Yet a spruce and elegant conductor rises and the overture begins, and the orchestra proves that its instruments are real; and I hear Spontini, and for a little while enjoy his faded embroideries. And the curtain goes up on “a public place in Rome,” upon a scale as spacious as Rome itself. Everything is genuine. There are two leading sopranos, one of whom is young and attractive, and they both have powerful and trained voices, and sing like the very dickens. No amateurishness about them! They know their business; they are accomplished and experienced artists. No hesitations, no timidities, no askings for indulgence because really I have only paid two lire! Their fine voices fill the theatre with ease, and would easily fill Covent Garden to the back row of the half-crown gallery. The same with the tenor, the same with the bass. Spontini surges onward in an excellent concourse of multitudinous sound, and I wonder what it is all about. I have a book of the words, but owing to the unfortunate absence of Welsbach mantles I cannot read it. I know it must be all about a vestal who objected to being a vestal, on account of a military uniform, and I content myself with this grand central fact. Then the stage brightens, and choruses begin to march on; one after another; at least a dozen: soldiers, wrestlers, populace, dancers, children. Yes, the show is complete even to ragamuffins larking about in the public place in Rome. I count a hundred people on the stage. And all the properties are complete. It is a complete production and an expensive production--except probably in the detail of wages. For in Italy _prime donne_ with a _répertoire_ of a dozen or fifteen first-class rôles seem to go about the streets dressed like shop-girls. I have seen it. All this is just as exciting to me as the Church of S. Croce, even as explained by John Ruskin with a schoolmaster’s cane in his lily-hand.
Interval I I go to the refreshment _foyer_ to see life. And now I can perceive that quite a crowd of people has been hidden somewhere in the nooks of the tremendous theatre. The large _caffé_ is crammed. Of course, it is vaulted, like everything in Florence. The furniture of the caffé is strangely pathetic in its forlornness: marble-topped mahogany tables, and mahogany chairs in faded and frayed crimson rep. Furniture that ought to have been dead and buried long ago! The marble is yellow with extreme age and use. These tables and chairs are a most extraordinary survival; in a kind of Italian Loins Philippe style, debased First Empire; or it might be likened to earliest Victorian. Once they were new; once they were the latest thing. For fifty years perhaps the management has been meaning to refurnish the _caffé_ as soon as it could afford. The name of the theatre has been changed, but not those chairs nor that marble. And conceivably the sole waiter, gliding swiftly to and fro with indestructible politeness, is their contemporary. The customers are the equivalent of a music-hall audience in these isles. They smoke, drink, and expectorate with the casualness of men who are taking a rest after Little Tich. They do not go to the opera with prayer and fasting and the score. They just stroll into the opera. Nor does the conductor, nor do the players, have the air of high priests of art who have brought miracles to pass. And I know what those two sopranos are talking about upstairs. Here opera is in the bones of the rabble. It is a tradition: a tradition in a very bad way of decayed splendour, but alive yet.
