The Examiner.
The Examiner.
The Examiner.
The Examiner.
(Covent Garden)May 25, 1817.
The Libertine, an after-piece altered from Shadwell’s play of that name, and founded on the story of Don Juan, with Mozart’s music, was represented here on Tuesday evening. Almost every thing else was against it, but the music triumphed. Still it had but half a triumph, for the songs were notencored; and when an attempt was made by some rash over-weening enthusiasts toencorethe enchanting airs of Mozart, that heavy German composer, ‘that dull Beotian genius,’ as he has been called by a lively verbal critic of our times, the English, disdaining this insult offered to our native talents,hissed—in the plenitude of their pampered grossness, and ‘ignorant impatience’ of foreign refinement and elegance, they hissed! We believe that unconscious patriotism has something to do with this as well as sheer stupidity: they think that a real taste for the Fine Arts, unless they are of British growth and manufacture, is a sign of disaffection to the Government, and that there must be ‘something rotten in the state of Denmark,’ if their ears, as well as their hearts, are not true English. We have heard sailors’ songs by Little Smith, and Yorkshire songs by Emery, and the Death of Nelson by Mr. Sinclair,encoredagain and again at Covent-Garden, so as almost ‘to split the ears of the groundlings,’ yet the other night they would not hear ofencoringMiss Stephens, either in the Duet with Duruset,La ci darem, nor in the song appealing for his forgiveness,Batte, Massetto; yet at the Opera they tolerate Madame Fodor in repeating both thesesongs, because they suppose it to be the etiquette, and would have you believe that they do not very warmly insist on the repetition of the last song she sings there, out of tenderness to the actress, not to spare their own ears, which are soon cloyed with sweetness, and delight in nothing but noise and fury.
We regard Miss Stephens’s Zerlina as a failure, whether we compare her with Madame Fodor in the same part, or with herself in other parts. She undoubtedly sung her songs with much sweetness and simplicity, but her simplicity had something of insipidity in it; her tones wanted the fine, rich,pulpyessence of Madame Fodor’s, the elastic impulse of health and high animal spirits; nor had her manner of giving the different airs that laughing, careless grace which gives to Madame Fodor’s singing all the ease and spirit of conversation. There was some awkwardness necessarily arising from the transposition of the songs, particularly of the duet between Zerlina and Don Giovanni, which was given to Massetto, because Mr. Charles Kemble is not a singer, and which by this means lost its exquisite appropriateness of expression. Of Mr. Duruset’s Massetto we shall only say, that it is not so good as Angrisani’s. He would however have made a better representative of the statue of Don Pedro than Mr. Chapman, who is another gentleman who has not ‘a singing face,’ and whom it would therefore have been better to leave out of the Opera than the songs; particularly than that fine one, answering toDi rider finira pria della Aurora, which Mr. Chapman was mounted on horseback on purpose, it should seem,neither to sing nor say!
Mr. Charles Kemble did not play the Libertine well. Instead of the untractable, fiery spirit, the unreclaimable licentiousness of Don Giovanni, he was as tame as any saint;
‘And of his port as meek as is a maid.’
‘And of his port as meek as is a maid.’
‘And of his port as meek as is a maid.’
‘And of his port as meek as is a maid.’
He went through the different exploits of wickedness assigned him with evident marks of reluctance and contrition; and it seemed the height of injustice that so well meaning a young man, forced into acts of villainy against his will, should at last be seized upon as their lawful prize by fiends come hot from hell with flaming torches, and that he should sink into a lake of burning brimstone on a splendid car brought to receive him by the devil, in the likeness of a great dragon, writhing round and round upon a wheel of fire—an exquisite device of the Managers, superadded to the original story, and in striking harmony with Mozart’s music! Mr. Liston’s Leporello was not quite what we wished it. He played it in a mixed style between a burlesque imitation of the Italian Opera, and his owninimitablemanner. We like him best when he is his own great original, and copies only himself—
‘None but himself can be his parallel.’
‘None but himself can be his parallel.’
‘None but himself can be his parallel.’
‘None but himself can be his parallel.’
He did not sing the song of Madamira half so well, nor with half the impudence of Naldi. Indeed, all the performers seemed, instead of going their lengths on the occasion, to be upon their good behaviour, and instead of entering into their parts, to be thinking of the comparison between themselves and the performers at the Opera. We cannot say it was in their favour.