An early world opera tour

Opera stars frequently tour the world today playing to packed houses and commanding sky-high fees. They travel in luxury and with every comfort.

Things must have been a little different back in the 1830s but at least one opera company was engaged in a tour that took it very far from its Italian home.

John Francis Davis, records in his book “The Chinese”, published in 1836, that the small foreign community at Macau was delighted to have enjoyed a season of opera in 1833.

“A party of Italian opera-singers from Naples, consisting of two signoras, and five signors, after having exercised their vocation with success in South America, proceeded on their way across the Pacific westward towards Calcutta, as to a likely and profitable field. Circumstances having occasioned their touching at Macao, they met there with inducements to remain some six months, until the season should admit of their prosecuting the voyage; and a temporary theatre having been contrived, they performed most of Rossini´s operas with great success. The Chinese were surprised to find what, in the jargon of Canton (Guangzhou), is called a Sing-song, erected by the foreigners on the shores of the celestial empire, and in that very shape, too, which most nearly resembles their own performances, a mixture of song and recitative. As the nearest way home from Calcutta, for these Italians, was by the Cape of Good Hope, they were a singular instance of the Opera performing a voyage round the world.” Davis, John Francis, 1836. The Chinese. Volume Two, pages 186-187. Charles Knight, publishers. London.

The vastly-expensive grand new Opera House in Beijing floats like a giant egg in a lake. But it was back in 1833 in a temporary shed in Macau that the first Western opera arrived in the country and foreign residents and curious Chinese would have been able to enjoy Rossini´s works such as the Barber of Seville.

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©Phillip Bruce 2009