I like best
to go. The Marionette prevail with me, for I find in the performances of
these puppets, no new condition demanded of the spectator, but rather a
frank admission of unreality that makes every shadow of verisimilitude
delightful, and gives a marvelous relish to the immemorial effects and
traditionary tricks of the stage.
The little theatre of the puppets is at the corner of a narrow street
opening from the Calle del Ridotto, and is of the tiniest dimensions and
simplest appointments. There are no boxes--the whole theatre is scarcely
larger than a stage-box--and you pay ten soldi to go into the pit, where
you are much more comfortable than the aristocrats who have paid fifteen
for places in the dress-circle above. The stage is very small, and the
scenery a kind of coarse miniature painting. But it is very complete,
and every thing is contrived to give relief to the puppets and to
produce an illusion of magnitude in their figures. They are very
artlessly introduced, and are maneuvered, according to the exigencies of
the scene, by means of cords running from their heads, arms, and legs
to the top of the stage. To the management of the cords they owe all
the vehemence of their passions and the grace of their oratory, not to
mention a certain gliding, ungradual locomotion, altogether spectral.
The drama of the Marionette is of a more elevated and ambitious tone
than that of the Burattini, which exhibit their vulgar loves and coarse
assassinations in little punch-shows on the Riva, and in the larger
squares; but the standard characters are nearly the same with both, and
are all descended from the _commedia a braccio_ [Footnote: Comedy by the
yard.] which flourished on the Italian stage before the time of Goldoni.
And I am very far from disparaging the Burattini, which have great and
peculiar merits, not the least of which is the art of drawing the
most delighted, dirty, and picturesque audiences. Like most of the
Marionette, they converse vicariously in the Venetian dialect, and have
such a rapidity of utterance that it is difficult to follow them. I only
remember to have made out one of their comedies,--a play in which an
ingenious lover procured his rich and successful rival to be arrested
for lunacy, and married the disputed young person while the other
was raging in the mad-house. This play is performed to enthusiastic
audiences; but for the most part the favorite drama of the Burattini
appears to be a sardonic farce, in which the chief character--a puppet
ten inches high, with a fixed and staring expression of Mephistophelean
good-nature and wickedness--deludes other and weak-minded puppets into
trusting him, and then beats them with a club upon the back of the head
until they die. The murders of this infamous creature, which are always
executed in a spirit of jocose _sang-froid_, and accompanied by humorous
remarks, are received with the keenest relish by the spectators and,
indeed, the action is every way worthy of applause. The dramatic spirit
of the Italian race seems to communicate itself to the puppets, and they
perform their parts with a fidelity to theatrical unnaturalness which is
wonderful. I have witnessed death agonies on these little stages which
the great American tragedian himself (whoever he may happen to be) could
not surpass in degree of energy. And then the Burattini deserve the
greater credit because they are agitated by the legs from below the
scene, and not managed by cords from above, as at the Marionette
Theatre. Their audiences, as I said, are always interesting, and
comprise: first, boys ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size;
then weak little girls, supporting immense weight of babies; then
Austrian soldiers, with long coats and short pipes; lumbering Dalmat
sailors; a transient Greek or Turk; Venetian loafers, pale-faced,
statuesque, with the drapery of their cloaks thrown over their
shoulders; young women, with bare heads of thick black hair; old women,
all fluff and fangs; wooden-shod peasants, with hooded cloaks of coarse
brown; then boys--and boys. They all enjoy the spectacle with approval,
and take the drama _au grand sérieux_, uttering none of the gibes which
sometimes attend efforts to please in our own country. Even when the
hat, or other instrument of extortion, is passed round, and they give
nothing, and when the manager, in an excess of fury and disappointment,
calls out, “Ah! sons of dogs! I play no more to you!” and closes the
theatre, they quietly and unresentfully disperse. Though, indeed, _fioi
de cani_ means no great reproach in Venetian parlance; and parents of
the lower classes caressingly address their children in these terms.
Whereas to call one Figure of a Pig, is to wreak upon him the deadliest
insult which can be put into words.
In the _commedia a braccio_, before mentioned as the inheritance of the
Marionette, the dramatist furnished merely the plot, and the outline of
the action; the players filled in the character and dialogue. With any
people less quick-witted than the Italians, this sort of comedy must
have been insufferable, but it formed the delight of that people till
the middle of the last century, and even after Goldoni went to Paris
he furnished his Italian players with the _commedia a braccio_. I
have heard some very passable _gags_ at the Marionette, but the real
_commedia a braccio_ no longer exists, and its familiar and invariable
characters perform written plays.
Facanapa is a modern addition to the old stock of _dramatis personae_,
and he is now without doubt the popular favorite in Venice. He is
always, like Pantalon, a Venetian; but whereas the latter is always a
merchant, Facanapa is any thing that the exigency of the play demands.
He is a dwarf, even among puppets, and his dress invariably consists of
black knee-breeches and white stockings, a very long, full-skirted black
coat, and a three-cornered hat. His individual traits are displayed in
all his characters, and he is ever a coward, a boaster, and a liar; a
glutton and avaricious, but withal of an agreeable bonhomie that wins
the heart. To tell the truth, I care little for the plays in which he
has no part and I have learned to think a certain trick of his--lifting
his leg rigidly to a horizontal line, by way of emphasis, and saying,
“Capisse la?” or “Sa la?” (You understand? You know?)--one of the finest
things in the world.
In nearly all of Goldoni’s Venetian comedies, and in many which he wrote
in Italian, appear the standard associates of Facanapa,--Arlecchino, il
Dottore, Pantalon dei Bisognosi, and Brighella. The reader is at first
puzzled by their constant recurrence, but never weary of Goldoni’s witty
management of them. They are the chief persons of the obsolete _commedia
a braccio_, and have their nationality and peculiarities marked by
immemorial attribution. Pantalon is a Venetian merchant, rich, and
commonly the indulgent father of a wilful daughter or dissolute son,
figuring also sometimes as the childless uncle of large fortune. The
second old man is il Dottore, who is a Bolognese, and a doctor of the
University. Brighella and Arlecchino are both of Bergamo. The one is a
sharp and roguish servant, busy-body, and rascal; the other is dull and
foolish, and always masked and dressed in motley--a gibe at the poverty
of the Bergamasks among whom, moreover, the extremes of stupidity and
cunning are most usually found, according to the popular notion in
Italy.
The plays of the Marionette are written expressly for them, and are
much shorter than the standard drama as it is known to us. They embrace,
however, a wide range of subjects, from lofty melodrama to broad farce,
as you may see by looking at the advertisements in the Venetian Gazettes
for any week past, where perhaps you shall find the plays performed
to have been: The Ninety-nine Misfortunes of Facanapa; Arlecchino, the
Sleeping King; Facanapa as Soldier in Catalonia; The Capture of Smyrna,
with Facanapa and Arlecchino Slaves in Smyrna (this play being repeated
several nights); and, Arlecchino and Facanapa Hunting an Ass. If you can
fancy people going night after night to this puppet-drama, and enjoying
it with the keenest appetite, you will not only do something toward
realizing to yourself the easily-pleased Italian nature, but you will
also suppose great excellence in the theatrical management. For my own
part, I find few things in life equal to the Marionette. I am never
tired of their bewitching absurdity, their inevitable defects, their
irresistible touches of verisimilitude. At their theatre I have seen the
relenting parent (Pantalon) twitchingly embrace his erring son, while
Arlecchino, as the large-hearted cobbler who has paid the house-rent of
the erring son when the prodigal was about to be cast into the street,
looked on and rubbed his hands with amiable satisfaction and the
conventional delight in benefaction which we all know. I have witnessed
the base terrors of Facanapa at an apparition, and I have beheld the
keen spiritual agonies of the Emperor Nicholas on hearing of the fall of
Sebastopol. Not many passages of real life have affected me as deeply
as the atrocious behavior of the brutal baronial brother-in-law, when
he responds to the expostulations of his friend the Knight of Malta,--a
puppet of shaky and vacillating presence, but a soul of steel and rock:
“Why, O baron, detain this unhappy lady in thy dungeons? Remember, she
is thy brother’s wife. Remember thine own honor. Think on the
sacred name of virtue.” (Wrigglingly, and with a set countenance and
gesticulations toward the pit.)
To which the ferocious baron makes answer with a sneering laugh,
“Honor?--I know it not! Virtue?--I detest it!” and attempting to
pass the knight, in order to inflict fresh indignities upon his
sister-in-law, he yields to the natural infirmities of rags and
pasteboard, and topples against him.
Facanapa, also, in his great scene of the Haunted Poet, is tremendous.
You discover him in bed, too much visited by the Muse to sleep, and
reading his manuscripts aloud to himself, after the manner of poets
when they cannot find other listeners. He is alarmed by various ghostly
noises in the house, and is often obliged to get up and examine the
dark corners of the room, and to look under the bed. When at last
the spectral head appears at the foot-board, Facanapa vanishes with a
miserable cry under the bed-clothes, and the scene closes. Intrinsically
the scene is not much, but this great actor throws into it a life, a
spirit, a drollery wholly irresistible.
The ballet at the Marionette is a triumph of choreographic art, and is
extremely funny. The _prima ballerina_ has all the difficult grace and
far-fetched arts of the _prima ballerina_ of flesh and blood; and when
the enthusiastic audience calls her back after the scene, she is humanly
delighted, and acknowledges the compliment with lifelike _empressement_.
I have no doubt the _corps de ballet_ have their private jealousies
and bickerings, when quietly laid away in boxes, and deprived of all
positive power by the removal of the cords which agitate their arms and
legs. The puppets are great in _pirouette_ and _pas seul_; but I think
the strictly dramatic part of such spectacular ballets, as The Fall of
Carthage, is their strong point.
The people who witness their performances are of all ages and
conditions--I remember to have once seen a Russian princess and some
German countesses in the pit--but the greater number of spectators are
young men of the middle classes, pretty shop-girls, and artisans and
their wives and children. The little theatre is a kind of trysting-place
for lovers in humble life, and there is a great deal of amusing drama
going on between the acts, in which the invariable Beppo and Nina of
the Venetian populace take the place of the invariable Arlecchino and
Facanapa of the stage. I one day discovered a letter at the bottom of
the Canal of the Giudecca, to which watery resting-place some recreant,
addressed as “Caro Antonio,” had consigned it; and from this letter I
came to know certainly of at least one love affair at the Marionette.
“Caro Antonio” was humbly besought, “if his heart still felt the force
of love,” to meet the writer (who softly reproached him with neglect) at
the Marionette the night of date, at six o’clock; and I would not like
to believe he could resist so tender a prayer, though perhaps it fell
out so. I fished up through the lucent water this despairing little
epistle,--it was full of womanly sweetness and bad spelling,--and dried
away its briny tears on the blade of my oar. If ever I thought to
keep it, with some vague purpose of offering it to any particularly
anxious-looking Nina at the Marionette as to the probable writer--its
unaccountable loss spared me the delicate office. Still, however, when
I go to see the puppets, it is with an interest divided between the
drolleries of Facanapa, and the sad presence of expectation somewhere
among the groups of dark-eyed girls there, who wear such immense hoops
under such greasy dresses, who part their hair at one side, and call
each other “Ciò!” Where art thou, O fickle and cruel, yet ever dear
Antonio? All unconscious, I think,--gallantly posed against the wall,
thy slouch hat brought forward to the point of thy long cigar, the arms
of thy velvet jacket folded on thy breast, and thy ear-rings softly
twinkling in the light.