English Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London:
Stephen Storace at Drury Lane. By Jane Girdham.
pp. xiv + 272. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997,
£45. ISBN 0-19-816254-5.)
Storace is a tantalizing composer. After studying
in Naples he spent some time in Vienna in close
contact with Mozart, who (whether or not he gave
Storace lessons, of which there is no certain evid-
ence) left an indelible mark on his style. The two
Italian opere buffc he wrote for Vienna are some-
thing more than facile essays in the current idiom.
Gli equivoci in particular, with the advantage of an
admirable libretto by Da Ponte out of Shakespeare
{The Comedy of Errors), is fully the equal of the
contemporary work of Paisiello and Cimarosa. The
influence of The Marriage of Figaro is palpable in
the graceful melodies, the dramatic pacing of
ensembles and the scoring, especially for wood-
wind. On his return to London in 1787 Storace
composed another opera buffa for the Italian opera
at the King's Theatre. It failed, and most of the
music is lost. He devoted the rest of his career to
opera in English for a company based at Drury
Lane.
It is hard to contemplate English opera during
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
without a sense of depression. The trouble was not
so much a lack of talented composers as the dead
hand of a tradition that elevated the librettist above
the composer and put the music firmly in second
place. This suited the lighter type of comic opera,
but was fatal to more serious works, which gen-
erally had convoluted plots deployed in endless
stilted dialogue, punctuated by songs (often
strophic) and other movements that had little
bearing on the action. Everything conspired against
the fusion of music and drama in a unified work of
art. This was the tradition that would hamstring a
greater composer than Storace in Weber's Oberon. A
further incubus was the habit of borrowing large
chunks of music and whole numbers from other
composers, which even in a period when there was
no great divergence in national styles was bound to
militate against unity. The result was a loose pot-
pourri containing elements of spoken play, ballad
opera and pasticcio with no glue to hold them
together.
Storace never transcended this tradition, though
he did something to raise the status of the com-
poser. He introduced ensembles and finales that
vitalized the action, if only temporarily, inter-
spersed with dramatically inessential music. His
mainpieces suffer from chaotic plots and bombastic
dialogue, and are sometimes pulled out of shape by
extraneous considerations. Since the prima donna,
433
his sister Nancy, was a specialist in servant roles
(Mozart wrote the part of Susanna in Figaro for
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her), the sub-plots are apt to overbalance the main
action. Minor or totally irrelevant characters were
given prominence to show off a particular singer,
such as the boy treble Thomas Walsh. A few works,
mostly afterpieces, are little more than plays with
occasional songs. In The Iron Chest, a mainpiece,
the principal characters do not sing at all. Storace
did attempt one all-sung English opera, Dido Queen
of Carthage (based on Metastasio), and was doubt-
less discouraged by its failure, the audience taking
strong exception to the recitative. If he set out to
reform English opera, he did not get very far,
though we must bear in mind his early death at
33, a real loss to English music. He had the ability
to rise much higher.
Jane Girdham's book has a narrow focus, deal-
ing only with the English operas and the circum-
stances of their performance and publication.
Within these limits there is much to recommend
it. It has the merits and some of the defects of its
origin in a doctoral dissertation. Girdham goes
thoroughly into the theatrical background, quoting
liberally from manuscript sources and the contem-
porary press, and is not afraid to dip her toes in the
murky waters of copyright. Some of the detail, for
example the pursuit of countless posthumous pub-
lications of songs and arrangements, which all
derive from the printed sources, is not of great
interest, and there is a certain amount of duplica-
tion, but her industry can only be applauded, even
if it does not greatly modify the conclusions drawn
in Roger Fiske's comprehensive study, English
Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century. It is only a
pity that she did not widen the scope to cover
Storace's whole career. No doubt his keyboard and
chamber music and his single ballet are of little
consequence, but the passing attention given to the
Viennese opere buffc leaves a somewhat lopsided
impression.
Girdham's task was not made easier by the
meagreness of the available material. There
appear to be no musical autographs, only one
copyist's score, two letters and one (posthumous)
portrait. Very little is known of Storace's personal
life, apart from a single incident in Vienna, when
he spent a night under lock and key as a result of
exuberant behaviour at a ball. (The Storace family
tree reveals a surprising link with Benjamin Hall
Kennedy, from whose Latin Primers many of us
benefited or suffered in our youth.) Nor is his
music well served. Only one of his sixteen English
operas, the slight but engaging afterpiece No Song,
No Supper, survives in full score. In view of numer-
ous revivals in different theatres, many copies must
 have existed; presumably they perished in the-
atrical conflagrations. Twelve of the others were
published, but only in vocal score with occasional
instrumental indications, a sad fate for a composer
in a position to benefit from Mozart's orchestration.
Girdham makes the best possible case for Stor-
ace. She illustrates his gift for melody, wit and neat
scoring, and stresses his principal innovation, the
introduction of lively and extended ensembles and
finales. She rightly singles out The Pirates as
perhaps the best of the bunch—significantly it
contains few borrowings except from Storace's
own work—but in the theatre, due partly to the
mixed style of libretto and music, it makes some-
thing of a stop-go impression. The more closely it
approaches musico-dramatic integration, the more
of a bump we feel when it lapses into fustian and
balladry. Girdham does not suggest a motive for
Storace's borrowing from others, except that every-
one did it. She notes that he sometimes modified
what he took, generally from parallel dramatic
contexts; he could surely have graced them with
music of his own. He may have been pressed for
time, but it is difficult to resist the impression that
he aimed too low.
Girdham might have looked more closely at the
influence of French opera comique, which faced
similar problems without the handicap of flatulent
dialogue. It presumably supplied the model for
rescue opera, a category to which several of Stor-
ace's pieces belong. His Lodoiska (1794) borrowed
liberally from Kreutzer's and Cherubini's operas
on the same subject, produced in Paris three years
earlier. She seldom indulges in special pleading,
but need not have questioned Julian Budden's
dictum about the advantages of working in a
strong as opposed to a weak tradition. Therein
lies the explanation why Gli equivoci, though it may
not contain Storace's most individual music, is a
more satisfying opera than any of his English
works. Five useful appendices include lists of the
musical numbers in his thirteen published operas
and of the identified borrowings.
WINTON DEAN
The Mendelssohns on Honeymoon: the 1837 Diary of
Felix and Cecile Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, together with
Letters to their Families. Ed. by Peter Ward Jones,
pp. xxxi + 225. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997,
£35. ISBN 0-19-816597-8.)
The bourgeoisie of nineteenth-century Europe
kept diaries with a passion previously unknown
and since unequalled. To accommodate the zeal for
personal confession at the mid century, the London
434
bookbinder Thomas Letts offered his customers a
choice among 28 varieties of diary, ranging from
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capacious folio volumes to modest calendars that
could be discreetly inserted into a breast pocket.
Broadly speaking, the substance of these records
fell into one of two categories. At one end of the
spectrum we have diaries whose contents were
meant not only for the author's eyes but also for
those of posterity. The journal of the German poet
and playwright Friedrich Hebbel, begun in 1835,
belongs here despite the writer's disingenuous
opening salvo: 'I am starting this booklet not just
as a favour to my future biographer, although with
my prospects for immortality I am certain to have
one'. Most diaries, however, were of the private
type exemplified by the critic Henri-Frederic
Amiel's 17,000-page journal, a document described
by its author as 'my consolation, my memory, my
scapegoat, my echo, the reservoir of my intimate
experiences, my psychological itinerary'. The
jointly kept diaries of husbands and wives—or
lovers—may also be classified with the latter
group. Interestingly enough, this form of personal
exchange proved quite attractive to a number of
nineteenth-century artists and their partners, in-
cluding Robert and Clara Schumann, Leo and
Sonya Tolstoy, Richard Wagner and Mathilde
Wesendonck—and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
and his young bride Cecile, nee Jeanrenaud. If
the Tolstoys' journal fostered what one recent
writer calls a 'suicidal intimacy' (Alexandra John-
son, Diaries and the Creative Life, New York, 1997),
and if the Schumanns' marriage diary, in Robert
Schumann's words, was to be the couple's 'good
and true friend, to whom we entrust everything',
the diary of Felix and Cecile Mendelssohn, with
its fanciful drawings and in-jokes, may at first
strike the reader as little more than an affable
travelling companion. In fact, it is considerably
more.
Preserved in the rich collection of source mater-
ials pertinent to the Mendelssohn family in the
Bodleian Library, Oxford, the Mendelssohns' diary
is now available in a beautifully prepared edition
by Peter Ward Jones. While commonly known as
the couple's 'honeymoon diary', this fascinating
document actually spans the first six months of
the Mendelssohns' marriage, from 29 March 1837,
the day after their wedding in Frankfurt, to 27 Sep-
tember of the same year, when they were reunited
after Felix's return from a trip to England. Specific-
ally, the diary encompasses four subperiods: the
honeymoon itself, which occurred between late
March and mid May and took the newly-weds
up the Rhine to Speyer and Strasbourg, then on to
Freiburg im Breisgau and Heidelberg; a seven-