NEWCASTLE'S MUSICAL HERITAGE AN INTRODUCTION By ...

famous Opera Impresario, Colonel J. H. Mapleson was presenting his Italian
Opera Co featuring Therese Tietjens, possibly the greatest dramatic soprano of
her time, Christine Nilsson, the Swedish soprano, the French mezzo, Zelia
Trebelli and the Italian tenor, Allesandro Bettini, in a wide selection of operas
including, ‘Norma’ and ‘Lucrezia Borgia’ (Bellini), ‘Il Trovatore’ and ‘Rigoletto’
(Verdi) and ‘Faust’ (Gounod). Other singers and operas performed were Charles
Santley in Wagner’s ‘Flying Dutchman’ (first Newcastle performance) and
arguably Santley’s greatest operatic role, and Sims Reeves in Donezetti’s Lucia
de Lammamoor, with Mde. Belle Cole, the noted Tyneside contralto. . There
were also performances of ‘Les Huguenots’ by Meyerbeer and Audrans’s ‘Black
Domino’. In February 1895 there was a performance of Arthur Sullivan’s comic
opera ‘The Chieftain’, which had only had its premier in London some four
months earlier. The Carl Rosa Opera, who had presented Charles Santley in the
Flying Dutchman also, gave a first performance of The ‘Jewels of the Madonna’
by Wolf-Ferrari. This violent story of jealousy and revenge in Southern Italy had
only been given its first London performance a year earlier, which is another
example of how well Newcastle was served with opera in the period up to the
First World War. Carl Rosa was a German violinist and a gifted combination of
musician and businessman. He started his first touring English opera company in
1872. Three main elements contributed to Rosa’s success as an operatic
impresario; his ability to spot embryonic operatic stars, his inspired programme
building – mixing old and new, classical with popular - and his introduction of
subscription tickets at all prices. He died in 1889 but his company carried on.
During this period Italian opera was the craze and was what the ‘fashionables’
wanted to hear. English opera on the other hand, came and went – venture after
venture failed. The truth of the matter was that there was no comparison between
the works produced by British composers of the time and the operas of Bellini,
Donizetti, Rossini, Weber and not least, Verdi. There was also the fact that the
Italian singers (although they were not all Italians) were excellent and it was not
possible for any English singer to enter their ranks. It was this that made the two
English singers mentioned above, Charles Santley and Sims Reeves, so
outstanding in their day; They refused to adopt phoney Italian stage names and
through sheer determination broke into the field of Italian opera and continued to
hold there own amongst their Italian counterparts. Both singers appeared often in
Newcastle but Sims Reeves must have had a special affection for the town, as it
was in Newcastle that he made his stage debut in 1838 or 1839 at the Theatre
Royal, Grey St., in the musical play, ‘Guy Mannering’. As previously mentioned,
singers doubled as actors in these early days and the other way around, and a
very young Reeves possibly got the part because he could sing as well as act.
However, it was as a singer that he would triumphantly return many times and on
one of these occasions in 1865/66, at a time when he was in such great demand
in the provinces, Newcastle showed its delight on his arrival by greeting him with
‘a merry peel of bells’ from the steeple of St Nicholas’.
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